The Dream Machine

"Sometimes the future is like a long tunnel that gets narrower as I move through it. It's like the trick of drawing perspective -- you make the four lines intersect to give the illusion of depth."

"The illusion of depth? Tell me what you mean by that."

Roger pauses. "I guess I mean... I don't know, like the tunnel is literally narrowing. The future, I mean. Narrows as I move through it."

Dr. Klein leans back. "Roger, try to tell me how it feels, as you imagine moving through this tunnel. Don't tell me what you think it means, tell me what your feelings are."

Oh Roger, you can fuck me harder, it's okay okay aaah that's it! that's it! You like it like this? harder Roger you can have me any way you want, any waaaah Any way, how about like this? like this? you like this?

"Lonely. It feels really, deeply lonely--"

Now Roger crumples. Dr. Klein sees him try to hold back, in his body and his face, but the tears come and they are very hot.

"Lonely," Dr. Klein says. He softens his voice. "It sounds awfully lonely, I imagine it you feel as if there is no one to be with you when you are in this place." Roger nods, his hands on his face.

"It feels like I can't breathe. It's like claustrophobia. I can't go further but I have to, like I'm being pushed. Like there's this huge wall behind me, and it's closing up the tunnel as I move through and I don't want to keep going but I can't turn back..."

That was perfect. Whoa. I know, right? Absolutely perfect. Move your arm. Like this? No, like... this. Like you're curling me. There. Isn't that perfect? Ahh. It absolutely is.

Then they fell asleep.

&

Mandy's Dream

I am waiting for a number to be called, I guess it's on the TV like the lotto or something. I am waiting for my number to come up
and it is the first ball
it reads
42
and the second ball
I can't remember but then the machine
on the TV catches on fire
and then the TV goes too

and now I'm panicking, I'm shouting Mom Mom the TV's on fire! But when I turn
I see it's not Mom
it's a something dressed as her
though it looks exactly like Mom
I know it's not really her
it's not a man it's something else
like a machine
and I scream and there's an axe in my hand and I swing it and hit her, hard,
right in the chest
and it opens up
and there's a fire there too
it's so hot

and when I wake up the radiator is hissing loudly like electric sparks and that's when I realized what had happened and what the doctor had done--

&

"Roger."

He does not reply.

"Roger, I want you to listen to me."

"Okay."

"You are not alone."

"But I am."

"Roger. There is no future. What you imagine, the tunnel, the wall, it exists in your imagination. It has no body. The mind can't move through time. I can't go forwards and see what will be. I can't go back and see what was. I can only imagine and in either direction the latest science agrees that the bulk of we think we see we make ourselves. The remembered present. That's where we live."

"It feels so bad, though."

Dr. Klein sighs, leans back and put his hands where Roger can't see them behind the desk.

"Does it have to?"

&

"What is that?"

&

"It's a dream machine."

"A dream machine?"

Dr. Klein shakes his head. "Well, not a dream machine exactly. The name dream machine historically refers to device built by Ian Sommerville. Have you heard of Ian Sommerville, Roger? He spent time with Burroughs in the 60s. That dream machine was a cylinder with holes cut in it, and there was a light inside. The cylinder rotated on a record player. People stared at it and saw things. This is not that kind of dream machine. This is more properly a brain-machine interface. It maintains the specific patterns of reverbant loops between your thalmus and cortex during REM sleep."

"What does that do?" Roger is staring at the machine.

"It lets you experience your dreams as if you were awake."

"So.... this is like lucid dreaming?"

"No. Lucid dreamers can control their dreams. Which I dislike the idea of. It is an unfortunate loss of information."

Dr. Klein extends a wire from the base of the dream machine and hands the tip to Roger.

"This is something different. Here. Put this in your mouth."

The First Two Murders

Dr. Klein left the office underneath a telephone pole covered in birds. Inside his head words were swimming:

I remember the time I thought I told the truth, but it was a lie. What does that mean, that I might believe what I say when I don't mean it? What are the meanings behind words, what truth lies underneath them, what happens if I cut their skin, what bleeds, what is language's blood and what

"Oh! Dr. Klein."

Shaina was startled.

"I almost -- I didn't recognize you for a second, outside the office, I mean."

"Shaina. How are you doing?"

She paused, touched her hair. The sun was moving slowly above their heads, and beyond that the universe slightly shifted. Shaina had blonde hair. When she first started coming, it was brown.

"Is that a professional question?"

"Of course not."

"I'm just joking, doctor. Not funny, I know, but--"

"Well Shaina, I'd best be going."

Better to create triangles. Better to find her again, and walk away leaving her feeling that there was something guiding them towards each other, the movement of heavenly bodies, something in their cells, magnetic nuclei, something about the way things are meant to be, yes, meant to be, yes, that's what I'm trying to make

"See you Thursday."

She smiled and looked down.

"See you Thursday," she said.

&

The Doctor's Dream

little elephants come up form the soil and shook their trunks at the sky. I was breaking something down, it was either a stone or a word, or maybe a word carved into a rock. I tried to tell them, hey, elephants, you don't belong here, get back. But they came up and split open at the seams. Butterflies came from their skin loosened and in little piles on the ground. Little elephant skin never forgets, I remember thinking. I was swimming in something thick, it was air but not air, it was a venus fly trap and the thick liquid in its gut. the burning light above me, hot air, long ride back home, I remember thinking that right before she came into the dream. I knew her but I didn't. I could see her face but can't remember now. She said the meaning of the world is not the world, and then wake up and I said what does that mean, and she said wake up wake up and I said I am trying and then I did.

&

meanwhile it was jazz city USA
int other part of town
some kids were trying to get back
to a different time
jazz time
wanted to be wild in the night

horns like sex
right right right
that's why they wore their hats like that
two of them

young-looking but maybe not really kids
can't tell right now
in the this light
can't tell now with what's on their faces

all this dark shadow
and blood

&

"I have strange fantasies, doctor. Strange I guess is a weird way to put it. They are mine, I know, so I guess I should try to own them, own that part of me. But I can't help but step back and look at them like another person might, and then I can't escape the sense that they are strange. I want to put people in the microwaves. I know it's impossible but the thought of it turns me on. Not any people, just certain ones. Shelley from work, I've told you about her. And Keila. From the bank. I can't imagine getting them in but I can imagine seeing them pressed against that plastic. On the door. And the light on inside. Doctor, I know it's weird. It gets me hard, a little even now just talking about it. God I don't understand. It seems obvious, in a way, like it has to with power and control. I get that but it -- knowing that doesn't -- it doesn't change anything. What I want to do. And I can't tell Karen. I couldn't. What would she say? I don't want to even think about it. And she's had her share -- in a totally different way I mean -- but her weird fantasies. I know they feel unwelcome in her case, but they do in mine, too, mine are just less vivid. I mean, she said she used to see things. Penises on fire, pushing through the bedroom wall. That was before the olanzapine. I'm glad she got on that doctor, you have no idea what you did for us. No idea."

Treatment

"I am interested in the various things we talk about when we think we are talking about something else."

Dr. Klein leaned back. I wasn't sure what to do.

"What things?"

"What?"

"What things do we think we are talking about?"

He paused. I felt distant from myself a bit, and tried to focus. The burbling from the small stone fountain on the desk filled up the room. Underneath that sound, I could hear the hiss of the noise machine outside the door.

"Well, Cliff, what do you think we're talking about?"

"Frankly I'm not so sure right now."

"Not so sure?"

"No."

The noise maker kept the conversation private, helped ensure confidentiality, which is an important part of the relationship that we are trying to build in this room. The relationship is an important part of growth; it is in fact a vessel for change, in that it carries us each from one way of living to another. The distance cannot be measured in flat miles. It is more a game of inches, but that is what I am resolved to.

"I think we are talking about sex."

As he said it, I remembered several things at once: Maureen in my bedroom, trying to get me to fuck her without admitting that she was trying; and Elena, who screamed just as I was about to press myself inside her. I remember the feeling of losing my erection, which if it -- the feeling -- were a sound it would sound like a sad clown's whistle: waw waaaw.

"Tell me what you are thinking about."

"I am thinking about whether I need to have it at all; if the army ever gets bored of following orders or if it wants to try something different for a change, collectively; how come it takes so long to conceive of a way of living that might lead to greatness; and why greatness comes in moments and not some more enduring capsule. I am just riffing here. Just letting it flow. I am thinking of the trees I climbed outside the house when I was a boy, and why I tried to push my sister off them so many times. Did I hate her? Do I hate her now? I try to take care of her in a way that feels like love, but is it? How do I know? How did the first spaceship make it to the moon and back? Getting there I can imagine. But getting back..."

I regard him carefully. He is not an unattractive man, to me. I think about the patients he treats. I have never met them, and he has never mentioned them, but I have a clear picture of one in my head: a woman, blonde, short and cute, I can picture her talking and thinking about herself and her life's patterns, trying to climb to a height from which it becomes possible for her to actually see them, trusting Dr. Klein to hold her up there and believing -- and this is most important -- that once she sees them, the patterns, she can put her hands on them and make herself something new.

"I don't believe you," I tell him. "In my office I can only make space for you to do the work. I cannot make you work, and if you don't want to, if you'd like to keep riffing and telling me that these feeling truly matter to you, even when you and I both know they don't, well, I will not stop you. I get paid regardless."

Dr. Klein sat up. I continued. I told him I was sorry if that seemed crass, but the fact is he knows as well as I do that we get paid to do what we do -- to listen, and yes that does help on its own, but really (and I tried to make this point very clear, very eloquent, like a kind of music I hoped or the water on the rocks) it did not matter what I did. And then I told him why.

*

The next session Dr. Klein cried about what he had done, what he shouldn't have done. I listened and made a mental note to check on the noise machine's batteries. It's part of the job.

Wolfram

Shaina waited on the beach for Cliff to come down. The stars were watery above her head. What are the odds, she wondered, that my life feels the way I want it to, always? It depended on so many variables, each in changing relationships with known and unknown entities, and the entities too were in changing relationships with each other and themselves. Shaina waited for Cliff because he believed this web was navigatable. Cliff believed in Stephen Wolfram, and what Wolfram believed in could be found in the private world he moved through, tailed by young men with hair sticking out from behind their ears, watery eyes, reflective glasses. The key was computation.

Cliff built sequences that made parts inside computers move. Dance, he thought. "Move," he told Shaina, "I mean, that's really what it comes down to, in the end." It was their first date; the wine bar had a fireplace and they ate oysters, which Cliff had never eaten and Shaina loved. "I love them sooo much," she squealed. He never felt that way about anything, the way Shaina felt about oysters. He thought he might fall in love. "In the end?" she asked. "There is remarkable uniformity everywhere," he told her. "If you can make inanimate materials do math, in the end you can make everything do anything."

But did he believe it? That was the question Shaina thought about, in different words, on the beach while she waited. The answer's absence clung to the wet stars. It clung to the sky and the sky opened and suddenly there was rain in the air and on the beach and in her brown hair. Out past the beach crest was the house they rented for the week, and on the second floor there was a light and in that light Cliff sat, internet pornography on the computer screen, divided equally into pixels, fundamental cells of digital images, moving up and down. Dancing? He stared at the changing relationships.

Moving.

123109 draft

We needed a reason to believe
and so built these homes
these cities
and gave ourselves the work
we do everyday

I was born not a saint
but a psychiatrist
and in the town by the sea
I learned by watching
what people believe
and what trees believe
all organisms must be met where they are
and to each our own time scale

so I spent time in the backyard
with a pair of binoculars
and a telescope on the roof
and I watched what went on

while inside the knots were being tied
tighter
inside the house I mean
it was a different world

consider this an introduction
the first splitting of things from each other
in the shadow of the garden
I played investigator of the world
while inside life was trying to keep itself
apart

this is the first crime
and the rest
is ripples

&

consider a different time entirely
and then the pressure of language
and then the force of numbers

consider a entirely different perspective
what it is like to be a bat
a different man
consider the genders
fluid in the body
fluid in the mind
consider all the options
the skin pigmentation
the density of bones

then take your magnifying glass
and go

&

1942 and with the fire raging
in his heart Mr. Goldenslicker drove his secretary
in his car
over the bridge
and died
the war was on
but for him
and the woman he made love to

it was all over

&

fragmenting out comes time
and boundaries

the crime I am investigating, that the police called me in for, is boundary violation. someone crossed a line that we agreed would not be crossed. Josephine lay in the living room with a small hole in her head and another slightly larger right over her heart. The fan is still spinning; it is late august in NYC, the year is 2010, and I am running late.

when I arrive, the police scatter in all directions. "They used to call psychics," Charlie says as I pass. "Now they call you."

"Yeah. Well I'm glad they do."

"I bet you are."

"Got to eat."

"You don't look hungry."

"Business is good." I regret saying that, the way it sounded. I meant

"Business is booming. Unlimited inventory. Unlimited demand."

&

I bend close over her body. Josephine was beautiful. Still is, even with the holes and the blood. Her eyes are half closed, one less than the other. Her hair on her forehead falls away from the skin that falls in towards her brain. I am sweating. I crouch down.

I remember one case, Tyrell Govan, age 32, black male of African-American descent, low IQ but not retarded, who had sex with the bodies. He didn't kill them; he came after the crime, before the police, which confused the hell out of them. They thought there was a serial murderer rapist on their hands. Tyrell wasn't murdering -- and he just kept leaving his semen inside the women and the men. Polymorphus perverse, almost except I think he preferred them dead because they were closer to objects. He was oriented away from life in that way...

Working out the plot.

We needed a crime. In order for the story to work. What did we mean, work? For whom does the story work? Not the victim, whether she be hung by a belt in the closet so no one would suspect homicide by the gardener, whom she loved once; or a man mowed down by a bus, it's a shame but it happens sometimes, people will say but will they guess that the driver owed him a fortune he would never be able to repay?

No no we are wrong. The story works for the victim too. Without it, she makes love in the garden one last time and is shocked at how few years need to pass before the details of that time are forgotten. And meanwhile the man makes it across the street, the driver lets him pass and the debt is perfectly ordinary, that is, invisible to literally almost everyone.

And the killer? Well it's clear to us what he gets. And we will be secretly rooting for him, even up to the moment when he is finally (inevitably) caught. His action took him to a place in which whatever he does, no matter how ordinary, will seem charged with meaning, electric, which is why he must be punished; but only after we get what we want from him.

And what about us? We get the chance to both be away from lives and deep in them, feeling everything--

Professionalism

Now I can. Listen: breaking in, trying to do it right. Looking like a chandelier cyrstal hanging from a wire. Somewhere else there is lamp light, the slow pulse of trains on the tracks. A broken whisle, listening, the listener got tired and for a minute dozed off. I saw him in the therapist's office, where I went with a heavy heart loaded up with things I needed to get out. Broken toyys, trucks, the reason I didn't stay and say this or that.. it was getting too much so I went like I said to unloud. When the doctor fell asleep. I looked at him, waited. He woke up and asked the next question.

draft 0.1

... a recklessness with others, to be able to hurt without feeling that you have done so, these gifts come untethered from weights of responsibility that comes from empathy; this is Joseph's advantage, what he tries to give to his son. It is raining in Park Slope. The windows outside the house give off ceiling light to the dull daylight shine. This is better than the way it used to be. Before Joseph was a raging animal, caged inside himself and poked at by time and other concerns the children did not get let in on, or his wife. Anne was quiet for several years, and then very quiet, before anyone noticed she wasn't eating much and then I found the laxatives in the bathroom, and first made the diagnosis.

I am a psychiatrist. I am the hero of this story.

When Joseph first came to me, he presented his world so well and so meticulously that it was hard to believe he needed to be there at all -- everyone else in his life, on the other hand, sounded like monsters. Human monsters. These things exist. It is important to realize that, to grasp the importance. I am not just talking about pedophiles, or murderer. I mean that there are people we encounter every day who warp the interpersonal fabric of the universe in such a way that others suffer. The question of intention, of syntonos with self, is a different discussion.

Joseph's life was populated by such monsters. He believed that he was always honest, and that his care for others was plain for all to see, if only they possessed decent enough eyes to recognize such things when they saw it. There was a rose garden he kept, and he worked hard to keep the insects who ate petals away, though he understood they needed to eat to, and so kept a few roses for them as a kind of sacrifice. For Christmas he brought me dried roses pressed in a book. The gift almost seemed romantic, but his way of giving it -- loudly, saying, "Hey Doc, their are people I don't like and there are people I do. This is because you're a good guy... I don't care about the holidays -- if you ask me, no matter how you slice it, it's all baloney, but think of this as a just a token of my appreciation..." -- distracted me from the fact of the gift itself: roses, carefully dried and placed in a small book, handed to me in my office.

Outside the park rolled over into the distance. There were no children out there today, too wet, but the dogs came with women in boots walking them and some men smoking and talking on the phone, the animals electrocuted with life. The men and women usually walk alone and don't talk, except when their animals intervene, and then the right is theirs to decide what they want.

*

The Present

We took enough bread and cheese to last for several days. Up here, the days end early and so it gets colder in the afternoon. I was in love with Helen; she was in love with the world. I wanted to be like that, too, but for me the only way to the world was through someone I could love. When I am not near her, I am stranded in myself. Helen gives me the gift of feeling the value of things.

When we left she was angry. "The mosquitos, the mosquitos, always the mosquitos... I forgot how it is up here."

"They're hungry -- they need your blood to stay alive."

Am I explaining or being compassionate? For life in even it's weirder forms. And to think of it the mosquito is a strange shape life has taken in its drive to eat itself. I am strange looking myself, too. How many living things need me to stay alive? These are the kinds of questions that do nothing to drive away loneliness, though it seems like they could, if I only I believed in them stronger. I don't think Helen considers things this way. I watched her apply the spray that would keep the mosquitos away.

When I was Jesus' age, I first became aware I was slowly learning that everything that had happened to me was gone. I understood that it was a part of me, but not as deeply as I once thought it was. In my head were the constant ripples of experience but they were not the rock in the pond, and they faded. This meant I was not the sum of my experiences. I started to think at that age I was truly a man of the present. It was Christmas in the woods. Helen gave me another piece of bread and from inside the tent we watched the insects and the trees work, each at their own time scales. To everything its own pace. My heart is slow, but it knows what it wants. Set me into time lapse film and it will be startling clear: who I was, whose blood I needed.

Quite the opposite, so we don't mind what comes out.

If I am perfectly open to everything, then everything will come through. It gets noisy; yes there are rocks, and sometimes my wrists hurt. From lifting up my hands which do the talking for the voiceless endless deciding

without choosing

which everything

is everywhere

when

I am in two halves and reduced, but I am not being and not knowing what is being a bat

Against the better success of the intransigent malingerer, we have come across the only two halves that are incensed and deceased. There are not those halves in the dressing areas of the morgue, she remarks, casually, convinced of the towering hell that is upon us. It is not hell. The quirky staircase (lovely) is dispelling rumours of discomfort, displeasure, and even, though against the general odds of approval, mistruths--mistrust, she corrects, fixing her skirt and glancing, quickly, at the doused miracle. She is a beast, he admits, next to us, agog, a fleeting man of sense. She is not uncomfortable, however.

It is a cryptic sense of failure--nothing is so confusing, vexing, as the black pit of this beast. His is a mouth of disgust and I am longing, though unconvinced by my clearly pseudo hedonism, for a separation from the heightened attack of mis-numbers. This is a death. And they are admiring and staring at only the ever glaring peak of absence, a truthful stare into the misery of absolute denial, emptiness.

I am not in death, surely, but against my better self, I am without a doubt, in bounty. I owe too, she declares. It is a price of self-pity which I am un-eager to repay. We have too many hands, of a distant reclamation, perhaps an authentic re-connection with the lurid hands of impostors (ha!). This is hell, he admits, again, casually.

I am not in death.

Cheer Up

I don't know who I am. All my feelings are paper-feelings.
The wind blows them away unless you poke holes in them first.
In the busy microcircuits of my mind I am constantly gathering myself
from the remembered present, and everyone I've known is there to lend a hand.
Whether or not I loved them, or they me I am constantly constructed
in a conspiracy several thousand years old of colluding parties like
wind and particles and great migrations,
and then I'm gone--
unknowable to all investigating forces.

Just Getting Started

I am committed to showing the world that there is no difference between it and everyone and everything in it. It is not a religious trick -- "Close your eyes," the neuroscientist said, "and all you see is God in the dark" -- but a moral lesson. That's the worst kind to try to teach, because it must be felt. It can't be learned through imitation. When we are kids we are too young to know how to guess, so we play the odds. If it rains four out of seven days a week, we predict tomorrow will bring rain. Only later do learn how to imitate the world's patterns in our mind, so that tomorrow it could be sunny, you never know, we'll just have to wait for the weatherman and see...

But what if you can't see the pattern? I can't see it but I know there are trees outside the window living their lives without pronouns, no possessive; once I was high and watched them grow in fast motion on the TV and right then and there I knew a truth: we are not alone. I have seen fungus sprout from the brain of a dead ant. I have shaken hands with people who fuck children. There is a porousness to all boundaries, DFW was right, and if we don't feel the holes we will fall through them: holes in the head, in my heart, in other people's eyes and intentions, and what do you hate the most? "Other people's needs," said the comedian.

I am afraid too. When I die I think I won't ever be me again. What a loss! So huge I can't imagine myself without it. And then there's all the pain, and regret, which is worse. But right now I can reach through the screen and find you. If you take apart these words maybe you can write something else with the letters. Maybe you can press yourself into the alphabet and leave behind a career. Before you disappear. I am trying to point without pointing. Close your eyes. Open them.

Mada

As it so occurred, I was not as wise as the world, Mada. I left it with but a thread of my tunic. Perhaps that was far more than the longest concrete strip. But it was far less than the hammering symphony of the string ochestra.

They put long barrels of trash here, Mada. Where once I sat and wondered (in glee), now it is only long barrels of trash.

The Gunshine State

“The distance from the audience to the event is a factor in news judgement. What happens in your own town is more important to you than an occurrence in another town. If your own Boy Scout troop changed its cap style, that would be more newsworthy in your own town then elsewhere.”

--JOURNALISM pg. 7 of the Boy scouts of American Merit Badge Series.

When I left Miami, guns left me too.

My beloved shotgun remains in North Carolina where a friend shoots it, on occasion, at tree stumps.

My pistol remains in New York State –but, by no means, by my side. I live in New York City now. Guns are criminal items. I seem to recall a friend whose Brooklyn apartment caught fire while she was in it. She escaped, frazzled and sans cats. When firemen discovered the charred remains of several handguns in the wreckage of charred furniture and felines, she was doomed. The guns weren’t doing anything in her apartment. As far as I know, they hadn’t done anything in their past aside from sit in a bag some rich kid drug dealer had left there.

But they were there. And that was enough to put her in jail.

Guns are terrifying things in New York. During my Special Patrolman training (I am an Urban Park Ranger) our NYPD instructor told us never to touch guns, for any reason. “If you find a firearm,” we were warned during out pepper spray training seminar, “put a trashcan on top of it and wait for the police to arrive.”

Though I have been issued a baton, handcuffs and the powers of arrest, the notion of giving myself—or any Urban Park Ranger— a gun strikes a chord of lunacy. No psychological profile is necessary to become an officer in the Urban Parks Service. Furthermore, some thirty percent of my graduating class (there is a Park Ranger academy) had been arrested at some point or another.

Beyond our general lack of mental balance, the notion of carrying a gun in our job seems outright ridiculous. The worst crime I ever witnessed in Central Park was a drunken disorderly pissing on a tree in plain sight. I yelled at him until he left. Though I never patted him down, I was able to conclude from his lack of functional pants, that he was not carrying a firearm.

To our credit, no one in the Urban Parks Service has used his or her baton –beyond one nutjob who beat a suspect in cuffs; he no longer works with us.

I’m letting all of this be known simply to let you know that guns are bad here. For most people, they are not things you own or think about owning. You may fear them. You may even fetishize them. But not own them. Never. Are you crazy?

I recall having dinner with friends (a non-profit organizer and an art handler) who spent the better part of an evening talking about what a slimeball one of their cousin’s had brought to a family reunion. The poor bastard had mentioned, while sledding in the Berkshires, that his father had given him a gun that had been in the family for generations.

The cousin had later confronted them, in tears. “Please,” she pleaded. “He’s not that bad.” But they could not be convinced. Nobody decent owns a gun.

I forget how different things are once you pass a certain latitude.

On a recent road trip, the signs began cropping up once we hit North Carolina. It was a certain brand of bumper sticker which would become increasingly prevalent as we continued south. “I’ll take my freedom, money and guns,” it read. “And you can keep the change.”

Whatever else you may think about the Obama administration, he as provided a healthy shot-in-the-arm to the gun industry. People are buying up guns with a frenzied gusto, believing, in earnest, that he will surely outlaw them. On several Asheville area print ads, tag lines urged potential customers to “buy ‘em before they’re outlawed.”

As we continued South, through Georgia, gun shops began appearing along the roadside with a bizarre frequency. They were advertised on billboards along I-75 urging drivers to turn off at upcoming exits –as though they provided an essential service: bathrooms, food, a place to sleep. And guns.

Once in Miami, guns began to pop up in all kinds of social situations. While drinking beer in the very suburban living room of an old homebrewing pal, I suddenly found myself sitting before a small arsenal. Handing me a glass of Heffeweizen, he struggled, tensely with the magazine release on a Ruger bolt-action .22 that he had purchased for his son. “I wanna take him out to shoot some jugs of water,” he said. “I want him to know what they can do.”

No situation seemed inappropriate for guns to make their appearance.

My girlfriend’s father, in the midsts of a breakfast table discussion about his misgivings about taking anti-depressants brought out his pistols (a .357 revolver and a Ruger .380). He too struggled with the magazine release –though he stored both of his weapons fully loaded.

Despite his recent battles with significant psychiatric problems, he is currently on a waiting list to renew his concealed weapon permit.

His son, my girlfriends’s brother, likewise lamented the difficulties in procuring a concealed weapons permit. Despite having his hours cut back at work and encountering difficulties in making ends meet at home, he described plans for buying a handgun, in addition to spending hundreds of dollars on requisite classes, FBI fingerprinting and background checks.

The most alarming case of Florida’s gun mania came from a young attorney. I’ll call him Larry Espositio and tell you that, after becoming a licensed lawyer, he decided to just hang out in Miami and teach sailing to children.

He exhibited a jerky, nervous energy when he spoke and sometimes made jokes that involved screaming at you.

Esposito had grown up in an academic family in Coral Gables. Even in Miami, this demographic is typically hard sold on guns and the wisdom in owning them. Nevertheless, when Larry’s grandmother died he spent nearly a thousand dollars of his inheritance on firearms. They were a good investment –he reasoned. If, one day, he came to his senses, he could count on selling them back for (at least) 80% of his original investment. I didn’t want to tell him that something you lose %20 of your money on cannot, in any real way, be considered an investment. He now owned four guns, a fact he was never comfortable discussing in front of anyone.

“Not in public,” he would whisper, when I prodded him to discuss his gun love in a bar.

Weeks earlier, while driving in Miami, an incensed driver had rammed into his vehicle, pushing him off the road. Esposito kept a handgun in a Crown Royal bag under the driver’s seat. “It fucked me up,” he said. “If he had tried to kill me, I would have shot him and then run into a closet, balled up into the fetal position and cried about it.”

Luckily the driver drove on and Esposito’s gun remained under his seat. Besides, that guy coulda had a gun.

If this piece goes online, I can already predict the response. A phalynx of comment dropping morons will unleash a volley of peudo-patriotic nonsense.

I am vexing as an entity, because I like guns in the sense that they are fun items for me to play with. From a policy perspective, however, anyone with half a brain could tell you that they are an incorrigible scourge.

People are very stupid. Every year, busloads of them chop their fingers off unclogging lawnmowers, get their genitals caught in vacuum cleaners and crash heavy machines into one another every second of the day.

Miniature cannons are not a good idea for these creatures—everyone agrees with that.

A lot of people, however, believe they are a good idea for “me.”

And, who knows, they just might be.
Every time I go down this road, someone hauls out the quote “an armed society is a polite society.” They believe that, rather than limiting guns, we should be making them readily available to all.

More guns=less crime + more freedom.

Get ‘em into the national parks to cut down on all those picnic basket snatchings. Put some in the employee parking lot and people will stop stealing shit out of the minifridge in the break room. Pack a gun into every purse in Miami and date rape will go the way of the Do-Do.

Hell, if every airline barf bag on September 11^th had contained a loaded .357, those planes never would have crashed into the world trade center.

We’ll see.

As Florida’s CCW continues to be honored in more places and more people come to want them, this theory will be put to the true test –though I doubt it will yield positive results.

While all the fearmongering is good for the gun business, I wouldn’t believe the hype. The gun industry has won the war, for now. While it seems unlikely to me that Florida and other libertarian states will be able to have their CCW’s honored in New York City any time soon, Obama hasn’t seemed to want to do anything about the assault weapon-toting protesters showing up to his town hall meetings.

The barbarians have lined up at the gates.

Don’t worry Florida. You’ll get there.

Note to Self

The world, including our environments and our bodies, is cleaved by our senses into discrete perceptual categories. How we sense is determined by our genetics and our experiences, shaped by cultural, personal, and evolutionary history. In this way, we make the world and ourselves by perceiving it. Outside our senses is the undifferentiated universe. Our senses make it knowable, and limit how we can know it.

Let us consider these limits. Take Thomas Nagel, for example.

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflect high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But this is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

Nagel's question -- what is like to be a bat? -- is often repeated in scientific articles on the nature of consciousness. What is not stressed, however, is the closeness between this question and another one perhaps more relevant to the quality of our lives: what is like to you? Your early development is guided by the genes we share and the variations within your body, and as your brain grows it is changed by your experiences, giving rise to a morphology unique to you and you alone. If I try to imagine what it is like to be you, I may very well get farther than Nagel when imagining hanging upside and emitting high-frequency sound. But returning to Nagel:

... I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imaging segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

the counter-attack, partly, (among) a zealot

Assessed, as opposed to determined, and quite contrary to assumed, yes, perhaps, it was his casual assessment in the nature of the disguised (though clearly) hostile appointed secretary. She stared too much, like she was frothy, ever so frothy--the minx, he mutters, behind his desk, then, panicking, of course, about the imminent intrusion, this ghastly dark hire, she bleached her eyes! He is considering, most removed, about the straight curve, into her sock when his consumption returns, bloody fucking hell. The usual discourse out of a frighteningly tragic commencement is to slowly retreat (he repeats, reading, out of the office, yes) into the confines of the upper most attic of your head. Where they keep the drafts of union statements, declarations, deep vows of infidel cessation (hot). My own bank of security, she had lamented, after (why of course) the toga dressed men, from some sort of country with a desert, attacked and burned her dear square house (1/2 acre, nested inbetween the town woods) down to the ground. They did, she implied, why no, she shouted, still convinced, and unaware I might add, that she was most certainly unwittingly supporting the intrusion, the condemnation of her fable-happy partner, her dear mercury--the planet! It is irrelevent now, he proceeds, without notes, that the claim of injustice, though claimed to be an act of hatred, is unfounded, yes, without merit (oh, thank you). The arrests are warranted on suspicion, at least suspicion, he muses now, again, protecting himself, only slightly from the advancing (the possibility, the mere possiblity) door -- it will open! He harbors himself loosely, then, against the desk, pondering, oh my, grasping, yes, quite cleanly. That was, he admits, her entry into this post, her appointment, by god, she was handpicked by the look of it, her own ethos possessed by the (latent?--good god no!) remarkably clear misdirection. Illogical, the accusor had accused, dressed fittingly in western attire, more mockery than poise, less than his blank dangling monstrous intent. I have read into this intent, more than once, she, that darling counterpart to this illustrious judge, speaks coyly, nudging the crude suited man (dear hell, externally rather elegant, but crude otherwise) and promising him, in her puffy lips that she will take him in her mouth, if, yes, if it is only because the safety is harbored more or less in the procreation of the non-togan state, that cheap bastard, he cries suddenly (oh he too agog? my, dear!). The others, quite so, are silent. There wasn't even an instant, not in the hours that were prior to this one, to see that door charging and him to rise to full height, imagined not of her leg into that sock (oh) - but the breath of a scandal, a merciless jolt into print. I have decided to ignore the allegations, he poses, and she, against the better judgement of her failing husband, accepts, in part, that it is all the most useful to detach the fledgling from its nest and birth, in office, the unwanted and useless (the foul) bird.

Has it always been a dirty secret to be afraid of dying? Now I wonder how many times we think of it, before we go, and how much easier it is to pretend it doesn't occur to us, or better yet, claim to be able to push it away. Like a mountain. It's that easy.

de-friend

Awful, awful: to be sad in America...

So many middle classmates, and yet all these empty spaces! I count pigeons between the electrical wires,

they don't carry conversations through the wires anymore--

all our voices must find each other through unbounded space.

It's hard not to think of you sometimes, and just now I guess I closed a door

I didn't know was open

which explained the draft,

and
the breeze

The Difference

I didn't want to collapse the difference between everyone.
I wanted to sing a song that was specific, and unique
to my throat; and whatever physics said about its shape
the precise measurements of my hollow spaces
and how they related to where I am full
was only as interesting as the handwriting
of a beautiful poem.
Like the way my voice sounded when I lay in the basement
and told a friend which girl from class
I secretly loved.

Now I enjoy taking a moment to add them all up and see what I find.
The difference is between taking a moment to make something
and making something of a moment,
which is what I do each day thanks to the specific foldings
inside my head that so many hands have touched,
fingerprints like handwriting: unique--
all of them