11.8
It was closer to the reunion that both of them were dreading. Since it lacked the gift of jewelry, the climax of emotion would be lessened. Our hero could live up to the import of polished carbon set in precious metal, emitting radioactive particles of cultural baggage. But he didn’t. The barn dance at harvest time seemed that it would carry on without them. Our heroine had her own rays in need of soaking up. To disabuse them of the patterns they relied on would be like exiling them from the bedrock of strict family, formed from cultures unrelated to the one in which they lived. Their interests would shift to the alternative, the underground, with their knowing why. New obsessions would take hold. They’d surprise each other by lecturing vehemently on things they had zero prior interest in. Moral compasses would need recalibration. After several episodes of gross strangulation, til what they missed had quietened inside, they’d find themselves perversely tight together. The chances of their breaking up would then be smaller than one or both succumbing to addiction, which was less likely than their acting out through wanton lust, finding affairs with the already given-up to be just retribution for what the other partner could not give. Fresh hells accumulated with the passing years and service was the only salve. But soup kitchen scooping and little league base-coaching were out of the question as neither cared for strangers very much.
This left a maw of frustration with their partner that neither could climb out of. The longer the train of goods one drags along behind him, the less he would believe that it could be another way.
Caravans criss-crossed the world, old with a staff of one. The tales that made absurd burdens bearable in countries without wealth were unavailable to them. Or those things came in twisted forms that did not work the same, thanks to the cult of the individual and the propaganda denouncing cohesion. Inner voices have evolved to be as powerful as the exacting influence of other people. Either way the neuroses that result from such systems are as wide as water looking like a sea, but really just a river. The other bank cannot be seen with a laser-corrected eye. It wants for noticing. But there are vast assumptions in the way.
The night lay resting in an atmosphere of staleness. Farmhands covered the crops against unseasonable frost. Exaggerations came from misapplied directives. The rapids roared where thought came up against belief.
Sex begat more sex. The color of her wardrobe was beginning to steam off.
Far and away the branch of drives is difficult to break. It holds onto its foundation like a police German Shepard bite. Whether it’s happening exactly now, it has repeatedly before. Everything has at least an implication. Never feeling something’s downside means competitive advantage. It also means the satiety of ignorance. Goods will lessen. The rules of made-up games compete like sperm to be the one that reproduces and is followed most. Their success is in their usage. The rules persist and rarely die. But the spermy ones that didn’t germinate will change their story as to prove that purpose lost is preferable. The stories are logged, available for posthumous accounting, barely heard in the cacophony of billions. Only fractions will be noticed — the rest will last for just as long as hope does. Given the azimuth of stubbornness that narcissists possess, their hope sustains their sperm for tectonic eras.
A powerful call felt inside is a compulsion that always leads to repetition. The mindful can dodge this by using it as what not to do. The ex-couple in question were too young to have thought this far ahead though. They were still reactors. But this was part of the freedom of the young — experience had not yet clicked shut every open window but for one. Sure they’d follow paths that ended in a swamp where it stunk like rot, the water was black, it entailed foot necrosis, and a disease or two from insects, but at least that was a novelty! The waste involved reliving daily scenes, surmountable, but only just, and only for a narrow few. The silence felt just like a sodden root. Credible witnesses refused to testify without improper pay.
As long as there was language there’d be words for love and criticism. It was as if someone said, I’m going to tank your interview. The two were thrust into a complex situation, but not of such complexity that things will not repeat — if only! In fact that was their default state. There mere boredom would negate morality. People do and say that which they do not mean just to free themselves of their repeating cages.
Much of speech is glandular in origin. One would not be human if they never had a thoughtless bully-dart escape them. These brains are much to manage. So long as they repressed their harm, they would be most likely okay, to others, with a category 5 inside. And this was a place of pride to stand on.
But instincts fire before emotions are identified, suppressed. Drives are sublimated with addiction, with substances and gambling, with being carried from one hot and naked partner to the next. Others embark tectonically from the bottom of the sea to the tippy high range tops.
11.9
Unwillingly, after he confronted her with one-sided love in silly-ass Nebraska, he rejoined the ranks of the rest of the men in this world who do not have sufficient drive to dominate. He wasn’t on a sky-island, he was in the human pen. Few blows a man can suffer are so acutely apoplectic. The ego, the sense of self, the overarching I-ness of every whirling voice inside feel moribund. Every touch is shocking. He did not feel capable of the merest movement. It was some kind of halting wonder. This barren helplessness was the first state after, when the mind’s walls were stained with the shadows of intimacy, before the mind was rife with anger, a significant murderous anger at giving fully of oneself and having it turn futile. First there was timidity. Everything was stacked but naught was getting weighed. He was the figure on the highway, walking outside of perspective, passed by caravans. It was the phase that led to being a reactionary. Helpful ribbons decamped, headed anywhere he wasn’t. Craven emotions were released because at least they made a break from misery. Wet towels were set down at the base of doors to keep in all the smoke (this doesn’t work). Flutterings of better times were fanned into the creaking furnace. Long ignored injustices arose to dominate. Purpose went to bother someone else. He took a bag, a spike, and went to spear-fish trash along the highway. He became ill at looking at the carcasses. Reminding him of himself, he could not stand them either. His eyes and nose were crusted in the mornings. The desire to reach out to old friends was tempered by the burn upon his hand from taking discolored cookie sheets from broiling ovens. He was reluctant to get so close to them again. This was how a personality will shift. A loved one did him wrong so he could never love again. Jacques in woe in Arden. His friends noted he was different, and when he never snapped out of it, a few would accept it, while those who would have dipped anyway take this chance to do so now. The close ones of his clique forced him to come out so that they can perform the healing ritual — getting hammered at a college bar where they can gross out college chicks. They take over a back patio and circle round a table with metal legs that screech against the cement floor. They have it out, they get to him, and he gets drunk enough on pitchers that he can’t feel it when the tears come, and after that there’s lots of hugs and jokes, and waitresses to borderline harass, and though he won’t feel better in the mornings, he does, a bit, for now.
She just feels like shit. It stung to do that to him. She’s frazzled to where she can’t parse the ad copy on the sugar-daddy website — she won’t go through with it, was only curious. She has her art and it’s still selling. She slams down the laptop and starts texting her friends. He was wrong to put her in that place where she had to hurt him. She too had need of ritual. Her friends will pick her up, will let her know how she was right. She was. Her friends give her a project, someone distracting to do. She will feel accompanied.
Time will heal the worst of it, on its island time. That wait is physical brutality. Getting through it is a low accomplishment.
Exits are unchanging by their nature. They are packaging.
12.0
Everything is judged, even if only by negation. They could not be certain of the spurious who recommend a vessel. In this way the salesman’s edict will ring true — they were buying not the product but the seller. Of course our heroine was unaware that she would not re-up until the man was on her porch with a briefcase and a whitened smile. When chance was offered to her, she chose to close the door. Some drives have a backer — one is entropy. It’s ready to contribute to a breakup — in fact in many cases it has already signed the outcome, contracting it, and irreversible. And yet it is promoted in the culture, the war between the sexes, as part of the strive for individuality, as a divide-and-conquer edict with unfortunate results. It contradicts the tribal instinct, sociability, and the desire to find a mate. It’s occurrence is abnormalcy.
Starting over is a common lower state persisting through adulthood. Despair will not latch on so tight when this is kept in mind. Know what this living world attempts to do. Jain-like he could be careful how he walked but at his scale something would be squashed. Out where he was, it was possible to de-legitimize an entire ethos, as it was not exactly steel beneath his feet. The priorities under wage slavery were solemnly decreed. There was still variety. Not everything was equal in its benefit and harm. Phantoms were demanding favors the wage slaves were incapable to give. Those who could go would do so in a hurry.
Faux words were nothing to accommodate. Each could tell the other was not kidding. Caravans of donkeys just got on with it with whip-lash motivation. But man is born to dwell. He makes his mind a living space. From there he never leaves. Everything is standing there, not sitting all the time. Proclivities are obtained, then pursued. They bubble up via the type of experience that changes one’s perspective. An elementary child is sprinting through his school day. Then a classmate tells him about sex. It seems bizarre, impossible, yet has the air of truth. The implications are distasteful, like a sentence from the court. To accept adulthood and its drives, the school kid will have to let a mass of his youthful identity change, which is to say, he will have to let what was himself decide to go to hospice. The ones who don’t will have to live in fantasy. He will stay with his future partner longer if both are clutching the same things. The hassle is acute. It’s hard to speak the same thereafter.
It seemed too much, to be conscious in every moment. Every unfulfilled desire will find expression in neuroses. “He wasn’t any good for you,” her girlfriends say to her. “Don’t feel feel bad for him — he’ll get over it,” another says applying makeup in a mirror. “His kink of you being partially clothed during sex means he hates the female body,” says another to her phone screen. “Jesus!” says our heroine, to which the other says, “It’s true.” They were going out to dance. They intended to drink for free. The pact they’ve had is that they all come home together. If anyone is ready to hook up, they must declare it at the beginning of the night, and the others must have met the guy. This is in part for their safety and also how they police one another. There will be grinding on the dance floor, but they will put their arms around each other in near sweaty headlocks to keep the moving mass from pulling them apart. The air is grey and stale with artificial smoke. The skin expects it to feel hotter than the atmosphere around them but it doesn’t. It doesn’t even feel like wind. The lights are like the flutters of emotion tied bull-headed to competing drives. It smells like bad parfum. The music’s loud and pounding. Everything in there has been made to override anxiety.
Elsewhere, similar, a young woman actually flirted with our broken hero. He was well lubed with processed ethanol, which got him doing what he could not be bothered to attempt for otherwise. He approached her dancing, she did not back off. They swayed their hips close and look into each other’s eyes. She leaned in close and yelled over the computer beats, “I like your eyes,” to which he yelled, “What?” Two smiles came to an understanding. The wave-pool slosh inside him meant he was too slow to give the right response, a compliment for her, as any fool would know. Her expectation hung out by the smoke machine, elongating the silence (in theory only). As soon as he broke eye contact, for her it was over. The sting showed on her face for half a second. She wasn’t used to the sublayer of rejection that occurs before intention’s been declared. Her appearance, her ability to break the ice with strangers, which her girlfriends would not do, had been enough for other guys to offer everything to her without her need of asking. When our hero was oblivious to her intent, she was insulted. The feeling was directed at herself, her fear she did not show of being trite, deficient. It was enough to shut the grinding down. And since our hero was attuned to notice negativity, it was then he’d sense she was upset and assume it was his fault, and that’s when guilt would kick him, completing the cyclical transformation. It was a pattern he didn’t want but could not help relive: attempt, adversity, confusion, grasping, failure, and depression. She turned back to her friends, and he was now on what Leary’s adepts decreed a bad trip. It was familiar and so comforting despite the pain. This trip invited all the other bad ones to come in, and they all spilled things out of him that were embarrassing to those friends who had been there to cheer him, but who had their own drives that they didn’t want him spoiling. There were no tears but this was now a crying drunk. A friend tried to get him interested in the activity around him, in the hundred other college girls, but our hero lit in on him over long ago b.s. and the designated driver said that was it. He trundled them off to a late-night drive thru. He ordered a train case of mini-burgers and the clique tore them apart, eating some of the packaging in their frenzy, but despite the myth of soaking up the booze with grease, they all got hangovers and two of them got cancer in their 40s.
12.1
The trees that were not slashed and burned could not photosynthesize the excess greenhouse gases. Not just anyone could dictate immediate seriousness, and that’s one persuasion that our heroine had lacked. She could only do it indirectly, as in withholding affection, but this fell under protective measures so she wasn’t gonna stop. For her it was as though she had a national prosperity with war to prop her up, no bear market in sight. Those flirting with her would not be sensitive. They had a directive she could understand and use. Any hate she got would Plinko-shuffle off her from the pegs onto the sidewalk. Someone she didn’t ask was gonna come collect the puck and set it at her top again. A couple thousand peg-bounding sharp tomorrows still remained. They’d generate events she’d long for when she was very old. An argument with customer service at a phone kiosk would be a precious moment when those were almost through.
Culture changes, not inbred response. If the aliens ever come, she hoped they’d mate with us. The result would be something new, as opposed to the same old. It would be something better than mankind, she hoped, but would at least be something different, outside of the patterns and the cage. What made her smile is that its opportunities would differ. Its biology allowed for new ideas. Maybe it could think of what to do with all this plastic. Maybe it would have emotions that we cannot feel, and make us understand the things that hover just outside our thoughts that we have no concepts for. Maybe it will know how to approach the aggregate. Maybe it will travel faster than the speed of light and make a documentary of life on other planets. Maybe it will answer Gauguin’s questions. Or maybe it will look at us and split.
She wondered if she could be the one to mate with an alien and carry it to term. Depends on what it looks like, she would give herself that out. If they could guarantee her health and it wasn’t insect-like, maybe. The thought did not abhor her. Throughout her life if there was a chance at something different, she would take it. If the alien could shape-shift into an Olympian, then most likely yes. If it would know what to do with asps, our greed, and the billions who live and think like it is still the Middle Ages, then definitely, she’d go through almost anything for that. Cockamamie similarities have happened.