Vagabond

 

Daphne left rehab against medical advisement or whatever and she’s been shooting speedballs in her aunt’s basement in Airdrie. Speedballs make you magnificently loopy, although I personally never understood the appeal. You mix cocaine and opiates is what you do, you cook them together in the same spoon, and basically the idea is you have the minute-long rush off the cocaine that makes you feel like you are having a heart attack and your eardrums are on the verge of rupturing, and once that is over you are blissfully high on the opiates for a good six hours or so, depending on your tolerance and duration of daily use. When I was using intravenous drugs on the weekends as a young man, I was perfectly happy to settle for the six hours of not thinking and of being suffused with supernatural warmth without the initiating  cocaine blitzkrieg, though I would do speedballs with friends who were doing them so as not to be a spoilsport. Poor wobbly and restless Daphne. I’ve extended her an offer to make use of the daybed in the basement for a few nights. She can use whatever she wants as long as she does so safely and out of my direct range of vision. I guess Daphne recently saw an episode of Black Mirror called “White Christmas” with John Hamm in it and it really rocked her in a maximally discomfiting sort of way, although she seems to get off on it the way she would a coke rush. Daphne is seized by new terrors with respect to the concept of immortality and the fact that it may be far less desirable than any of us earthlings have yet been able to properly divine. Her fundamental point: immortality does not on the face of it seem desirable at a time when the planet is a mouldering heap of trash with dimwitted humans endlessly butting heads. What would a “life savings” become in the context of the economics of immortality? Would people become trapped in tortuous ordeals, as though on a reel? Would space-time become fundamentally different, opening up like a flower? Would mass sterility somehow figure, like in the wildly overrated 2006 Alfonso Cuarón movie Children of Men? Maybe a whole other scene,  à la Freud, could be produced and demonstrated. Maybe every single human being who ever existed could come back to life in some audio-visual or fully sensory form that we could access and with which we could play and experiment. One of the characters in the recent Richard Powers novel Playground would by all accounts appear to have believed since he was a little boy that technology will someday resurrect all who lived and died in one form or another; I remembered as I read the book that as a boy I had likewise contemplated this enormous and confounding idea. How do these things get planted in us? I put the question to Daphne and Daphne said with great self-assurance that these sorts of deeply embedded unconscious ‘memes’ are information from the future bouncing back off of us. Consider, added Daphne, the movie Vagabond by Agnès Varda. I was pleased to do so, as it’s a film we screened at the Plaza on 35mm film back when that was still possible and I was still a film programmer. I remember that Daphne had been in attendance that night. We smoked a joint together outside the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. Daphne says that on the night of the screening I had said that Vagabond is above all about two things: the logic of tracking shots plus the principle that death is a process of organic transition. I didn’t remember making that second observation, but would have to concede that it certainly sounds like me. Amazingly from my standpoint, it was Daphne, high and scratching herself, who then proceeded to consider the physics of the death problem. If death is an organic transition it has cosmic implications and material ones, reaching backward and forward in time. The point of beginning her movie with a  languorous consideration of the frozen corpse of the protagonist and then setting about recreating the final weeks of this young woman’s life, like a kind of psychospiritual audio-visual detective story, is that having entered into death in space-time, the young woman’s material-organic death has implications going both backward and forward in time, but we don’t get to see the future, we see only the before-death as a quantum territory wherein the evental death actively reinscribes and reencodes the living material past. I was quite surprised to hear Daphne speak so coherently in her current state/condition, especially insofar as abstract thought will invariably become aberrant and perverse in those in active addiction. I also confess to having felt a little sheepish for never having myself had the proper sense to call Vagabond a metaphysical film outright. It is. And in exactly the way Daphne lays it out. In light of this I feel even worse about the stupid joke I made as Daphne was going downstairs for the night and I to my bedroom. I told her that if she died in my house I’d kill her.

Xenoglaux 2025

Psycho Yet Again: June Prose Poem

Any of you dreary and predictably irascible asshats want to help cordon off a special little piece of activated resistance? even if it’s practically a bust or a bust of us, endless lovemaking and base subsistence, lying on a cot that is all I got whilst airforce communards drop their loads on the ill-prepared retards whom we shan’t ever hold in high regard, even if we are that, soothsaying cat, so somebody better show up and show humility unless they want a whole new disability. Even in the worst of times the man who looks like Simón Bolívar won’t lower himself so lower depths as to get in my car when we need to make our escape immediately and head straight west into the tsunami my lady love thoughtfully preordered for me. Is that a gargantuan train wreck or just a crick in one guy’s neck? I’m feeling thick upstairs but mighty limp in my underwear beneath this infernal sun that won’t play fair. Another day, another duty paid at customs, hirsute bear-men for rent that come with their own natty silver buttons. I’ve seen thieves sneak into jewelry stores through the sewers and been upbraided by management for failing to get my prunes properly stewed at Mount Galatea, Spray Lakes Valley, the Kananaskis. Do I know how to make your woman squirt? Go ahead and ask her if you think you won’t get your feelings hurt, forever inert and on alert, the elastic and forever placating Papa No-Person, the grubby nobody equipped only for handing out allowance money. And if I retain, O Lord, a bit of the pitiful reek of a Norman Bates, that don’t necessarily mean that a man’s mother isn’t his best friend. In the end I’ll take what I can get because the going has got stuck and I’m so easily dropped or blocked-off by the blockbusters and their ballbuster underlings. Norman, did you kill your mother? In a manner of speaking, yes, in the sense that I killed her, but at the same time I was sure I was her so the case really isn’t all that clear, my dear, and even as Anthony Perkins was demonstrably queer, not that anybody ought to jeer, I could just as easily be the Honeysuckle Rose fastened to your rear or the earwig set on spelunking way down into your ear. How many hundreds of clams will it take until we finally uncover the greater sham? Sam-I-Am is siamese if you please, people-pleasing Aesop-on-the-rocks jock-of-all-cops queasily awaiting this dinner of multicoloured cocks. Bear-up, child, and rub this nauseating unguent on your chest in preparation for the great e’er-foretold unrest, the tugging at the apron strings of polite society who tries her best to be dainty but cosigns unspeakable cruelty mainly. This is the place I leave all who followed me, hounded me consistently, or weren’t even decent enough people to earn so much as a dollop of my symphony's available sympathy, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” playing on repeat accompanied by sweet meats and pigs’ feet, gemstone bedecked glitterati hot tub party and sanguine reading of the minutes, Club Officials doing their unseemly business directly adjacent to the tar pits, unthinkable and ruinous extortion at the hands of would-be Martian culprits, I’ll break in and despoil any place as long as it remains under control of the indefensible human race, the rate race, whatever the fuck, the rat being the patron saint of infrastructure, porousness and coarse odour of piss that is infrastructure, asparagus, Latinate declensions from forbidden sub-dimensions make good order and governance a 360 degree rotating food-fighting irrelevance like the famous seven irrelevant rearmost elephants. Please turn things over and set them afire all Looney Tunes. They say there’s a lady down the way who thinks I look good but is concerned I might be gay. I’m gonna invite her to the riots later today and we’ll see if she can throw a brick well enough to carry my bairn.            

The 99% Televisual Man

When I was young I studied the literary and flakey European philosophers known as Continental philosophers rather than the more stodgy and fundamentally British ones they called Analytical. I was a poet more than I was a logician. Wittgenstein was an Analytical, one of their demigods in fact, protege as he was to Bertrand Russell, but I always harboured a kind of special fondness for him on account of having deduced early on that he was both autistic and a closeted homosexual. Philosophically, for me personally, you can sum up Wittgy’s Sturm und Drang and reduce it to something pure and simple and maybe (increasingly) useful: there is no meaning for people—nor will they ever find any—outside of the operative communications apparatus, whatever the particularities of that apparatus may happen to be in any given place and time. Unfortunately, as everybody and their loud, opinionated uncle knows, the communications apparatus right now, summer of 2025, isn’t even a vague whisper of a ghost of itself, and a lot of this has to do with the internet (of things), a planetary network/web made from real material parts and running 24/7, which is no longer like the maypole around which we gather and dance a jig, but much more like a Tower of Babel that will divest us in short order of our ability to communicate or collaborate meaningfully with one another at all. When I was young there were only a certain amount of channels on the television and everybody was basically drinking their news and entertainment right out of the same trough. The absurd level of harebrained consensus was maddening and troubling, from my always slightly-outcast vantage point, but it was eerily consistent and from the perspective of now probably almost idyllic. Sex and gender have quite little to do with it: if I meet a new person at any time in this 21st century reality in which I find myself bumbling through an embodied experience, I will not have any idea where they get their news and entertainment until they start laying it out for me.

I went on a date last night that was awkward, rife with unhealthy communication tactics flowing in both directions, and ultimately totally demoralizing, mostly because she and I obviously don’t like one another very much…and have already done this twice before. What I’m saying is, this is the third time we’ve had sex after a sad and lacklustre date. She has no consciousness of who I am or what my tastes will tend toward. Last night I had to watch two episodes of Mom, a new or newish piece-of-shit Chuck Lorre sitcom I’d never even heard of, just because I said I liked Anna Faris. She seemed slightly ashamed when I told her I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like making her feel that way. So then we had sex, and the density of the nightmare thickens. I haven’t even mentioned her once to my sponsor. I got home from the date shortly before midnight, ate a bag of candy, and lay in bed sleeplessly staring at the bedside lamp I knew I’d use to defend myself should some nocturnal interloper seek to enter my house with ill-intention. I’m the kind of guy who can think about an intruder long enough to hope one actually shows up.

Having slept almost not at all and being in a funk because of the date, my finances, and a hundred other bullshit things, I arrived at Ernie’s for my coffee as I normally do on my way to my morning A.A. meeting a little later than usual. Then I realized also that there were four people in front of me in line, such that I had to make a choice as to whether I wanted to go to my meeting at all, or if I wanted to sit down and drink a coffee and eat a cream cheese bagel. I did the latter, sitting for a while scanning newspaper headlines from around the world on my phone. Hatred for my fellow man was at a manageable simmer. After a short while, as the place was sort of clearing out, an extremely well-dressed, tall, and attractive couple sat at a table nearby and as I began to listen in on their private conversation I was reminded immediately of the marvellous Javier Marías novel The Infatuations, which is narrated by a woman who spies on an attractive and compelling couple in a café day after day…with horrendous results. I did not intend to ever repeat this exact experiment, should that even be remotely possible, but I was immediately fascinated by what the tall young man was talking about, which related to an episode of Black Mirror, the popular streaming series sort of in the spirit of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and an episode which apparently features the actor Jon Hamm and has quite disturbing implications in the sense that it suggests that some kind of criminal justice infrastructure conjoined to A.I. and quantum computing could in the near future develop ways of torturing persons, in whatever state of embodiment, infinitely. The smart and composed girlfriend said this was exactly the way ratings-obsessed streaming platform executives would imagine a fully-syndicated eternity, but as I was finishing the dregs of my coffee and bunching up my napkin, it seemed to me that the premise of that Black Mirror episode I’d never even seen was the most terrifying thing I had heard in my life, at least since learning about the ubiquity of death itself.

             

There is something to what the young lady said, too. It were as though television was always there to hook you then serially hurt you, much like a large 19th century novel might kill off your favourite character somewhere in the vicinity of page 400. When I was living with Louise she really loved Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad, neither of which did anything for me. My complaint with Breaking Bad was that Walter White was the only dynamic, fully human character in the whole show and that the writers kept throwing out plot points like they were smoking crystal themselves. It was almost like the days of the old-timey ‘cliff hangers.’ That being said, I did make it through a few seasons of Better Call Saul on my own, precisely because l liked the characters and the non-codependent relationship between Jimmy and Kim. I stopped watching Better Call Saul the season where the final episode has the brother, played brilliantly by Michael McKean, dying in a house fire. I simply did not wish to see how much more awful things were going to get.

Cover Tune

 

Work Reprimand

Larry, how’s it going? Please step into the office if you don’t mind and close the door quietly behind you. Terrific. Okay, look, this isn’t the first time I’ve called you in here and I suspect it won’t be the last, which is okay…I remain confident that we can all work together to develop a more evolved mindset. But you’re actually getting worse, and that is an issue. You remain clumsy, slow, accident prone, and increasingly you are menacing and surly when approached by most anyone. I mean, look at this. At 7:35 this morning you commented Bro, I fuckin hate you on a Facebook post from a complete stranger with a ridiculous moniker. What was it? Oh, yeah, CrispixAlpha. That is a horrible way to start your day, Larry! I know you have a chronic mental illness and that that means having a hard and baffling life with chilling abyssal zones of harsh incoherence, the psyche is the nesting place of traumas, but, really, though, you must have been the kind of kid who fiercely protected all his toys and lashed out at anybody who’d approach within a certain perimeter. You have the deep and deeply unhealthy hacking cough of someone who’s swallowed a silo. You are self-protective and defiant. You know, hell, I absolutely used to be like that myself. Somebody would come up to me and say who are you? And I’d say I ain’t anybody you need to worry yourself about, buster. Don’t fret as of yet, kid. Speaking of kids, that young woman you were sort of dating was awfully young. It didn’t look good. And from what I could tell, though she had a sweet temperament she also had a fucked-up heart and contaminated worldview. That’s on you only in the sense that you didn’t see it coming and then it flattened you. It’s also on you because you shouldn’t have pursued anything with this person in the damned first. The first gal in her twenties you meet who’s into jazz music and you go all disco oblivion. The ladies in Interstellar Transmissions call you the Jazz Spaniel. How do you feel about that? You still snorting coke? It’s the same basic set-up wherever you go…have gone…you’re bounced about like a pinball to the tune of almost no actual productivity and eventually you attain pitiful burnout, nothing but lint in your pockets. Do you think of your online life as a kind of therapeutic harassment or something? That’s just incredibly sad. No sensible person would want to spend any time extending it a thought. Why blacken the horizons any further? We need to have a No Identities office party. Leave Your Identities at the Door. I want you to connect with Clark. His energy is extremely unthreatening and frankly it makes me a little jealous. And I want you to implement a particular adjustment with respect to your daily meditations and your daily self-talk. The universal consciousness suggests referring to yourself as human instead of any other noun, proper or not. Not Larry, but, you know: hey, human, what’s the lowdown? I hope this can help maybe get you way outside of yourself for a while so you can see the world and see that you aren’t any more special than us other dick-lickers. Right? Don’t look despondent. It’s all gravy. I’m expecting you at the Nondenominational Cleansing Ceremony. 2:00, Larry. Try and put on a good face, a'ight? 

Astrophage

I hadn’t seen Theresa since we’d played a wedding at Lake Louise in January and now it was April already and here she was walking down the street with her bass clarinet and some fella I’d never laid eyes on previous. I couldn’t get much of a read on the guy. He had the beard of a craft beer aficionado. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d always be ready to oblige you with a handshake or broad grin. I literally did a 180° and booked it back in the direction from which I’d come.  It hasn’t yet been easy for me to find ease anywhere, my childhood having been plagued by all kinds of visions of how ghastly things were going to get, how poorly I’d handle it, and the torments and agonies I would suffer for having had so little a proper part in the part I played. Theresa doesn’t prick up her ears when I’m with her until what I’m talking about briefly overlaps with one or another of her personal interests. A conniving careerist who isn’t going anywhere special, she startled me over dinner once by angrily describing how another friend—a guy we both know, perhaps her lover or former such—avoids her and then mopes and then grandstands, all of this stuff that Theresa was doing to me at the precise moment she was clumsily delineating the thing. What are you gonna do? Someone can be looking right at you and obviously have a lot on their mind, then proceed to tell you that they have nothing to say and everything’s okay. Nothing is ever okay on this planet, Jones. I no longer have the remotest capacity to divine what is going on around me, especially with respect to people I think of or previously thought of as friends. It’s a contagion of emotional withholding; it may correspond tangentially to solar flares and shifts in planetary axis and all these sorts of things. We have the degeneration of U.S. statecraft to the level of candy floss and bumper cars. We have all-too well documented evidence of the nightmarish zeal brought to bear in Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is all stuff of which I’ve been terrified since I was in grade two at Woodlands Elementary and having to see all this sordid destiny through to the end has positively shredded my last goddamn nerve. What could anybody want from me? My psychiatrist says I can start looking for employment when I stop showing up at the emergency room for a spell. Whatever I have to offer may not be there tomorrow as that is the way of all things in transit. That is the way of Heraclitean flux. It doesn’t debate or abide contracts. It’s all the different kinds of weather we know and don’t know. Who out there I wonder has the most up-to-date numbers on the unknown unknowns? I will take the Buddhist stance here and strive to live the mandate: I don’t know, and it’s terrific. “A crowd of facts,” observes Henderson in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “came upon me with accompanying pressure in the chest.” The philosopher Byung-Chul Han advocates immersion in a “hovering time” that can avail us visions of “temporal sedimentations issuing a phosphorescent glow.” Take this if you will, from his 2021 book The Scent of Time: “The spell of profound boredom will only be genuinely broken if the ‘vita activa’ incorporates the ‘vita contemplativa’ into its critical pole and once again serves the latter.” If you cannot read, learn, and discuss openly then you can contribute to nothing other than the real-time downfall of postindustrial society, and I’m confident you are not very likely to ever see your own personal part in it just like those clueless jet-setting billionaires can’t see theirs. Nietzsche is largely talking about the ‘Protestant work ethic’ when he writes: “Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.” The artless bustling business of people might be the whole imposter civilizational facade its very self. You have enough jobs, you quickly catch on that nothing on God’s earth is run all that well. The inefficiencies and redundancies are astonishing. People who are manufactured more or less by the state are prepared early to inform on one another, to compete for status, to maintain plausible deniability, and to go ahead and do what they think they can get away with. In a basic sort of inherently socio-mechanistic context like that you can very easily see how conspiracies of silence may come to predominate. I’m not good at fixing this problem. Wherever I touch it the big bad bastard gets all the more inflamed. I don’t have the illusion of permanence, breaking it all down as I do to the twelve-stepper’s twenty-four hours. I have managed one day at a time well enough to still be here. But everything has to pass through a filter in order to meet and greet the reader, so going forward now for however long I am going to do stories that are essays and essays that are stories, and all the characters are going to be composites just like all of us already are, neither selves nor mere animals, but rather something much more akin to the capricious wrath of Zeus.