Wake up call

This morning I stared at a demon smiling at me through an opening in the curtains. Our gazes locked, unchanging. Then slowly his face began to change. His smile became a grin, then a sneer, and with each expansion of the mouth the face became distorted as well. The eyes became smaller, beadier, the nose more scrunched. And as the smile exploded, the face imploded, and what had been becoming increasingly evil could no longer be distinguished from the random shapes of clouds among which it was manifested.

The matter with matter

It appears that very few things matter.

Such is the consequence of contentment: no invention without necessity; no passion without desire; yada yada.... the Dalai Lama must be a very bored man, except, of course, boredom does not apply. Not to the likes of we who sail with the wind, we who rage with the storm and resound the stillness. We are creatures of inertia.

The great marvels of civilization are but signs of human restlessness, of malcontent, eternal monuments made to compensate for shameful mortality. Man never could face his own insignificance.

Show me a stubbornly stagnant society and I'll show you a perfectly happy one. A cosmic irony: the very quest for perfection is the one (and only) obstacle to attaining it.

My friends, nymphs and naiads, we are mayflies! Beautiful and short lived. Beautiful because we are short lived.

There is no wealth but in experience, no accomplishment but in feeling. Live to feel. And when you die, and can feel no more, let it be because you are filled to the brim with experience and must give up this shell for a larger one. What meaning has death to a life devoid of sensual, emotional experience, a life of emptiness?

So it appears that very few things matter; so let it be.

Queen's Night

You’re walking along Queen Street at 2:30 in the morning (or otherwise known as the middle of the night). You’ve just come from a festive evening with some casual friends. You wouldn’t trust any of them with a secret, but they’re okay to hang out with. You’ve been playing poker, in fact, and finished on the winning end. Now you’re going home, to bed. You’re walking the home stretch to your building, which passes through Queen Street, a dirty part of Queen Street, between Sherbourne Street and Ontario Street. All the streets here are streets by name, no avenues or boulevards or even roads; the area is a grid of streets.

There are a couple of bars along the north side. They have smoky windows and dirty signs. You can’t see inside through the cigarmen and cigaretteers blocking the entrance. They used to be contained within the bars, but a law was passed that forced their release. They spread out from the doorway like weeds, dandelions, exhaling their pestilence in clouds of white, to float along with the breeze and choke the life out of beings elsewhere. The clouds give rise to more smokers, dotting the sidewalk, leaning against the walls, dangling over the curb.

You turn your gaze away and look east. It’s good to look where you are going in the middle of the night in an infested neighborhood. You know every shadow could be hiding a crack dealer, or a crack whore, pleasure for hire. Good job. You avoid tripping over a backpack laying in the middle of the sidewalk just a few steps ahead of you. It is in front of a taxi cab company, Diamond, rides for hire. You notice that you’re passing by a body shop, fixes for hire. Bent and twisted cars sulk silently in the small parking lot, awaiting their turn. You remember the building on the other side of the cab company was a paint store that burned down. All that remains is a broken shell that's now boarded up; nothing new has grown to replace it.

You think the backpack belongs to the pair of legs jutting out from the steps of the cab company’s entrance. The legs belong to a man, hunched over and fast asleep. He’s got a blanket draped across his thighs. It’s a chilly night and you wonder why he didn’t wrap himself with it. You get closer and realize that it’s not a blanket, but another person, a woman, also asleep, with her head in the man’s lap, and her shoes kicked off her feet and laying on their sides, like her.

You don’t get any closer. Instead you cross the street to the north side where your building is. You continue staring ahead. You don’t see anymore the man and woman asleep on the sidewalk; you don’t see anymore the haze embedded with smokers; you are blind to the boarded building and mangled cars. You tune them out; out of sight, out of mind. Now you enter the building and go up the elevator and into your apartment, your room, and your bed, where you tune out the rest of the world.

embryonic

Today I wake up with a shiver. There's something about a chilly morning that makes me want to regress into the womb, just curl up into an amniotic blanket and live umbilically.

I think of the embryo at the end of 2001: A Space Odessy (the movie), and think of all mankind returning to an embryonic state. Not just man, but everything moving in a cycle, a swinging pendulum. The universe, expanding and contracting. Our yearly seasons, and eonic climate shifts, from global warming to ice age. Mankind, progressing and regressing, from space age to dark age.

It's all the same. Space, after all, is darkness.

I feel enlightened, and hit the snooze button (five times).

enesis

so there will be things that are all about him and things that are all about you and things that are all about me, a him-you-me trinity. This will be life. This will be the world. This will be all that matters.

Let it be written so that it will matter.