When we first start hanging out with Ishmael in MOBY-DICK, we see that he, like everyone cursed to walk this earth, has preexisting notions or prejudices regarding people and concepts and things that he has yet only a shallow understanding of. This is most evident when he meets his future best friend, the harpooneer Queequeg, who is (at least initially to Ishmael) a bizarre savage from a faraway land. After spending time with him, and sharing a bed with him, and being spooned by him, and smoking a pipe with him, and communicating with him in a way that transcends mere language, Ishmael’s skepticisms of Queequeg’s culture and strange religious practices melt away. Even if he does not fully understand them, Ishmael nonetheless respects their obvious importance in Queequeg’s life.

All throughout MOBY-DICK there are moments like this, where Ishmael’s snap judgments are soon replaced with a sort of gentle humanistic view. It’s inspiring. I think Melville sums this up well in the chapter where Ishmael and Queequeg become bedfellows:

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

I bring this up because this is how I try to come at the whole world and everyone in it. Sorry! Maybe that sounds too idealistic or reductive to you, but it is true. I don’t hate anyone, not a single person, and I try very hard not to pass judgment on things that I do not understand. I want to understand them . . . am curious about them! I am, after all, an Aquarius . . . it is WRIT UPON THE STARS that I espouse peace and brotherly love. All people are my brothers and sisters.

AND WHAT OF RELIGION?

Is there anything more contentious? Well: Ishmael (and Herman Melville) has a lot to say about religion. I agree with every word. These passages from MOBY-DICK have and continue to encapsulate my feelings regarding organized religion and personal spirituality, whatever they may happen to be:

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship—to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;— but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike— for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

just so happened to watch GREY GARDENS on the 50th anniversary of its release

Near as I can tell, just about every friend of mine who is single is currently experiencing Dude Woes. Which is to say: they keep meeting and, to their dismay, briefly dating these sniveling losers who bail or ghost after a few dates . . . the operative word being “briefly” on account of they (the women) would have liked for the budding relationship to sail on to that secret place only lovers know. In a few cases, the dude breaks it off after several months of dating apropos of nothing . . . after having lulled them into a false sense of security, when things were going well for both parties! Some tumorous thing has emerged in people on The Apps in this post-virus world where they are absolutely terrified of building something with a kind stranger who is open to loving them. It is endemic. Seems these creeps would rather stay home and look at their phones and feel depressed than see something through just for the sake of the song.

Every week a friend will send me a screenshot of a Breakup Text and ask me for my Dude Perspective. In essentially all cases, the dude admits that, while he enjoyed getting to know my friend, he feels it is best they stop seeing each other for one of the following cliche cop-outs:

• “I’m depressed”
• “I’m not over my ex”
• “I’m afraid of commitment”
• “I need to focus on myself”
• “I have a lot going on at work”
• “I don’t think I’m ready to be in a serious relationship”

. . . and so on. Cowardly stuff!

Listen: these friends of mine are top-shelf high-caliber individuals. They are rarefied . . . truly some of the best people walking the earth. I am fortunate to know them. My friend Emi once said to my brother Kerwin: “Ryan knows all the best people.” It’s true!

The other night my friend Cecelia came to me and asked if something was wrong with her on account of all these scrubs kicking her to the curb after one or two dates, and I told her the truth, which was “Cecelia, absolutely not”. I told her also that in the last two weeks, many of my friends had, like her, lamented The State of Things, had shown me screenshots of messages with these dudes and their weak-ass excuses for splitting, had the asked me the same questions about themselves. And then Cecelia said one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me:

. . . wow! She’s right.

I have spoken of this many times, but I believe there is a point of no return with a dude in his thirties where, if he does not get it together, which is to say GET OVER HIMSELF, then he will be permanently frozen in that state till the Reaper beckons them into the abyss where even Time does not exist. It seems as though a lot of dudes just putz around shrieking and wailing, not having any sense of themselves or the world they inhabit . . . and have let the three decades of their life render them a jaded, selfish, aloof, cheap, indecisive, and spiritually bankrupt pile of protoplasm.

If this sort of life continues on without being rectified, the dude may as well be strapped into a rollercoaster ride straight to hell. I myself was in danger of crystalizing into this thing. Somehow during the pandemic I was able to overcome it. I know now that operating out of fear is never the true path. A decision made in fear is always wrong. It is better to make something than to wallow in an inert state until the clock runs out. It is, of course, better to love someone else than to hate yourself. Live while you still can! Otherwise you will always wonder at what could have been. TAKE IT FROM ME: in a decade, you will not think “I’m glad I did nothing” . . . you will be tortured by your stupidity and inaction now that this person and this time in your life are fucking ghostly fragments!

It seems to me that, nice though some of these guys may have been to my friends, they still fled out of fear. Must I quote DUNE??

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

LISTEN:

Stop fucking around and BE somebody, baby! Just start flying . . . it’s that easy! The illusion of choice—forfeiting a chance at true romance because you think there might be some better thing on the horizon—is just that: an illusion. Even if it doesn’t work out, it was not wasted time. As I told my friend Leila the other night . . . when the nukes start dropping, would you rather be hugging yourself or someone who loves you? Now that we live in the Dark World here at the end of all things, it is foolish to turn away from a good thing. If you’ve got a good thing going . . . keep it going! “I’m depressed” is, quite frankly, an extremely pathetic excuse not to hang out with a beautiful and intelligent woman who wants you there. Jesus wept!

OK?

I shall end this post thusly:

. . . OK?

There is a feeling which permeates every waking moment of my life, as though it were some inexorable truth laminated on top of my reality, which is this: I am a Fool . . . a deliberate, intentional fool, which is the worst kind. Or didn’t you know??

Consider the tarot card. Head in the clouds, this guy is blissfully about to walk off his ass off a cliff into oblivion:

. . . don’t I know the feeling! I have only ever been this thing, so I can’t say for sure what it’s like to live any other way, but maybe it is not a bad way to go about it after all. Or anyway, after decades of bearing witness to the fates assigned to others whether they like it or not, there are certainly worse things to be than the Fool . . . things which are, put simply, not nearly as fun. Just like how the Devil is lying even when it’s telling the truth, I am always having fun even when I am not having fun, even if it means walking off a cliff just to find out what’s down there . . .

I think also that being the Fool keeps me honest in some way. I don’t know that there’s anything anyone could tell me about myself, even and especially the bad things, that I am not already paralyzingly aware of, and lambast or even torture myself with when no one else is around. If you preemptively toss the pie into your own face, what else can anyone say, really, to cut you down? (This is nothing to say of Jester’s Privilege, which insulates me from most harm and repercussion, but that’s a whole other thing.) And while it is true that I am completely deluded and, as an ex-girlfriend once put it, “vibrating past reality”, I at least know what I am and have made a joke out of it.

There is of course a major consequence to my godforsaken station in my life. By my own hand, I have recently got myself embroiled in a series of strange circumstances, some unraveling as we speak and some which wait for me in the near future, and I could stop it all right now if I wanted. Right this very second! And yet I cannot and will not let myself do that because . . .

I told you I was the worst kind. Though there are many paths, I can only go the one way, like an utter fool. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. I dream of a heaven in which I am free of my own foolish self-ruining machinations, the endless wandering, the endless wondering . . . perhaps then I would actually have something or someone waiting for me at the end of this long dark trip, rather than falling through this galactic tube of time, this bottomless abyss where there is no certainty even for something as simple as tomorrow. Gazing upward with tears in my eyes, I am barreling straight off that cliff with a little white flower in my hand and a little white dog at my heels and I know it! Being as dumb as I am is a kind of hell. And yet even when I am crying I have to laugh. It’s like the fella said:

. . . a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated . . . I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.

☆彡

Today was the autumn equinox, which is when the sun is directly over the equator, and thus there is as much day as there is night. And so saying, today marks the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. But you already knew that shit!! I’m a solstice man myself, but it is cool that we got both a new moon this past weekend as well as an equinox. It feels auspicious in some way . . .

Anyway: I love it!

I’ll just go ahead and say it: I am feeling increasingly insane as I keep getting farther away from New York City. I will get back there soon enough . . . I just got to make a big circle around a whole lot of this continent before I do.

I take a picture of this playground cemetery every time I pass it on the way to my dad’s house in Tennessee. In the 14 years I have driven past it, I have never seen anyone there. The cemetery holds a sort of significance to exactly one other person on this planet who may or may not read this website. Anyway, I dig this place . . . the children play while the dead sleep below.