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It’s 4 AM now and I’ve just finished running 4.5 miles.  I get a fleeting sense of accomplishment.  There’s still more I could do though, I just know it.  I see if anything has to be cleaned but my anal daytime self has made it so that there isn’t a speck of debris to be dealt with.  I head to the white room and open up the medicine cabinet.  There are some blue sleeping pills I could take but I’m not sure I want sleep just yet.  I have a full bottle of Xanax that I haven’t broken into yet.  Xanax will make me sleepy enough for an hour-long nap, and then I can usually spring back to life with a raspberry-blue-energy drink.  I take a couple of the tiny white pills and jump into the shower.  I cover my chest in manly scented body wash.  I get the stink of the 4.5-mile run off of my skin and down the drain.  I feel the comfort of the Xanax as it dissolves under my tongue and into my stomach.  What this tiny white pill does once it is in my stomach, I don’t know.  All I know is that it makes me feel happy and a little bit sleepy/dreamy.  After the shower I dry off and grab a small handful of the little white pills chased with a Dixie cup of water.  If I’m going to be using I might as well get the most out of the experience.  I put on some clean clothes and move to the red room.  The red room is where I usually can escape for the longest amount of time.  The computer opens up whole worlds of thoughts and ideas.  With all the social networking sites that now exist I can’t help but delve into my past.  I often wonder what motivates people to disclose so much of their personal lives to the Internet.  I think most people don’t even realize how many billions of people have access to their personal photo albums.  I start feeling sentimental and yearn for old comfortable feelings.  I always do this to myself.  I torture my eyes with the past.  I like to think of it as motivation for the next day.  A small mantra, or idea, in the back of my head saying, “This is what you were.  This is an example of how happy you can be”.  I examine my current self and can’t fathom how I could possibly ever be like that person that I was in all of those photographs.  Then I look at the other people in some of the pictures.  People that I used to make happy.  When was the last time I even saw some of these people?  Jesus!  It’s reaching 5 AM and my eyes are heavy but determined.  I head to the white room to swallow some more white pills.  I get back to the red room and I know I shouldn’t but I do it anyway.  I hack into my first girlfriend’s account.  Her passwords have always been a combination of the name of her childhood cat and the current street that she lives on.  She told me this years and years ago and I still remember it.  This is the first time I’ve hacked into her account at 5 AM.  I’ve done it before at 2 AM and felt guilty about it and walked away without any snooping.  But, this time it was 5 AM and I wanted something.  I needed something… evidence or a relic that tells me that I made the right choice by not falling asleep tonight and pushing myself to stay awake.  I find a photo album of her most recent vacation with her soon to be husband.  This still irks me.  We haven’t dated in years and I’ve had a number of relationships since her but she was my first love.  The girl I will always measure every other girl I meet up against.  And now, she will be forever unavailable to me as she ties the knot with somebody that I’m sure isn’t half the person that I am.  I pan through her latest vacation photos and something seems familiar.  Like, way too familiar.  It’s pictures of her with her fiancé but an awful sense of déjà vu courses threw me with a dizzying effect.  I run to the green room and dig through some boxes till I come up with a physical photo album that I take back to the red room.  It’s the album of her and I when we were both 17 and in love.  We had just lied to our parents about a vacation that we were taking.  We claimed that we were going to a friend’s beach house with a whole bunch of people but instead we went on a secret vacation to some small town in Northern Wisconsin that had a cheap hotel.  We had a disposable camera with us that we passed back and forth taking pictures of each other as we toured through the scenic riverfront town; twenty-seven photos of the perfect vacation.  Now, here, years later and with some other dude she’s taking the same photos!  I hold up the aged photo of us embraced in a kiss, a close-up photo that I took with my right arm outstretched catching our heads together with the river in the back round.  I hold this picture against the computer screen that shows the newest version of this photo.  Her, with her haircut short and him dressed in a suit and the back round this time is a scenic European lake.  I’m being replaced!  It’s the same exact photo just I’m no longer the male character and the setting is different.  This isn’t the only example of memory replacement.  I count twelve more photos that have far too much in common to just be a mere coincidence.  Did she knowingly seek out to replace our memories?  Or was this just a sub-conscious act of hers to get back those old feelings of falling in love for the first time?  I go back to the white room and finish off the bottle of Xanax.  The happy feeling that they usually give me is replaced with discontent and disbelief.  In the back of my head I always pictured the two of us getting back together.  I wasn’t sure how or when but my mother always said that, “if it truly is love, then it will find a way.”  Well, this latest evidence is telling me that love can be replaced.  Memories can be squashed out and that I can become expendable.  While I pray for a blue morning to wash this feeling away, I fall into a deep Xanax induced sleep.

This is cross-posted from Stephen’s blog:

the s&m dinner.

A friend of mine in the music school at Calarts, Jason, invited me to go to an S&M dinner with him and his kinda girlfriend Meredith. The whole concept sounded strange: meeting at a restaurant in a public place to be around people with a sexual interest in common. Pain, mainly. So, of course I went. I’ve known Jason and Meredith for a while, so it would at least be nice to see them off-campus if this event turned out tame. The two of them live in the same dorm section, and only realised that they shared this fetish when they coincidentally dressed up as mistress and servant for Halloween. At the CalArts Halloween party, I found Meredith holding Jason on the floor with her foot. She would lean her weight onto him, and he would scream, kind of in delight.

Parking was easy at the Four and Twenty diner in Studio City. I had to arrive late, since I was coming straight from class. I popped in the door and before I even spoke, a man in white with a long moustache—probably a chef?—pointed me to a room in the back. At first glance, the group seemed to me a lot like the friends my mother would meet with for spiritual and religious discussion when I was about four or five years-old. I mostly just remember their names: Fred and Betty Whipple, Bob and Dot Smith. It kind of makes sense that they would seem similar. Especially since those women my mother knew would come up to me like they wanted to pinch my face. Oh, if my mother ever knew I was going to an event like this, her cremated remains would be rolling in their urn. I sat down next to my friends and introduced myself to the S&M people.

They were all between 40 and 80 with no exceptions. The women shook my hand with a lumberjack grip, while all the men hesitated even to reach their hands out. Two of the women looked me in the eye like they wanted to have me for dinner, both telling me I was very cute while the handshake lingered into a squeeze. One of them had large breasts and was kinda hot, like Angelina Jolie but twenty years older, bigger and with glasses. Weirdly sexy, and somehow, I think she could tell that I thought so. The other of them, Mistress Lisa, a frumpy elementary school teacher-looking middle-aged woman, immediately asked if I was a submissive. “I can be.” Then she growled back with a creeping smile, “If you can be, darling, you will.” A nervous young girl, a waitress, interrupted to take my order. She looked like Ugly Betty but with her hair tied up in a ponytail. She smiled uncomfortably widely, braces fully showing, as I asked for strawberry rhubarb pie, her eyes lurking around like she wasn’t supposed to look at anyone. Mistress Lisa dominated conversation for most of my time there. She told me how she was once playing with her child’s Cookie Monster talking handpuppet, and somehow it ended up on her husband’s penis. As she fondled him, it would make sounds like it was munching and then “mmmm.” The husband really liked that, she said, and then she laughed like a wicked witch. Meredith told Mistress Lisa that I like men, and then she recommended lots of gay S&M groups. She also explained that she had mostly gay friends growing up, because it was the easiest way to get to be around submissive men. She said most of her friends died in the early 80s.

Then, her phone rang, and she said, “Oh, I bet that’s Georgina, my little slave girl who needs permission to masturbate.” Sure enough, it was, and she asked us if she should let the girl touch herself. We nodded, and then the lady next to her, the hot one with big boobs, said, “Of course you should let her. Everyone deserves pleasure.” Then, when she got off the phone, she told us her slave girl was a pre-op MTF about 20 years-old who serves her often. Around the same time, I overheard the hot lady telling the Madame that her husband loves sucking on her cock. Her husband looked bashful, then smiled and nodded. The Madame must have been 80 years-old, her facial expression stern and staunch and her grey hair wrapped up in a bun. Lisa told us there were only two times people gasped in reaction to the Madame. The first was when she forgot someone’s name. “She will never forget your names… never!” she confided to us. And the other time was when the Madame was spanking a guy for a demo in front of the rest of the group, and he said, “Is that the best you can do?” The Madame didn’t speak to that man again for three months.

I kept looking at the other lady, the one with the big boobs. She would look back and wink. She eventually switched seats and sat across from me, and told me I was cute again. She asked me if I was into fisting. She would sometimes converse with the fellow next to her, but kept her eye on me. I spent most of this time analysing why it was that I was avoiding reciprocating interest. She was really hot, even if a bit old. But then I couldn’t help but think that these women weren’t very far off from the dirty old gay men—the “chickenhawks” in the gay world. These women were built, had strong jawlines, almost looked like men, but dressed posh and wore lipstick. They looked like big horny older drag queens. Of course I was turned off, I decided. I’d feel like an escort. My two friends finally decided to call it a night, so we all left.

Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…..nothing….. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one………nothing.

In the end there’s just this awful darkness.  Empty and stretching forever.  Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four….nothing, nothing nothing.  Twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven, my eyes slowly open and I’m in a hospital.  Twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty…..saline iv and a charcoal cocktail.  Thirty one, thirty two, thirty three…. A doctor looks grim and shakes his head at me…. Thirty four, thirty five, thirty six….my mom is there holding my hand….my father by the window looking so sad….they speak and I hear an echo of what they’re saying.  They tell me to stay strong and maybe we can beat this.  I try counting backwards, I try and reverse time.  Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…”he’s not getting better, we’ll have to move him……sixteen, fifteen, fourteen……I close my eyes again as I feel my body moving… thirteen, twelve, eleven…..there’s beeping and shouting, my iv got ripped out.  I see the blood but I feel nothing.  I feel I cannot connect my mind with this body.  Ten, nine, eight.  This time the voice is sounding other worldly.  It lets me know that the choice is now up to me.  I can count down to zero and roll over and die, or stop my bad habits and wake up and be alive.  Seven, six, five, four three, two one…..inhale deep and open my selfish eyes.

Yesterday I picked up a book on Buddhism. The book is about the Buddhist approach to questions. I read the first few lines to the intro of the book. This is the line that stuck with me:

QUOTE If you ask “Where did the universe come from?”, the answer can’t be “jump.” END QUOTE

So that was the line, the line that got me thinking. I read the line, and then I stopped reading. I stopped reading because I realized…

If you asked me a question right now, ANY question,

I’d have a strong desire to answer with the word “Jump.”

I’ll speak hypothetically. You ask a question, I say Jump. You asked a question wishing to receive specific, informative response. Even if I don’t know your question your bet is as good as mine that an answer of Jump, upon first hearing, wouldn’t satisfy response. The Buddhist book told me that the one word response “jump” is thought to have little to no informative potential.

Let’s say when I entered this world I signed a societal contract. Let’s say this societal contract is for reals- and for real reals because it is printed on heavy weight professional glossy paper. Let’s also say that the societal contract has a voice and its voice is pretty darn vocal.

Here’s another scenario. Societal Contract, the societal contract with a voice, asks me a question. I give the response “Jump.” The societal contract is obviously not very happy with me. The societal contract is thinking: What does jump even say? The societal contract is responding to its own question: Jump says nothing. The answer Jump is a sure way to make the questioner think the answerer did not hear the question. The answer Jump is a sure way to make the questioner think the answerer is avoiding or making fun of said question.

Akin to what happened between me and my imaginary friend Social Contract, the Buddhist question book explicitly states that Jump is never a satisfactory answer. This makes me even more inspired, to challenge the Buddhist book. I would challenge the Buddhist book to a dual, but in true pacifist spirit, I will instead propose a movement. It is not a movement against Buddhism. It is a movement against this “the answer can’t be…” bull shit. It is a movement against the silly first lines of this particular Buddhist question.

So here I am wanting to say Jump and being told “No, no.. that’s not an answer.” As I feel it, I have no choice but to develop the new movement, the Jump Answer movement. This movement supports an environment where it’d be totally cool if more questions were answered with the word Jump. This movement accepts that as long as questions and answers are happening, we could all benefit from a lil’ more malleability in acceptable answering space.

To me the question and answer section of life, has always seemed so limited, so linear.
     “How ya doing?” “Fine, Thanks.” “Where are you going?” “I’m going out.”

     “When are you gonna be back?” “Maybe before sun up, after sun down?”
Most people accept the question and answer section of life as not a big deal. For those accepting the societal contract, it’s no sweat to answer a detail-oriented question or two.

So the Jump Answer movement is officially made. Anyone can join. It’s created by and for the Jump in all of us. It’s created for the non-linear that those straight lines on the street convince us can’t and shouldn’t be followed. It’s to prove to this silly Buddhist book that deflective is reflective, and that answers of “jump” are not necessarily a bad thing.

Broken records aren’t thought of fondly. But maybe if we open our listening, they’ll have something useful to say. You ask me a question. I say Jump. What does that say? It says if you and I wish to construct a home together, yes the front door can be in the back. If we were to lay a rock patio out front, yes we can be our own artistic directors—you can start on the left, I can start on the right, and even if we don’t have the same layout plan, we will still meet in the middle. If we were to cook dinner together, set the table, and sit down to eat, yes we can wait till a dradle is spun before we start eating.

Lately I’ve been among about a lot of cool people, doing a lot of cool things. I have heard these people doing cool things referred to as “Rockstars”. The Jump Answer movement is a shout out to the Rockstars potential in everyone. Show the rockstar an inch, she’ll see a yard. Put the rockstar in a box, she’ll break out of it. Tell the rock star not to defy gravity, she’ll shout “Why the heck not?”

If we were to question and answer,
               yes you can ask,

          yes I can Jump

and
     yes later we can swap subject positions.

Thank you Note: The Karma of Questions: Essays on the Buddhist Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff), 2002.

my-lifeis-your-memoir-words

rachel trotta works at a community medical clinic in portland or. the clinic serves alienated clientel: homeless youth, trasngender, iv drug users, people of any age expereincing mental illness that has consequently landed them on the edge of society.  rachel talks to lots of schitzophrenics and people high out of their minds. she is a perceptive gal and produced this after working her first night shift. oh yeah, think npr monologue cuz that’s what she dreams about in her mind all day long.

What we want in private is a secret unknown to public wishes. Our public desideratum may be clear to us; but inside we are never sure, never knowing. Wants are secreted away, hiding – closeted from ourselves.

Ceremoniously coming down the stairs after an hour or so of wafting in the breeze and floating through a window, the leaf thought it clear that the timing was not right for awesome things to happen that day, even if it was brighter than the day before. The leader of the free world crunched the leaf beneath his steel-toed boot on the way into the room where he made most of his decisions, the foyer of the dining hall.

Sharon had pressed the button—he had initiated total planetary destruction. All because of a mere slip of his curled fingers unfurling spontaneously. Luckily there was a CAPTCHA, so he was unable to go through with his unintended attempt. Lazily, he had no desire to decipher the strange letters blurred across the screen. It seemed strange that he was not the first leader to have the button for global annihilation listed next to the food specials on his vid-menu, but he rolled with it. Three terms earlier, he knew, other leaders had to face these same decisions and ultimately decided on dinner not doom.

Complete planetary destruction was not what anyone wanted publicly, because if they wanted that, well, they would have become a pariah to everyone. No one wanted to be hated, so the citizens and their leaders in the different countries practiced mutually assured assuagement. Nuclear danger loomed at all corners of the world, but they knew that if they just kept telling themselves that it was not much to worry about, well then it would not be that big of a deal.  After all, such global decisions were tied to the global historical narrative and not the faithless whims of the populace.

That planetary doom could be much closer than anyone imagined did not phase Absalom as he walked down the sidewalk to his local fruit market. Persimmons, quinces, pomegranates, and pears all vied for his fickle affection, and ultimately he went with the strain of fruit least resistant to his present desire: strawberries, so sweet and tart and delicious. He knew that though it may have taken a month for the fruit to be driven here, and although he knew that they probably didn’t taste anything like the strawberries of even fifteen years earlier, when agriculture was fifteen years less advanced than it was today, he knew they still tasted delicious, to him, and that was all that mattered.

Overhead, gulls tasted the air with a passing “caw-caw” that even a less discerning listener could tell did not lack a certain amount of stress. The stomachs of these simple birds stretched suddenly as they tasted the alka-seltzer bubbling in their stomachs.

Absalom looked overhead and winced as he saw one of the gulls burst into a white, watery mess mid-air. Kids sure do play rough sometimes, he thought as he watched the resulting red-white goo land in front of him.

The children no longer had “Duck Hunt” to shoot at. So the children shot at real birds with their bee-bee guns. It was fun for a while. Then it got strangely gruesome as the sidewalks of the city became littered with dead birds, and other birds that were not quite dead because bee-bee guns sometimes were not fully capable of murder. Bee-bee guns were outlawed amongst the city’s youth. The youth started messing with alka-seltzer tablets, taking after their older cousins of the twentieth-century.

Absalom wondered, how did the desire arise in the youth to destroy birds, the birds that were an unimpeachably normal part of city life for so long? He never wanted to kill birds, so the desire seemed foreign. Many people foreground the need to kill, he thought. Some people kill large things: buffalo, whales. For the most part people can only muster the courage to kill small things like birds, Absalom thought to himself.

Instead of taking pleasure in the pain of another species, falling asleep in a microwave was Absalom’s idea of an enjoyable activity for a Saturday afternoon. Disengaged from the hustle and bustle of shopping and killing and shopping that represented the Saturdays of many urbanites, he crawled into the local tanning salon each Saturday afternoon, to get his skin baked to a beautiful golden glow that made him look like some sort of Greek idol.

Absalom walked into his usual tanning salon. His favorite technician was off today, so he decided to have his skin bronzed by a stranger. He undressed and lay in the booth, which seemed slightly larger than the booth he usually lay in. When he asked why this was, the technician reacted as though Absalom were making some kind of affront, and said that the older tanning booths were still there, gesturing to the cobwebbed corner where his usual booth now resided. The technician said they were in the process of moving the new booths in and the old ones out.

This sounded reasonable, so against his better judgement Absalom crawled into the larger booth, wrapped the eye-shade over his eyes and as usual and the warm light of the booth initiated along with the typical whirring machine hum. All of a sudden there was a flicker of colors in his mind’s eye—bright pastel greens and blues, flashes of red. Untypical, yet strangely calming, he thought. Absalom fell asleep comfortably for the first time in ages. It was nice for him.

-

Sharon got out of the foyer where he had almost destroyed the world with the push of a button. Can’t go in there again, he thought, might cause a big boom boom. He didn’t want the boom boom. He walked out into the main dining room and cried out, “Your leader is prepared to eat!” to no one in particular. His servant and assistant were the only other people in the room.

Loosening his belt, he sat down on his favorite chair. He looked around, theatrically turning his head left and right. The time was right for dinner.

The radiator started leaking noxious black, the chair spun around as if of its own accord as the leader’s feet spooled it ever faster. Dogs barked outside, a light turned on only to shine brightly up and down the room, spotlight landing on the leader’s head. A spotlight, a chair, a moment too soon. His meal was served forthright upon the table. He dug in, letting the cream and gristle coat his throat. Deliciousness! He let the flesh coat his esophagus, fall down through him into the soul of his belly. It was beautiful. For the first time that day he felt full, bloated even. He liked it. It was how he wanted things to be. So tasty.

“What soul sacrificed itself to the grace of your leader today?” he asked. His assistant pulled the printout of his meal’s source from a manila file folder. It had been a young man named Absalom who was disintegrated in the tanning booth in Glendale two days earlier, slow-baked for a day, and then devoured in around ten minutes by the leader, at this very moment.

DO THE DEMISE
Pt. 4 of 4

So Marky had pretty much putzed out with the drugs. It’s not that his stomach bothered him, he realizes, but rather that every action, every thought he now had did not seem to be his own. He lost the extreme discipline and self control that he had once so cherished. Before he could type faster than he could write. Now, sitting in front of his personal computer, the stream of thoughts comes so slowly that he can barely pluck at the keys, finger pecking. His real life degrades into a puddle on the floor. Now all he has is a conformity that is beyond him. He cannot dissent even if he tries.

His mother, who walks upstairs and gives him his dinner, is of no help. She merely funnels more Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese into her son, supplementing the psychiatric drugs with the harmful food of international industry. She is not complicit, she is merely acting in her own interest, or at least that interest that is allowed her in the skinny purview of mainstream society. Even she, an artist, cannot escape the forces capitalism creates. It is more convenient for her to cook Mac ‘n’ Cheese in the microwave than to shop for vegetables. She takes the path of least resistance, and Marky, once so innocent, becomes just another body sacrificed to activities beyond his control.

The story you have just read may seem familiar. That is because there are hundreds of thousands of cases just like Marky’s across this great land. The parents of our nation’s boys and girls–brainwashed by what they hear from psychiatrists in collusion with big business drug manufacturers, with the support of lobbyists in Washington–make decisions that can far too easily alter the destiny of countless youth.

And at what cost? Sure there are likely some who, overall, benefit from the ingestion of psychoacrtive drugs at a young age, but for the vast majority it far too easily hinders the consciousness that should be apparent to every human being–namely the fact that in everyone’s life there are myriad toxic forces beyond our control. A nation loaded with drugs cannot realize that we live in a heavily policed military-industrial consumer state. It cannot rise up against the forces of cruelty and ignorance that lead this world. In other words, we maybe are fucked. Corporate drug cartels rule the land and the young Marky of today will undoubtedly grow up to serve the system that in individual persons, be they a solider bleeding on foreign sands or a worker serving a faceless corporate master, really governs the country, and the world.

Marky’s mother was unsure what to do. It was not like deciding whether a note in some piece of Brahms should be played forte or mezzo-forte, the decision did not require that kind of precision.

In any event, she knew what she had–and that was a blubbering baby boy, her own, collapsed and sobbing on her knee. She pat him on the back a few times and carried him back up to his room, laying the now-sleeping child into its bed. Elizabeth felt a little slimy doing this–she imagined there were more caring actions–but she had work to do. She needed to focus on her art!

As a single parent there were often times she had to negotiate between what was right for her child and what was right for her art and career. She always hoped that she chose the right path, while at the same time knowing that it was a constant negotiation between two poles.

One time she had the opportunity to go on a three-week chamber tour, but she knew the only way she could do it would be to leave Marky with her aunt. Elizabeth kind of despised her aunt, all along knowing that for her to care for Marky was the only option if she wanted to go on tour. So she let her son go with aunt Anne even though she knew it meant Marky would be without his beloved television and candy for three weeks.

When Elizabeth returned from that tour, Marky was resigned and bitter. Elizabeth made the meatloaf that Marky loved and everything returned to normal. And so it went that anytime Marky became destitute, Elizabeth would do one or two motherly things and Marky would be, more or less, back to normal. Never the same as he was, but at least stable.

Marky awakes sluggishly in his room, 5:30 p.m. His growling stomach informs that dinner has not been eaten. Before he was dancing, now he his sluggishly shifting his weight around. He hates what is hapening to him. It was a new drug that he could not understand. No one at his school had ever been on it so he did not know how to act with it streaming in his veins, he feels as though something is growing in him that he can not understand or identify.

TUNE IN TWO WEEKS FROM NOW FOR THE EXCITING CONCLUSION!

by Michael Molitch-Hou

The machines that they had been building went on for centuries.  They were always the same machines, but, naturally, they took on different forms that would be unrecognizable to the following generations.  A machine is a machine is a machine.

That is not to say that the machines were metals parts grinding away at each other, but whatever they were is what they were.  They sometimes even took the forms of beautiful trees that smelled up the night’s already fragrant air.  They were machines that wrapped around each other as vines on trees and hugs on bodies.

It was organically electric.

But, as I was saying, the machines had been going on for so long that no one can any longer remember what they were, or what they were for, or for what it was anything was supposed to be doing.

One such machine was a man-made man-machine named Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou, which is me the man who is writing the thing about himself, which is also a thing.

Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou had been recreated for centuries taking on different forms and names, but always ended up as Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou when he was Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou, which is the time where I came in.  When, and if, he was those other forms, I do not think that he would remember it, at least not at this point when he began writing his autobiography.

But, it was meant to be, Mike.  It had come about this way and in some round about way you became you.  The nature of that course had been theorized by all sorts of people.  That is to say, suggestions were made to the nature of your comings about.

One man had put it this way, “On the first day, God created the Sun and the Earth.”  While others had decided that one of Zeus’s daughters, whichever one it was, had burst forth from his skull and then some other crazy shit happened.  Either way, you had come about and decided, or had decided for you (by you or someone else), that you wanted to know how you came about yourself.

Keeping the others’ words in mind, you might feel here and there what they were trying to suggest created you.  Had it been a big bang and a crash and then billions of years later you were you, that is to say, Mike was Mike?  Could be.  Seems logical.  They have provided a lot of evidence towards that.

Of course, this was not satiating.

How many other possible ways was it that Mike could become Mike?

You had reasoned billions, if not infinite ways, but had a feeling that some seemed a bit more right than others.  For instance, a monkey in a tree could have dropped a coconut and you could have burst out of that coconut, making the Universe.  Zeus could have shot a daughter out of his head and some other things happened after that.  Or the bang could have been big, small, or nothing at all and you still would have come about one-way or the other.

So that wasn’t it exactly.  It wasn’t the big or the bang, it was really the whole shebang.  I wanted to know, you wanted to know, without a doubt, how you came about.  I don’t remember a big bang or a man with a cane that when he pointed it, magic came, and so did you and everything around you.  The irrelevance of that whole business became extremely relevant.

But, of course, they had suggested history and theories.  They had laid out a nice track of history behind you: things suggesting that there was a history and a past that made you into being some day.  Um… some histories stretched out as far as the beginning of the Universe and as far as the eye can see, and they provided fossils and old artifacts providing proof of a past.  Past that, they told you your family lineage, your country’s history, the science of a flower, the rise to power of ancient civilizations such as Rome and all the kings horses and all the kings men.

So they gave you the Beatles, Albert Einstein, and this body that you can call your own, if you’d like to.
It was all very convenient to wake up with all this beautiful paraphernalia surrounding, wasn’t it?  It was a grandiose tropical fiesta of everything that exploded all the time with many little big bangs.

They even invented particle physics to try to tell you about that.  In a way, it was eye candy all around.  And you know that you loved all of it, down to your juicy center, that it was sweet, but weren’t sure why, which was another question raised.  And when questions are raised, “they certainly rised.
They started slow, long ago, head to toe, healthy, wealthy and wise” (The Beach Boys 1967).  Some say, or at least hint at, that the question can be the same as the answer sometimes.

Or at least, you get the feeling that that could be the case or that that someone could have said that once.
Instead of thinking of an example, let’s bring this to the point of things:

Mike, where did you come from, where are you going, and what is it exactly that you are?

A beautiful way to think of you is as a wavelength, the length of which runs entirely from the time you came into being until the time that you stop coming into being.  You have a distinct memory of your development, suggesting that you probably did come into being at some point, but we’re not sure when it ends, if ever.  Maybe, when you die, you just forget yourself and then remember yourself again back on February 8th, 1984.

Wake up, live, remember who you are and where you came from physically on a daily basis, with memories fading as the times grow longer, and then die, which is to forget, only to wake up again and repeat the process over again.

Somewhere in there, there is the thing that we are for all practicality purposes calling Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou and his consciousness.  The thing which would have the ability to see its actions and how it performs them was called Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou by the things around him when he woke up on February 8th, 1984.

That thing can seem, for the most part, to only see itself from the insides: a man behind the steering wheel of an automobile that he isn’t sure he knows how to drive.  There is something about the car that makes it highly desirable, maybe comfortable seats and push buttons and anything you could ever want in a car.
I guess that it is possible that when I die, I go up to the used car lot up in the big blue sky and the dealer convinces me that I am the right car for me and I could get back in and drive it all over again.  That could explain why I would want to continue driving the thing until it started to fall to pieces and the bumper fell off and the motor slowly died and the mechanics started to tell me that there wasn’t anything I could do about it, but maybe just get rid of the old thing.  Then do I trade it in for a new thing?

As I said, the forms could be different, but could all just be the same thing with different forms.  But if those forms include a consciousness and personality and everything, maybe the consciousness changes too.  So, when I go up to car lot heaven, they could sell me on a different body, but that means consciousness too, and then when I get back here on planet Earth, I am a new person and don’t remember what Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou was but now only remember what Francine Dresser is, bought as is.  Which could also explain why I don’t remember what anyone else remembers from his or her perspective, but only from mine.
And, therefore, I cannot rule out any of their consciousnesses, but can only say that I am not they and cannot say that I know them inside and outside.

After all that, this could turn out to be a short postmortem autobiography after all.

But the question of will still comes to mind and bothers me.  That’s more like it.  Why am I typing what I am typing right now as if I could say that I had a choice in the matter?  I certainly would like to say that I had a say, but it’s difficult to say if that could even be the case.  My fingers can go widdly-doo on every little thing that I do, but maybe they just do what they do and I have no choice but to choose to permit them to do it.  What do you say?

I know that the line between my will and that of the Universe around me, the insides and the outsides, seem to be negligible, in that I can’t distinguish who’s will is whos’s.  So, I suppose it’s all just happening.  And it could, in fact, be a moot point on where the Universe came from in the first place and where it goes, where I lead it and it leads me, but I’m still stuck on the one sticky thing of why all the things seem to be suffering.
There is a will about, insides or out, that wants me to help the things that are showing suffering to stop suffering, or at least to stop showing it.  That is why the consciousness of others is important, and what my role and will is in that situation.

If the whole thing is just a happening, me just being willed and willing the Universe, why did the Universe that I woke up in bother with the details of people suffering physically, emotionally, and mentally?  Did the Universe, whatever it was that I woke up in on February 8th, 1984, want there to be things that would suffer or at least show suffering?  Or maybe, it would be impossible to tell, another moot point, whether the Universe wanted the suffering or not, but just was and that was part of the was that the Universe is.
But, I, as a part of that Universe and one of the sufferers have a huge problem with that.  It is happening to me after all.  I see the suffering and want it to end, I suffer and want it to end.  What’s the deal then?  And that would be the drive that drove me, the luxury sedan with pick up and go named Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou, to the end.

And, let’s say that the suffering outside of me was just a big act.  That no one was really hurting or aching and that at any minute now, the crying will stop and I realized that I had just had the fleece pulled over my eyes for a century.  What a surprise that would be, wouldn’t it be?

But then, I would still find myself here, in the place with the things that pretend to suffer.  And why would that be?  I would still want to know why I had come to be if I was just going to come to be in a big game of things.  And that just seems silly to me.

So then I am here, there is still the one suffering question left in the sole thing that I can comprehend existing, which is me, Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou.  And I don’t seem to have a choice in the matter.
And if I have no choice in the matter, what can I choose to do?  I can’t stop choosing, because the thing that I live in, the thing I woke up in with all the things that demand that they’re suffering and that I, or someone, do something about it would demand that I choose, and choose wisely.  And they would suggest to choose this and that and this and that and everyone who was making me make choices, which I may or may not have my own ability to make, would say different things.

For instance, there are two pie shops across the street from one another.  The pie maker at one which makes cherry pies declares that his is the best and that he needs customers, money, to feed his family and keep his business going so that he can continue to feed his family and so on.  The other one across the street who makes pecan pies claims the exact same thing about his pies.  And if I like both flavors of pie equally because pie is pie and all pie is heaven in the sky because of its tingly sensations that it makes on my tongue and allows my tongue to have so much fun which is the thing that eventually allows me to love everyone, people and pies and, even the sun, how would I make a decision about which pie to eat: equally adorable pies by two men demanding me, as a customer, to make a decision.  I suppose I could just keep walking and not eat any pie, but that would involve missing out on eating anything and who wants to do that?  And, I suppose, I could just keep walking and I’d come across cake, which could be as sweet as the first scenario because, let’s face it, we’re here for the sweets.  And then I would remember that I could have just eaten pie and not have to worry about cake.

So which pie do I choose?  Well, let’s say one man is evil and should not make any profit or have any customers, though his pie is delicious.  So, I should choose the good man and not the bad, but I have no idea how to gauge the good or badness of either one.  So I look into their faces for sometime and talk to them and sit there and try to decide if one is evil.  And then Pecan Pete tells me how he used to burn ants with a magnifying glass as a kid.  That fact for some reason makes me think that maybe Pete ain’t such a good guy and that I’d better go ask Cherry Chuck if he ever burned ants as a kid, to which he responds, “Nope!”  But, I think, why did Pete burn those ants?  Well, maybe his parents didn’t raise him right and he ended up hurting little tiny bugs and it’s not completely his fault.  And, plus, Chuck tells me that he cheated on his first wife because really they weren’t happy in the first place and, I mean, he thought he was in love, but it turned out not to be true and, well I don’t know, I guess one thing led to another and hormones are hormones and he found himself with another woman while still with the first one.

I wouldn’t want to contribute to either foul man, burning ants and committing adultery.  So I could go down to the cake place where I find out that Chocolate Chunk Charlie punches cats to this day.  Hell, I’d rather eat pie from a man who burnt ants when he was 8 and didn’t know better than to eat cake from a grown woman who still punches cats.  But then, I figure, well, her folks probably never raised her right in the first place, so she never got rid of her bad cat punching habits.  And, really, is my buying her cake going to change the way she is one way or the other?

How did Pete, Chuck, and Charlie ever come to be so sad, bad, or mad?  Well, in one form or another, their folks never raised them right?  Well, why didn’t their folks raise them right?  Probably because their folks didn’t raise them right.  And so on and so on into infinity.  Which brings us back to where it all came from and what the hell we’re doing here and why.  And because I can’t speak for anyone else because I am not inside of anyone else’s consciousness, I have to ask myself, where did Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou come from and why?

It’s not a silly question even if it’s been repeated a thousand times because I still have to be here.  The only way I don’t have to be here is if I’m not here.  But because I’m here, I have to assume that I am here and that I should probably figure out how to enjoy it.

So, I just buy whatever the hell I feel like at the time I buy it and that’s that.

And, then, I guess, I’m still here for the sweets whether they contribute to all things evil, which is being defined here as destroying the Universe (which is assumed to be good), or not.  So the sweets are still going to be sweet and the sours sours whether I know why or where or who or what or however or whatever.
But to walk out into the streets daily and hear everyone yell at each other about what they’re doing wrong and all, I can’t help but feel like telling them it was just people’s parents not raising them right, whoever or whatever their parents were and wherever they came from or instead to maybe just keep my fat mouth shut.  That is to say: forgive and/or forget to forgive and/or forget.

So, at least on a daily basis, the individual uni-VERSE (little “uni”, big “verse”)  of Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou, with his daily day to day memory way has to forget who he is every day in order to remember himself in everyway which is run by a motor, small or large, that asks him the question, who, what, why, when, where, and how much farther?.  That could, in fact, be the sweetest sweet of them all, the pie in the sky piece of cake, because the engine fueled by delicious answers to hungry questions on a day to day basis could one day eat the most satisfying meal of an answer to the hungriest eater of a question that the eater engine would be filled for an eternity, kick back its heals, and pat its big, fat, greedy stomach and burp and, when it got hungry again, say to itself, which would probably be everyone,

“Well, who wants seconds?” individual life being the Universe’s favorite five course meal and all hands that ever were being raised and on deck.  Thus, leaving Michael Michael Motorcylce (Turn the Key Watch Him Pee) Daniels Molitch-Hou to repeat himself in all forms at all spaces and times, whether it be the conscious personality of Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou or not and to run on his own motor, which fuels itself until it can’t fuel itself anymore at which point it becomes a different form of Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou that might be called Francine Dresser, which I believe can be correctly translated as a French cabinet, but could never quite remember who Michael Daniels Molitch-Hou was in the first place, though when she saw him there was probably some vague recollection.

So, Francine Dresser takes a good look at him as he stumbles into her, knocking her and her things over in the big used car lot, and yells, “What the hell are you doing?”, questions his upbringing, and then tries to remember where it was she knew him from exactly, but then letting the feeling trail behind her with her other memories of the day.  She, finally, signs the contract for the car and, on the way out of the lot, asks herself if she’s happy with her purchase.  And at the nighttime, the summer time, with only soft cotton sheets from the 70’s, she recounts her happenings to her husband.  And then, he responds,

“It’s funny, I told that same story to a friend the other day, and he said, ‘Yeah, same thing happened to me in Rome in, I’d say, um, ‘round abouts 70 AD.’”