from Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis

“Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that'd barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you're doing with her because she's cute and you're kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let's face it you're just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag so small that mice couldn't fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies.”

working through it all, a poem by Charles Bukowski

working through it all

the bravery of some is close to fear
and the fear of some is close to
bravery
and I admire a brave man more than a fearful
man,
and sometimes I am one or the other
and often I am neither.

that’s when I’m best: neither brave nor
fearful

just cracking nuts in my warm
alcove

as flowers strain to grow
as music strives to please

as the ladies love
others.

God is my source. I cannot see apart from Him

Lemuel repeated the phrase of lesson 43 again, as he had dozens of times already this morning. But, as far as he could tell, everything remained totally fucked up.

He was trying to work it, trying to see God as the source—whatever the Hell that meant—in everything he saw or thought. But everything he encountered seemed to be fucked up, everything was a piece of suffering shit added onto the other suffering loads of crap in his life.

His elbows bumped things over into the trash, his back and neck hurt, his blood sugar wouldn’t go down, his eyes seemed weak and sore. He had work to do that he didn’t want to do. He’d lost the tiny screw that held the back on his brand-new tablet almost as soon as he’d removed the tablet from its box. The list seemed endless.

Even Lemuel himself didn’t give a crap about all the troubles piling up upon other existing troubles in his life, his story.

He’d thought he’d lost his patience for his own story, his own self-inflicted patterns of recurring suffering. He thought he’d been ready to toss away as much as possible, to let at least some of it go, if not all of it. Or at least he thought he’d been ready.

Today was proving him wrong with a vengeance.

He understood he couldn’t let anything go if he resented it, or didn’t want it, or even if he just felt something was obsolete. He knew he had to be able to love, or at least accept, something before he could let it go.

He understood the principle that he would only be ready to let go of things when he was bored of them, when they had lost their appeal.

But obviously the things he resented or feared or desired had not lost their appeal for him. He simply must not be bored enough of knocking things over with his elbows, pains in his back and neck, high blood sugar, weak eyes, and boring work he had no real desire to do.

“God is my source. I cannot see apart from Him,” he repeated.

Who was this “God” anyway? Not someone he was raised to know anything about, reform Jew or no reform Jew.

Not something he even cared to know more about, based on the passages in all the holy books he’d ever tried to read. They all seemed like simplistic stories meant to manipulate those who have the emotional intelligence of scared children.

An old, white-bearded guy in the sky who slaughtered people who didn’t believe in him? That might work for people who liked to be controlled, but Lemuel had never been one of those.

Still, he took a deep breath and let his sense of being just feel. Like he was floating down and deep and pleasantly under the warmth of something beyond his ken. He didn’t even know what that meant—he’d probably never know what it meant—but he relaxed and started to feel more and more…settled, at peace.

It was crazy, because his life still had all these holes in it, these fucked-up places and pain and loneliness and fear and sadness, but something…larger—yes that was almost it—something much more encompassing, was also eking its way through.

It was more than also happening, it was more the case, it was fundamentally the case, in a way that all the fucked-up hassles of his life really weren’t. They were just mirages that he seemed to have a lingering desire to focus on. They had nothing to do with the pervasive fullness that Lemuel could now taste.

They did not even exist, he thought, as the taste of that fullness graciously dissolved any lingering desires to focus on such suffering.

“God is my source. I cannot see apart from Him.”

Lemuel moved to pick up his ballpoint pen so he could write about what was happening, and his elbow bumped an empty ceramic cup and knocked it over.

He almost had a “fucking shit” response, but saw the response form from deep within the fullness and almost laughed.

He bent down to retrieve the cup, which was neither broken nor had it ended up in the wastepaper basket next to his desk. Instead, it had landed intact, upside down on the floor.

Lemuel lifted the cup and saw underneath the tiny screw he’d lost, the one that held the back on his new tablet.

With the screw grasped between his fingers, he said, “God is my source. I cannot see apart from Him.”

This is how Lemuel’s day began.

My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world

Patterson sat in his wheelchair watching the patch of light his visitor was calling a sunspot progress across the old, red couch.

His visitor looked vaguely familiar to Patterson in the same way that Patterson's own name sometimes felt like it was indeed who he must be.

Patterson knew that his aging body was called Mr. Patterson by others, and he dimly had an almost recollection of being referred to by another name. Perhaps Bill or David or Sam. Perhaps dad or granddad or even honey at different times gone past.

But musing on such matters seemed to serve no more real purpose than watching the patch of sunlight progressing across the floral pattern on the cushions of the couch.

His visitor spoke of things Patterson had trouble focusing on, in the same way he had trouble being certain he really was a separate person named Mr. Patterson.

His visitor spoke about changes in the local weather this approaching winter compared to last winter and voiced concerns about the economy and work and politics and family life.

He talked about adding more chocolate to Patterson's chocolate shake, asking: wouldn't THAT be good?

Patterson didn't know whether such a thing would be good or not, but he tried to nod his head in agreement.

The body he seemed to inhabit shook with tremors, so Patterson was unsure whether what he tried to communicate ever got through to whoever seemed to be trying to converse with him.

In fact, to Patterson, communicating and names and the winter weather and family life and politics and the economy and work all seemed to be as fickle as dreams, not much different or more meaningful than the sunlight moving slowly across the couch.

It wasn't, however, as if there was anything Patterson knew of that was better or more meaningful to focus on than what his visitor spoke of or than the dreams Patterson seemed somehow to be involved in.

It was more that all of it, the dreaming and the listening, the chocolate and the sunlight, seemed very thin, wispy at best, as it seemed to dissolve before his very eyes.

His visitor made a joke that Patterson couldn't follow, and then he stood up and shook Patterson's trembling hands.

Patterson appreciated that more than he could convey, although he knew the gesture in itself was only a symbol of something that was ungraspable and unspeakable.

Patterson watched his visitor walk away. And, for a time, he watched the patch of sunlight move off of the couch and across the wall until it was gone.

We Do Not Even Exist

They tried to tell us we existed. The wheels, the televisions, the smells of cooking foods, the bustling what have you.

But even from the very beginning, from the moment the possibility of separation reared its tiny, mad head, it never had the correct feel to it. Like it was only half-heartedly trying to reach to truth, and not trying very hard or very well.

It somehow felt artificial, like an angry bird coming in for landing in a bad game, pixelated, flapping wing sounds not in sync with the graphics. Like we were being fooled by something less than we ourselves were.

It grew more complicated after that, even though it was less than a dream within a dream.

Still, the first voice almost fooled us. We were that close to accepting our individual existence.

"Ma'am, Sir? Would you like to get free bag check in from now on?"

A head that seemed to be ours turned, yet we could not see that we actually even had a head. There was only a confused vision that looked out towards something else, something irritating, something grating to the very idea of truth.

Legs out of nowhere seemed to move us closer towards the irritating falseness. We felt a push, a roll, a movement. A bump.

We tried to remain still, centered in the Bliss of Being, where truth was all there was, no us, no other. But it was becoming harder, more difficult.

"Would you like to try our special offer today?" the grating voice continued after we seemed to stop.

And then a hand came up, a hand connected to what we were even then forgetting that we weren't.

Grasping seemed possible. Clenching, furling in upon itself. Connection, distracting connection away from unending peace, pulled us so strongly.

And then a terrible, terrible sound we were almost convinced came from us blossomed through everything.

Were we destroying all that is? Were we-

"What lovely twins, ma'am. What are their names?"