The story of my blessed and madcap life: it did not look right at all but I went in anyway out of pure foolhardy willfulness and it was much worse than I expected. Spin that disk ad infinitum and chew on your broadsword the while. Memory itself is a disk system that switches disks in and out rapidly as per the immediate needs of the sentient creature negotiating the earth’s surface (custom, habit, innovation). You could not possibly carry every single memory you have at all times in a sack of any size let alone one you would be able to manage over the ever-cruel distances. Girl, you’d break your damn spine. Memory and imagination may sometimes combine in order to all the more confound. Look for the light and the colour in your consciousness and know that the positive polar angle reaches skyward and the negative polar angle crash-lands in the mud and the worms. Is that the Garden of Eden right there in the largest park in walking distance from where you yourself are located this very moment? The psychotic is the person, in this case myself, who would encourage you to pursue the idea to all its logical extremities. My father was a hard-drinking business man and often he and his buddies, half in the bag, would tell longwinded off-colour jokes and hee and haw and carry on, all of which was pure delight to me as a boy, but more importantly it was these men and certain high-grade standup comedians who demonstrated for me that if you have a brilliant zinger of a punch-line this is actually the ideal time to do a long shaggy-dog build-up, taking the audience on a circuitous journey to the outermost regions only to finally deliver that boffo punchline (everybody always howls). Every time I look back over my best work, I think: holy fuck, how did you do that? you were a fucking mess slapped over the face of a disaster! I became a Buster Keaton or Evel Knieval of this woebegone Canadian prairie, my fingers deep in archaic string instrument tunings, and the rule of thumb for pratfalls and stunts and suchlike is that you need to be good and gassed on strong spirits to deal with the pain…and everything is pain. I lived for a few years with a woman who basically shared my often esoteric taste in music, movies, and literary fiction…it spoiled me for life. Behold me in my spats, emboldened before God’s gnashing snatch. I am God’s monkey wrench…have you ever begun to consider how many different things you might be able to do with a monkey wrench? You know, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Form is the inhuman and God-like dimension of art and it’s what us perfectionists are trying to get a free and clean high off of. Again, the really interesting idea in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is that nothingness is the active agent that outlines difference and therefore makes the world intelligible in all its known material properties. This idea, curiously or maybe not so curiously, had a major impact on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida when they were still very young (Vernon W. Cisney’s Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative comes with my very highest recommendation).
What a codependent gonna do foremost is a codependent gonna codependent. You have your people-pleasers and placaters on the one hand, per Gestalt therapy orthodoxy, and then folks like me, star of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in whom romantic feelings of any kind induce a very specific whirling, stomach-churning delirium, as demonstrated by the serially-vomiting Stan in the early and eye-opening seasons of South Park. When I got out of a notorious treatment centre for dug and alcohol dependency in Palm Desert, California in 2009 I then lived for a year in a casual and easygoing sober living house in Palm Springs. I spent the year reading, writing, going to a movie almost daily in one or another of the little Coachella Valley municipalities, and hanging out with twelve-step people. I didn’t drink or use anything stronger than Tylenol that whole time. What I think I liked most about Southern California is that nobody seemed to think I was especially odd or unusual down there, and of course down there I don’t look especially weird. Los Angeles especially has all these streams, pulses, and swells of bold, proud, and maybe even regal weirdness. I remember being at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax with my A.A. sponsor when another friend called to tell me that a guy we both knew from a previous treatment centre had just died of cardiac arrest partying by himself in a hotel room in Nanaimo, British Columbia. I think the constant conspiracy of silence around all this stuff—mental health, addiction, systemic poverty—is a kind of war crime being committed by the majority, and I will never stop saying so. The best thing I remember happening in Los Angeles was when my sponsor and I got to go see supreme Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó’s unequivocally bleak 1966 martial staging ground The Round-Up, part of a series on widescreen cinematography they were running at the old silent movie theatre, also on Fairfax (we got to sit on cozy couches!). While things quickly started to go tits-up-and-sideways once I got back to Canada—I’d be drunk again within a year—I will always be able to recall with warmth and fondness the drive from Palm Springs to Calgary which I came insanely close to doing in one long go. My car had poor air conditioning and it gets real, real hot in the desert in August, so I set off on my long northward trek, through Las Vegas and other sundry sights, at about four in the morning in order to get a solid head start on the sun. I drove fourteen hours that day until I finally pulled into Dillon, Montana and got myself a room for the night. I can remember and feel in my body today how overjoyed and consoled I was that I could enjoy for-me-profound and exciting adventures, in their material and spiritual properties and aspects, much better sober than lit. My sponsor always said that there isn’t anything good enough or bad enough that a drink won’t make it worse. It’s true (for about 10% of the population). A blunt no-bones elder-in-recovery here in Calgary once told me something like: yes, it is a one day at a time program, but you have to do it for the rest of your life and you need to remember that every day too.
I already loved hockey as a little Canadian kid in the very late 1980s when, at ten, around the same time I stared guitar lessons, I began my short minor hockey career. More than any of the more or less customary NHL hockey I got to attend live in my youth (we’ll set aside the one game I got to attend in the series in ’89 where the Flames ultimately triumphed over the Canadiens and won their only Stanley Cup), the competition between the international teams at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics totally set my whole neural network on fire. Often when I would have night terrors or little miniature psychoses as a child, I would really and truly believe I could hear an arena full of people cheering and jeering right there inside my bedroom walls. I was to be no messiah, but rather the updated middle-aged version of Richard Lindner’s painting Boy with Machine (featured most memorably in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus). I loved all the gear at my grandparents’ farm just as much as I loved my music gear at home. In the U.K., works and gear are slang related to intravenous drug use. I actually believe that pressing the record button on a machine has an effect on the entire earth system. For Deleuze, the cosmos—or, as per machine assemblage brother in crime Félix ‘the Cat’ Guattari, the Chaosmos—is the unity of all multiplicities that are, could be, or that we might imagine. The simple formula for this spatiotemporal framework: the totality is One-Many. Of course, what Deleuze is doing at least in part is once again keeping the torch of Spinoza ignited and flickering majestic in the age of quantum mechanics and tense outbursts of all kinds of things all the time. The Venus flytrap catches a fly by enticing the fly to step on the trap’s trigger which is exactly how a normal hunting trap works when it catches things. There are only so many models and forms for basic existing things and situations, and they get recycled endlessly, to the point where it gets more comic and more absurd but also more ghastly and abyssal. Store up the laughter just in case you might have accidentally won the happenstance race against sensation-rich life and signs and symbols meant puzzlingly to guide, in dream or in hand. Carl Jung echoes Nietzsche when he bemoans that the Occidental World has not been working on civilization and enlightenment anywhere near as long as the Chinese yet insists upon acting vulgar and superior (he also expresses a belief shared by Nietzsche that Heraclitus is the only worthy voice of Occidental antiquity). Jung got into the I Ching. In a piece entitled “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Jung quotes the philosopher Chuang-tzu, as it would happen a contemporary of Plato: “The state in which ego and non-ego are no longer opposed is called the pivot of Tao.” Boy, do I like that. I couldn’t have put it that well given five lifetimes. A fella could really haul that bill of gods some distance, I imagine. From my vantage, assuredly, forty-six years old as of recently, I think if you stay relatively stationary and remain at steadfast private labour, you would in looking at the I Ching through the eyes of Carl Jung or the game of Go through those of Deleuze and Guattari, build a better map of the cosmos as a navigable frame in active play than you could get by accessing a quantum computer, particle accelerator, or super satellite (though those things are useful too).
The elephant in the room, or at least the three-legged dog, is that I just got kicked off Facebook's two big social media networks. Here is my public statement, pass it around to the publicists at the debutante bash this very fortnight and enjoy the room temperature champagne:
It is not nearly as much fun to steal a car if you don’t total it at the end—
