November 12, 2014

November 12, 2014

For someone who is always on the front line of utter disaster, I’m pretty much in a good mood.  There is no question that I will one day die, and I find that comforting for some odd reason.   No matter what I will do, or say, I’ll still end up dead.  I’m not big on doubt or “why.” I pretty much take what is out there and ride it into the storm, or if I’m lucky into the calm.  Nevertheless I never could understand why people grumble about this and that, when in fact, there’s a beginning, the strange and sometimes wonderful middle, and then of course the end.  I’m hoping that someone will write a biography of me, after I am dead called “The Beginning, the Middle, and The End.” My only regret is that I’m not floating above people as they read the book - but alas, I think death is really nothing.  Nothing, like being blank.

On the other hand, I have a great deal of desire.  Mostly for the girls who are employed in banks, shops, and on the bus.  The more I don’t know about them, the more I plunge into love.   When I see a beautiful girl, contained in a shop, I feel like a visitor to a zoo.  They can’t go anywhere, but I, on the other hand, can come and go as wherever my desires lead me.  I often find myself humming the melody to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” as I walk from one shop to another - not for the merchandise, but for the woman who sells the goods.  I like to think of myself as a piece of merchandise, and these ladies are handling me with the care, because eventually the goal is to sell, and damaged goods are not good for retail.   Or the customer.   Salesgirls boredom is a turn-on for me, and I’m not sure why?  I suspect that I trust indifference over passion, because after a while it becomes a narrative that one can read miles away.  “indifference” is an empty canvas where one can fulfill their desires on the blankness.  “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.  It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.  My language trembles with desire.”

Knowing that death is ahead of me, I fetishize the living, as a theater piece.   I get high just thinking that I’m the driver and it doesn’t matter how fast or slow I go, I can throw myself at the mercy of fate, and let the wind behind take me to where ever the desires are.  “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore), ” a song I remember hearing in a pub in East London called “The Blind Begger, ” and thinking how that could be the last song I’ll ever hear.   More likely it will be “My Death” by Jacques Brel (translated into English by Mort Shuman), but then, who knows?

So today, after writing this essay, I’ll go outside and wander through the town, perhaps to see the pretty girls who work in bookstores and imagine my life as a best-selling biography.   The map was made some time ago, yet I don’t feel compelled to follow that destination, or why not draw up a new map?  …”I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance…”