just so there’s no ambiguity about this after i’m dead: i hate birkenstocks. i think they are ugly and dumb. they are crocs for people who smoke pot. ok thank you.
if i let myself go even a little bit, or peer too far over The Dark Cliff, i would fall right in. insanity swarms me like sharks! i have nothing to bounce my reality off of except a 12-pound cat who is mad that i keep throwing him into snowdrifts.
Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!
‘pierre’ ruined herman melville’s life but uh . . . thanks for writing this stuff, dude.
“horrible gropings”—now i know what to call HUMAN LIFE
“we lift the lid and no body is there” sure is the head, the tail, the whole damn thing, as far as i’m concerned.
i watched the people living next to me dig their car out with two shovels. this took about 45 minutes. that was 2 hours ago. i looked out the kitchen window just now. their car is completely buried in snow again. everything they did has been erased by earth’s agenda.
[coughs up weed smoke] well if that ain’t a metaphor for the whole damn thing i don’t know what is
at 4 a.m. last night as the snow came down from heaven and locked me in this icy tomb . . . i sat in an easy chair with a blanket over my lap drinking wine and reading from ‘moby-dick.’ man, these words, i’ll tell you: they sing a dark streak into my soul. there was terrible noise in my head otherwise. you give these demons even a mouse hole of an entrance and they’ll reach into you and fill you like smoke. . . .
anyway: ‘moby-dick,’ which is 165 years old, says more to me than any human i’ve ever met, that’s for damn sure! the first page is about a guy sort of joking around that whenever he feels gloomy or suicidal he has to get on a boat and be away from humans and land. later he warns not to let the fire invert thee, as it did him. god, ishmael, it’s too late for me too! the fire has got in me. i sure am inverted.
i have never had any luck finding comfort in stories where the heroes win and go home, or someone is, uh, redeemed or finds hope or has their soul renewed, and so on. no sir! i like a book with a boat whose life preserver is a coffin . . . a book with a whole chapter on the eery feeling brought on by supernatural whiteness! ishmael climbs into the crow’s nest and says that he is ill-equipped for the job of whale lookout, saying that dreamy, melancholy souls should never be put in a place where time and space warp in one’s head and one becomes part of the ocean itself, just by looking out at its endlessness!
ishmael is initially prejudiced against a lot of things . . . or at least he thinks he knows better, and finds certain things to be disgusting or uncouth. but as soon as queequeg wraps his arms around him in the bed they share, he softens, and laughs like hell about it.
“i try all things; i achieve what i can.”
i was getting chills reading this stuff. the doom train sailed right into my heart. this is the greatest work of imagination anyone has ever produced, i am sure of it!!!
finally: i know my fate, man. i am ishmael now. i will be ahab later.
this is what my voicemail greeting sounds like
i want to say that about half the voicemails people leave me make reference to it
as in: “please change that stupid greeting”
or: “you’re scaring me, dude”
Experienced professionals? They have dragged out their life in stupor and semi-sleep, they have married hastily, out of impatience, they have made children at random. They have met other men in cafes, at weddings and funerals. Sometimes, caught in the tide, they have struggled against it without understanding what was happening to them. All that has happened around them has eluded them; long, obscure shapes, events from afar, brushed by them rapidly and when they turned to look all had vanished.
And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels.
yeah.
we are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice. . . . we have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances.
“O ghosts of fuckin’ mist and ice, guide this blessed fuckin’ vessel to the wastes of the South Pole. May our boots taste that dead earth at first light. Amen.”
—Gritt Calhoon
one of the most revolting images i can think of is two human beings pantomiming being in love. there are subtleties in the real thing and then there are all these other people in their weird cardboard worlds with their weird cardboard love. i’m trapped in a nightmarish disneyland where i can see the zippers on the backs of the costumes of all you fakers.
you’re going to end up killing me, but then at least you never fooled me. yeah.
