With age comes a series of realizations about the horrors of being. Perhaps having spent so much time in states of delusion, an ever-expanding consciousness trained on an ever-shrinking ego makes one realize how many years were spent in reverie — one of Inception level iterations. For so many times in waking up, we are still stuck in a dream within a dream.
The Thais have an expression for those who know nothing and yet think they see — frog under a coconut shell. Mistaking all of reality for that hollowed out ghost-head that made 17th century Iberian seafarers shit themselves on Pacific Island shores, one day the hemispherical skull was lifted, and my God did the world come rushing in.
In previous days, an aging pretend journalist in a mausoleum city, I thought I knew what bad was, drinking my days away in a basement without heat. I came back to America thinking there was a life to be made, words to be read, friendships to be rekindled, love to be lit. And then the grind of stone without spark got me. So I started counting down the steps in the death march.
Books and backyard cigars, four bittered roses stirred in an old-fashioned way, at least summer time offered oblivion on Freya’s day.
A chaos cavalcade — be it five o’clock boys or police-protected ‘Oh My God Beckies!” — regularly careened down H street as my teeth rattled on the other side of a weathered picket fence. The gentleman of leisure who always frequented the end of the alley bantered like hype men as they relieved themselves on the chain-link fence. Piss and herb wafted down the dumpster gallery. I stared at the pipe running up my red and white row-house until it intersected with blue. Then night came and the Autozone security light portended alien abductions and fire in the sky.
In that hemmed in patch of grass, four steps down to a falling apart rocking chair, escape came with the first snap of the beer cap or final stir of the whisky stone. You cannot really call the dimming of the connective light happiness. But for a lack of a better word, it would have to do, until the morning brought the aftershocks of shame and headache pain. And even at its worst, it was always worth it. For these was always a time in the booze blind when it all made sense. And in its own way, that time is endless. A time when I could just stare up at the faint stars and not the mobile abyss, scrolling through the ghosts of yesteryear who don’t even have to wait for the next life to forget that I exist.
Then winter began to rear its ugly head on the backside of autumnal ardor. And as the cold began to set in, I saw the dying of the light in my own escape plan. How would I make it? Another half-year of two mile slogs up and down the snowy slopes of Capitol Hill, onto the brutalist wasteland of the L’Enfant Promenade. By December my basement icebox would take the warm out of jerking off into a sock. And then there were the rats looking to come in from the cold. And then the wintry still of daily dying alone.
And then an opportunity to return to Bangkok came. The same one that had been snatched several months prior. It was a fly-by-night news agency that operated in the shadows while promising to give light to the voiceless.
It was run by an affable conman who’d tried to rob the rightful owner of the domain name several months prior.
It was career suicide.
To my mind, that was better than the other kind.
So I returned to the Big Mango to devour the wet sugar pile with the other ants under the sun. It was me living my best life, another drunk mediocrity aping Bukowski and waxing anti-natalist, while secretly mourning a God I couldn’t resurrect.
The city was made for those in pursuit of the three Bs, whose music was far more puerile than Bach, Beethoven, or Berlioz.
Bladerunner motorbike rides by night, street food, and red lights — or in my case, hedonistic praxis tamed by ex-post puritanical plight.
And being just another mediocre white man without much to give and a complete inability to let go, my last dream of being a writer buried months before the year’s first snow, all I had left was to appropriate the sartorial stylings of colonial fashionistas, suck the light out of the last Mekong sunset and cry out “Hasta la vista!”
And so the twilight of my own soon-to-be middle-aged life started off just fine. The money more or less made its way down the wire, though the work permit never did. And then the new-found coronal king came rushing in, and I found myself without my plague mask in the city of sin.
There’s something about this pandemic that’s lit my well-worn limbic system up like a Christmas tree. Too much time watching the blue-checked kings and queens getting high on bad news, high on putting the bastards in place, high on imagined ideas of themselves.
We are now all addicts hooked up to the morphine drip of social-media sanctimony and shit-post leveling. Its a pitched battle between Nelsonian knowledge grifters and the know-it- all shapeshifters —nihilists signal jamming the Pecksniffian radio kings.
I’m so tired of it all for all is war. War against the other. War against one’s own shadow. The crusader complexed sending out their cavalry to slaughter narcissistic hyper-vigilance. So many crying frog faces and resistance lotus eaters taking pot shots from opposite sides of the same coin.
Yes, show me your packed trains pushing hoi polloi to their deaths in the age of pandemic. Show me your overfed Brexiters pushing aside medical staff to stock up at Tesco. Turn your dead family into social media content to get that dopamine rush and pretend you are doing anything other than displacing your own feelings of dyspraxia.
Tell me how all the things you did for yourself you really did for others just so you can go go viral. Never lose an opportunity to attack even in the veil of praise. It’s elevate ego at the expense of the other in a zero sum game. And when that constant battle at social climbing leaves you scraping the bottom of that well of self, take the opportunity to preach to others about the importance of mental health.
Better yet, tell me it’s all a hoax — FAKE NEWS! — the libtards are trying to suicide the economy to take down Trump!
Is it not better to scorch a snowflake while granny drowns in buckets of her oozing shit than to think beyond the prism of partisan paroxysm? In those parts from which I came, the bread and circus was always above human life. Bored. So fucking bored. A content leech on the ass of modernity near the end of the Netflix night and getting far too close to understanding the waste of one’s own life.
“I want March madness God dammit — ides be damned. Just fucking get on with it by Easter bucko! Bring out our dead and let their ashes rise from the alter of the neoliberal death cult. Rip the Greatest Generation from their ventilators and rend their still beating hearts before Huitzilopochtli. Kill! Kill! Kill! Just don’t make me feel anything real!”
For it’s not a matter of message when there is really just one messenger — the same god-damned monster yelling “me me me!” into the abyss.
It’s a culture that idolizes otherwise inactive nodes while denying the dependent arising that gives all life its spark. We do not want to be emerging waves that only ebb and flow in the space between each other. We’re fish yanking ourselves out of the ocean in asphyxiation to pull off a Jesus Christ pose — a beacon-less light house leaving ships to wreck at sea just so that we might be seen.
And who the fuck am I, you rightfully ask? Who the fuck cares about some self-righteous rant form some drunken jackass?
And you ain’t wrong. But whatever you think of despicable me, just know my bilious balderdash isn’t trained on actual tragedy.
Rather, it’s a wrecking ball swing at scaffolding propping up grifters in a society of spectacle sans shame.
It’s taking aim at the precession of simulacra — a Baudrillardian kick to the balls for allowing the dopamine rise and fall from blue check mark infamy to precede the blood and flesh person you sacrificed on the alter of semiotics and “ME”.
For on my own melting sugar hill under the sun, millions lost their jobs overnight in an emergency decree as buses to broke lands were packed like sardines. Doctors are collapsing from exhaustion after Sisyphean shifts. Hundreds of thousands are calling hellfire inhalation and sucking phlegm until wide-eyed death. And let’s not forget the actual fake news: Tony never said goodbye to Birdie before she downed her last demitasse of dragon’s breath. And the tens are still feeding thousands on troubled streets without the thoughts of tweets upon retweets. And gods among men are working on a vaccine as we get rich livestreaming our patho-adolescent screams.
This whole damn thing will keep keeping on because of them, and not because of you, nor me. And even our hell of quarantine is beyond a Filipino prisoner’s dream.
And I know I’m shit, and I don’t feel good about it. I’ve been shifting through my own muck for far too long it’s true. And lucky you for the shade of that coconut shell Michelle, for you are yet to see the burning bag around you ma belle, as the doorbell on God’s door ditch rings eternal in a dying world.
Drowning Tones & Death Notes 