Almost altogether flown away

and held exactly where you are…

“The Wild Ducks of Hundred-Elder Mountain”

 

I once spent (my personal record, for those of you keeping lines) just over two thousand six hundred hours here on Earth without suffering any human feeling whatsoever, other than the basic inescapables of gut hunger and nasal disgust. Turns out that hunger and disgust, you will find if you embark on an experiment such as mine, are sadly what we might call “intertwined” with what we also might sadly call “everything.” They come as inextricable from awareness it seems, no matter how supreme a rank of inner suffocation one has achieved. Believe me if you can. Save yourself the nonproductive crawl towards that sanguine cunt ennui. For your own sake, or at least for what we might call “your sake,” if nothing else.

Please allow me to tell you my point plainly upfront instead of showing you subtly and gradually over time: it is indeed no small task to bludgeon a human mind out of itself, to make certain that a human mind is no longer able to achieve meaningful realization of any kind. Because in a place like this, to realize anything at all would amount to being the whole goddamn problem.

Consequently, my desire towards any cogent feeling or thought in any way was clearly the troublesome wrench in my own conscious gearworks, this much seemed logically secure. My desire towards annihilation, for instance, was itself creating a brand new reality available which I could then desire to be annihilated all the more. What a bumfuck of a deal! And many wise folk had said it before me, no doubt about that. I was just too much about my own daily grind bullshit to admit it, I suppose I can see that now looking backwards. If only one could find how to live in this direction, backwards, and not merely sometimes inconsequentially glance its way. It’s true, I was too about my own dragon dreams, a statement I cannot help but entertain. Too about being the knight and the sword and the greedy winged fire master all at once. Guardian of the giggling gyre, that’s me, unnamed hero. That’s my precious story, stale and stiff as time.

Or are all my memories just harmless laughter in my head, just like Ms. Sally said?

 

They say writing (or in this case, recording—no sharp points allowed) can be therapeutic. They say it a lot in places like residential rehabs and long term detoxes, funny jacket joints, etc. They say shit like, “write a story, it’s healing” or “imagine your life as the story you want to read,” but I don’t know if the trick works the same if you in fact are the story, if you’ve always felt (known) that your life was being written by some no-name, non-emerging hack with unlimited resources to unfairly self-publish his rude, wannabe drafts. As if your very bones were crafted of baseless set-ups, your veins weaved from nothing but the flimsy candy cravings of childhood. And if that’s the stuff out of which the tangible parts of you are contrived, then what of something so slippery and unagreed upon as a mind? Your mind? Your “self”? Ha, real rich. Pronouns of ownership never seemed so ill-advised as they do in the nuthouse. Proving once again that neuroscience and grammar, though both esteemed sciences, do not mix. That two (and far more than two) things can be equally true.

But what of it, you might ask. What of what happened, or more true, what is happening and will continue to happen as long as I keep speaking into this little black machine? If I were a reader (or listener) that is the question I’d be asking, although, if I were you I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten this far, to be fair. So, good on ya. Or, more pertinently, are you doing okay? What’s your mind doing against you on this fine day? Why are you here with me, now that I have a mind clear enough to think of it? Is it out of cruel, sick mercy or cruel, sick spite that you tag along like this? Is there something you too wish to find in here, or is it just something you were asked to do on my account to transactionally pad your own? Are you visiting me, inspecting me, mining me for my data, my rarest snowflakes? Are you perhaps an internet cookie monster I cannot deny with the mere click of a button that is also not really “there” at all? Hum. Drum. Everything numb.

Let’s start at actuality, that precise point, actually, shall we? Before we go any farther. It seems only fair for me to ask you. Are you in fact a fact, meaning “a there,” an objective thing with so-called access to an outside and an inside actualness all at once? Or are you an innie only, all ephemeral and squirmy and some say make-believe—real enough to change how many pills they give me and what color, but not real enough to be able to bring with me to Empathy Circle show ‘n tell on Tuesdays? Real enough to topple my day from tip to toe but not particular or actual enough to sway my so-called doctor’s opinion of me in a manner that would give me better food and lodging options? What say you? It matters a great deal to me. I swear with each pinky still properly attached in the world proper.

Well, as a matter of record, I’d like to say “fuck you” for not answering, but you never answer, you never do, and you never said you would, so it’s really on me, the fuck-offs I feel. See, the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is working! This I must accept. It’s on me that I keep asking such questions of you and your kind, my villainous friends, my desolation angels. My invisible crew—all the mad duckies who never stay all in their row, as their one hard and fast rule. Oh, and how I wish you could hear them quack right on cue, harmonic in a way, but then again that is the same as me saying I wish I could hear “I” when I silently sleep, isn’t it? Like me trying to get some kind of “you” outta you is just as loony as trying to get “I” outta me. Then what? Welp, the only thing you can do with a fully unraveled spool is ravel it back up again. And what to do with that? You see it, how endless and senseless. I knew you would.

 

In “meditation hour” today we listened to Ms. Sally read us a thing which she called “Duck Hour” or “Duck Thoughts” or maybe it was “Duck Floats.” I really don’t remember. But she gave us a little piece of paper with it typed out neat and in odd spacing like the poems in school books no one read for homework and everyone easily ignored in class the next day.

Ms. Sally said, this I do remember, that meditations like this one can help quiet those of us with “all the noise of crashing waves” going on in our heads, our loud as monsoon insides, and that if we can learn to simplify the sounds that convince us of “what is” then we might have a chance at living peaceably alongside people who gracefully do not, for example, wipe their ass with their bare hands or use torn-off underwear elastic as tooth floss. Are these promises extravagant? Sally and this duck, apparently, think not.

Ms. Sally, in her best sober and polished voice, read this to me (and us) today:

 

Now we (please god please for once define “we” before moving on) are ready to look at something pretty special. (goddamnit)

It is a duck riding the ocean (there are 4 oceans, no such thing as THE ocean) a hundred feet beyond the surf.

No, it isn’t a gull. (who the fuck said it was)

A gull always has a raucous touch about him.  (just like most of the reprehensible representative fathers in here)

This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles (cute verb but not sure it is apt for a duck in swells) in the swells.

He isn’t cold, and he is thinking things over. (think think think, but also, keep it simple)

There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, (ah, a clarification just in time)

And he is part of it. (yes, yes, we know, be a part of, not the whole, yeah yeah, but then I—)

He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha (who else saw this image coming a fucking hundred goddamn miles away?! Anyone? Oh, now you’re silent. I see.) meditating under the Bo tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. (who has that ever stopped?)

He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have. (tell that to The Hammer!)

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.

And neither do you. (scientists claim that if we filled a dinner glass with ocean water then that would be how much of space we have tinkered with, relative to all the water in all the oceans, that is)

But he realizes it. (Ooooooo, the grand realization, the Big Epiph, the head-crease straightener)

And what does he do, I ask you. He sits down in it.

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is. (but what about how he got to this infinite state of so-called repose? He sits? He is “in it”? He fucking “realizes”? Lovely, just great.)

That is religion, and the duck has it. (Fuck. Your. Self…since you, lucky ducky, only have one self to deal with, much unlike the rest of us listening to this gooseshit in duck’s clothing)

He has made himself a part of the boundless, by easing himself into it just where it touches him. (at least Ms. Sally seems touched).

And after she finished reading the duck stuff to us she had that satisfied look on her face that mothers do when they shamelessly breastfeed in the park. You’ve seen it. The look of the Madonna in old smokey paintings. The look of a long-range truck driver after taking a private and cleansing 18-wheeler of a shit. Sally had this look after reading to us about the duck who sits in the waves and does not drown. She had the look that says, “I have done it. I have done what I set out to do.” Same look you see on any politician or pastor’s face after a speech or sermon, same visage shown on Washington’s gray face looking westward on the quarter.

But let me ask you something—what actual good has any of those looks done to any actual one who suffers? The look is always truly just for the looker, ain’t it? Is General George telling you where to go next, or why? Does the pleasure on Pastor Mike’s face after another successful altar call ever seep into your usable soul, ever save you from even the average perils of the rest of Sunday afternoon? Are the contents of the semi driven by the shitter ever made to make your life more liveable and worth living? When was the last time eerie Mother Mary ever shed tears of blood that made your sins feel actually washed away? Be honest, why dontcha? It has always worked like gangbusters for your narrator, just allow the rest of this recording to reassure you.

Which reminds me of my need for a disclaimer, or at least an explication. A fair reckoning of my vital statistics. I am (and again, this singular “I” business creates more than a singular bone of contention in me) a man, middle 30s, once fit, now terribly round. They say the meds do it to me, the fattening, but I know it also must have a little something to do with the highly processed and salted foods given to us batshit crazies in here. Two things, both true. I have most of my hair left, but where it does retreat I pay it no mind. Pay it no mind even though I have plenty of minds to waste, to splurge, to share! And in a world built upon fake scarcity, I suppose it’s nice in a way to have whatever surplus you can get.

I worked once in an actual career, of sorts. I had my own residence with locks to which only I had the key. I lived alone with my thoughts. Which, I feel it’s fair to say, is very much not living alone, not in the slightest. And it is here that I feel I must address the trap of language, you see, because you must have by now some pause as to why a narrator with such a tight command of the language is obliged to live his days inside a madhouse, a looney bin, a state-sponsored shitshow? I can explain.

My diagnosis in life came late, in one manner of speaking. Some find themselves sooner than others, I suppose. It caught me by surprise, so much so that they, the campus security officers, had to drag me kicking and manically laughing out of my “PHIL 4: Introduction to Epistemology” course at the community college where I was adjunct instructor of this and that. What I found out much later was that a student had texted the code to security for help with our room number because I, their beloved if not a bit wacky and impulsive instructor, was shirtless in the middle of the room challenging the jocks to a planking contest. I came to learn that one student had drawn shaky black wings on my wet back in permanent marker during the event only because I told her that if she didn’t, the Angel of Death would be upon her and her loved ones that very night, or some such moving ancient hebraic rhetoric.

It came sorta outta the blue, as they say. From a fenceless left field. Ambushed by neural networks I didn’t know existed. My inner electric Tet Offensive. And I mean, let’s be fair here, it’s not like I was the poster boy for sane and clean living before, not nearly. But I had also never ingested enough substance to do anything like disrobe in class until this day or even had to fight the notion not to. I had never claimed to be a hybrid being from just beyond the Pleiades, had not once done “a plank pose” in my life. All this is true, as true as the fact that I had also never heard the words “your father was found dead” before that week, and consequently, had never learned how to avoid what news like that might do to a person “like me,” a regular ho-hum professional with a ticking time bomb in his head waiting to explode at just the exactly worst time.

This is what it does. It lands you in a new home fitted with bunk beds and barred windows and filled with stinky friends and a daily drip, so to speak, of enough chemicals to make it impossible for me to fly to those manic and dangerous heights ever again, to make it so I can never be shirtless of my own accord, to ensure that any exercise I do will be in the exercise room during exercise class. The duck never does yoga; yoga does the duck. To make sure my genitals are always covered, as long as state insurance keeps me covered too. And that’s the real bumfuck of it, if you can allow me to use the same crass noun twice during this recording—I am one of the lucky ones!

Can you even imagine? I can. I can imagine your laughter at the thought of me being lucky, laughter that you immediately felt guilt over and without knowing as to why. Most of my ilk, the ones who stagger the avenues of life appearing to be the human form of the hunger yelps of a band of deranged coyotes, the street folks who feverishly scratch at dried-out railroad ties all over their arms and toes as often and sincerely as normies think of their various financial accounts (or horrendous lack thereof), the citizens of the disregarded underworld that is now very much the above world, most of these are left to fend for themselves in our splendiferous society and are detested and exiled for not being able to do so. Hated because they have been found lacking by a far from inaudible and very omnipresent voice. A booming heard no just from the clouds, but from The Cloud. A vision not seen only at a burning bush but in the mouth of every aflame oil drum from sea to shining sea.

They are just like me: schizophrenic, schizophreniform, schizoaffective. There are growing clinical variations on the theme. You got your basic brief psychotic disorder types, the tightwad hebephrenics, and the good ole boys and girls, the classic catatonics. What we all share (aside from a general disdain for hygiene and a deep love for cigarette smoking) is that we were so-called normal once. We were like you. It’s just that, for us, it doesn’t take much to knock us off the board, to take the sanity out of our sails. And since most of us have no idea what is wrong with us until it is far too late, we tend to drink and use whatever we can to keep the wildness at bay. Which really works just fine until it really finally doesn’t, meaning we end up institutionalized or left to momentary junk mercies at the cross street of psychic interrogation and physical torture.

I trust it is difficult for most normal people tied up within their personal struggles of child rearing, career building, all manners of self-improving, ab sculpting through advertised injection, managing pain with pills wisely prescribed by professional hippocratics and manufactured by giant caring companies led by empaths who never cruelly made a fortune off the suffering of AIDS patients, going to church with millions of others on isolated western screens made by eastern slaves in order to learn how to get materially rich just like the Messiah did, spending much of their life anxiously planning how to finance their own road to Golgotha, normal stuff, arguing about the right color and of course the wrong color of all-important society-shaping truths, celebrating cutthroat banks and invasive insurance companies and the greatest military force the world has ever known with 30 second fantasies called commercials, the regular energy, the day to day grind, knowing that some days are clearly more important than others, that some people most certainly are, thinking that this is all going somewhere very special and altogether necessary along an upwards and to the right road that goes by the name “because we said so,” sane and sound society stuff, walking briskly while a watch counts up your good behavior, walking ever more briskly when forced to encounter one of those sad horrid tent cities where my misunderstood and misbegotten bretheren hang out who are unable to get into a posh place like this one, unable to cuddle in the swells with the lucky ducks like me because they did not have the correct paperwork, or if they did, it was not filed correctly because, in the most basic and obvious sense, those folks (me) are not in any way capable of your level of group-approved, uptight, ass-apoxied correctness. Or so the very blatant story goes.

I want to thank you, each of you, for holding on to get to the end here, where I can get to the positive part. I am feeling better these days, more “all of a piece” as opposed to “in pieces,” and Ms. Sally is right, writing (or speaking into this recorder which will then, hopefully, become grammatical writing someday, however that is supposed to happen) can be therapeutic. Perhaps that is exactly what is needed to solve our society’s far from invisible schizo problem. Perhaps we need a nationwide airdrop of composition books (or “decomposition” books if we want to be really progressive about it) and some super heavy boxes of ballpoint pens, yeah, a giant airdrop of therapeutic goods empathetically targeted to the thousands of disassociated schizoid encampments that persist all over the greatest and richest human empire yet to be conceived. Think on it with me, if you have the stones. If we can get Operation Notebook Drop going and going strong and we figure out the logistics of unleashing a shitton of pages and pens on these unproductive and odiferous tent hellscapes then we are bound to kill (or at the very least lifelong maim) a great deal of them, and since we are doing this operation charitably (out of a charitable and nonfixed mindset) there will be no room for any pesky residue of regret, resentment or blame when we crush off a goodly portion of these foul smelling, loud-mouthed, ass-out undesirables. These fucking schizos. And if anyone can say that with a pure heart, it’s me. And what about the unfortunates who survive, you ask? Let them write, and thrive! Let them eat of their own words and be nourished. See, the plan is fully sustainable, no outsourcing needed, carbon neutral(ish). Winnest of win/wins if I ever did hear of one!

The solution is simple: society must follow the best policy. Schizos like me, in the most literal of ways, do not belong with you. You know it, I know it, we all know it. That is why we have institutions like the one Ms. Sally serves in and that is why we have tanks and bombs and fighter jets, too. Be honest. It is not kind or wise or inclusive to be dishonest about the world we all inhabit and thus share some culpability in making. Since the strange beaked and winged people from the stars came down offering cognitive pine cones to our earliest ancestors the story has remained simple and the same. This is a winners and losers game, and if you were born with a brain that naturally conjures up yappy demons just to make things more (let’s say) interesting for you, then there is no point in any of us pretending which role in the game you are playing any longer. Let us stop talking falsely at this late hour, as a frail and gifted one of the loser tribe once believed.

It is high time for society to evolve into itself. It is time to cease fire on the so-called wicked competition and get on with smiting the actual and inarguably desolate. You could even give them (us, don’t forget) a warning call if you like, to help yourself feel better about it all in the proverbial morning. A good old fashioned “timber!” or “bombs away!” would likely suffice, but if you’re asking me (which it feels like you incessantly and inexplicably are) I’d prefer we stay on theme here, as Ms. Sally likes to say, and give the ever-growing world of we useless quacks the time tested, schizo-approved hound call of “duck and cover”– and laugh if you love her, meaning of course, all that you surround.