Postcards from Purgatory

Just Satyrical Prose.

Kiss it all goodbye; remnants of childhood imaginings evaporating off crumpled pillowcases and vibrant dream worlds overshadowed by monochromatic reality.
There was a boy back there, clean and bright, full of unhindered curiosity, running through wonderment and lost in the playgrounds of its mind. Then, when the first tinges of actuality touched his feisty fingertips, he was filled with the shock of compassion, that only ones sharing in his depth of empathy could comprehend, and he knew misery for the first time.
And now? An acerbic senescent man wonders how such naiveté could have been himself, concealing feelings of embarrassment for having ever believed that mankind deserved redemption, contort his face into a jester’s mask.
The world has become a drab grey charade, imitating the light spectrum; a pasquinade in place of monuments. And these streets, these avenues of simulated living? They violate the maturing æsthetics of a mind that can be enthralled with just the quiet serenity of a mountain slope and the understated elegance of a leaf blowing in the wind.
Simplicity is so underappreciated. Urbanization has done more than litter the landscapes by constructing synthetic order over an underlying chaos, it has emptied the countryside and made into gardens void of spirit. Neon meat-markets and ostentatious billboards have replaced woodlands, and careers in service separate man from the artefacts of his creativity, making him another instrument of means.
There, around swimming-pool lakesides and electronic hyper-realities, un-meritorious mechanoids muster in search of a rare glimpse into verisimilitude and a genuine experience with substance; robots looking for an emotion chip, some updated software of conscience, some newfound inkling of philotimo that will reintroduce them to humanity.
These ensconced souls, using the myth of ‘human rights,’ a system provides them with, vent their anxieties and become more than they pretend to be, or could ever be. Protected from the complications of culpability they turn conceited, impertinent, and demanding; they become three-dimensional.
This distance from responsibility, this immunity from personal choice and action, has made human existence into a farce. In the resonating vapidity, excess becomes commonplace as parody is used in place of the missing real. All things become a monstrous overkill so that the basic sensation can be appreciated and the “experience of living” – as Campbell claimed to be a myth’s purpose – can be attained.
‘Reality’ is inflated out of all proportions, accommodating declining sensitivities, but also made impotent through consistent disinfections and persistent quarantines.
A white-walled sterile world where nothing you touch touches you back.
In the pressure to maintain hygienic environments nothing is left to chance, no sign of imperfection is tolerated and no hint of delusion is dismissed.
Markets are filled with produce minus any memory of where they come from or how they got there. Saturated with pesticides and picked before stress has sweetened them and sunlight has burned colour into them, they look plastic in veneer, and feel forged in texture. No worms, no bugs, no spots of natural decay. Meat comes to us neatly packaged with no remnant of a slaughter; canned goods with taste enhancing additives; preservatives and food coloration give off the illusion of salubrity.
The world must be cleansed of any hint of authenticity.
Here in this enhanced reality of testosterone distended muscles, hormone therapies, surgical mammary glands, Botox injections, penises in spectacular Bacchus splendour and excessive juvenescence –expressing desired dependence and faked virility – everything gets notched-up an octave and a new artificial median is found.
It is a world of dolls, with perfect skin and hair, with push-up bras, lipstick and gaudy toupees; an environment of play-actors and caricatures where increasing numbness is counteracted with ascending extravagance; where a whisper must reach the crescendo of a scream… and a scream…?
A scream becomes an inaudible Munch-like facial contortion where, in the silence, the horror is lost in travesty; simulacra of a Baudrillard nightmare.
Under these circumstances enjoyment can only be had through overindulgence and amplification.
A caress must become a slap; a kiss must become a bite; a voice must become a shriek; a gesture must be accentuated through theatrics and dramatizations, so that purity can be replicated in the superfluity of emptiness. Passion made clear through sadism and masochistic magnification.
Circumstances, themselves, spin into staged events and legitimate characters vanish under thespian exuberance. In the frenzy of thrashing panegyric ecstasy – mirroring the ones from
Nyssa only in style – sweat drenched bodies, fatigued and made receptive to virus, become vulnerable to any unexpected cool draft and fall sick as a consequence. The very thing that shelters them, imbuing them with a false sense of imperviousness, renders their immune systems impotent. For with the death of this modern dogmatic, unreachable, God, man’s soul has turned diseased and a fever burns mankind’s temples.
But what else could we have done with such a God? We had to kill him in a pre-emptive strike.
And now, that boy cowers in silence in the center of a much more austere man; the world a grey-shifted kaleidoscope of imagery that washes over him like rainwater; a screenplay where the lines between fact and fantasy overlap and leave him indifferent.
Life imitates art these days and the world is an amphitheatre enclosed within an arena. All reality is measured against the recycling imagination of the human mind and the distorting inevitability of memory; expectations are heightened to the delirious pitch of a wet-dream.
If it does not correspond precisely to the imagery of inflated realism, it must be revved-up, improved, embellished, diluted, warped.
The world made large to be seen by eyes that have lost their acuity or made small to hide their shortcomings. Man takes examples from the screen and the screen takes examples from itself until the circle is made complete and reality, or the lack thereof, is left excluded on the periphery.
Even this confession is a parody.

Yours truly, from the temples of doom, Wanderer

The universe of the surreal no longer comes to us through Rene Magritte’s imagery of hypothetical subconscious symbolisms, or through the pen of Andre Breton. It has spilled over into the world at large.
It has left the dream-world for the conscious one.
And what is the difference? If the real and the surreal have become indistinguishable then what does fact matter, or action, or truth, or inertia? All is malleable and nothing matters.
The first casualty is that of severity – cynicism takes over and leads the way.
In a culture where not even the self is taken seriously, everything loses weight and gravity becomes a myth. Imponderable realties come to be and all sense of permanence and reliability vanish, with compounding disinterest.
Cynicism is the lovechild of extreme scepticism, where no single thing has value unless it fits into a self-referential private reality where nothing external is allowed to disturb its internal cohesions, and fabricated tranquillity.
But reason wasn’t meant for exploring the manifestations of its own subjectivity. It was meant to create subjectivity through sensual elucidation, and with it build war strategies and defensive castles of power, withstanding the unperceived objective world beyond.
When it was forced to turn in on itself, due to the absence of creative frontiers, it became a cannibalistic entity, a self-effacing glutton; consuming itself.
The second casualty is that of energy. In a jaded muted world, referential second-hand experiences are just as reliable as any other.
War, violence, brutality, love, sex, adventure could all be explored while lying on ones back reading books of fiction/non-fiction or watching screens of fantastic imagery, listening to computerized tunes.
Acumen built on minimal effort; bought in used bookstores, in DVD outlets and corner magazine stands.
The experience of battle is shared through camera lenses and the voyeur convinces himself that he is just as worthy of expressing the terror and euphoria of combat as anyone that was actually there.
The deconstruction of authority begins with the absorption of distinction into a multiplicity of voyeuristic co-experiencing. One man’s involvement becomes everyone’s involvement, and action/adventure another product to be distributed and consumed. We no longer exist, we observe existence; we no longer live, we observe life.
The hero of the quest loses his face and turns into a 3-D character in an interactive simulation; he becomes a detachable prosthesis that is worn by all so that the cellular memory of the limb is downloaded into a communal trough. The totality of the experience is, inevitably, lost is translation; diluted through the appreciation by proxy.
To replace what is being lost, parts are severed, amputated from the dead corpse, and then nit-picked with surgical precision, and scanned with microscopic accuracy.
The medium focuses on fractions and fragmentation, disregarding the whole; frozen images, camera angles, sound-bites, micro bites, microphones, nanotechnology, as the miniaturization of the real distracts the senses from the entirety of nothingness.
In pornography the essence of the sexual act is misplaced in the conglomeration of images, writhing and sweating. The spectator is a participant and an observer at the same time; the event assimilated into consciousness, leaving a lasting impression. That’s when everyone becomes a celebrated idol; everyone turns into a leading man, and the event loses its magic.
But what happens to these doppelgangers of surrealism? They speak with the commanding certainty and ostentatious power of the eternally unaware, wearing on their heads a distinguishing bowler hat, drawing the eye away from their faceless craniums.

Yours truly, from the deserts of anonymity, Wanderer

I had a meltdown again; part of my usual cycle of self-pity. It usually begins in the morning, when the mind searches for reasons to persist and before possibility has been slandered by the day’s disappointments.
I rummage through subconscious details and only find an insatiable will, curious and full of unjustifiable hope. Then, I open my eyes to the other four dimensions, and I’m reminded of my earlier disillusionments, once again. The process repeats.
The will is all that drives me now. A pride that will not capitulate.
Later in the day, I watch the tube.
A cartoon character using the usual catch-phrases of movie-land reality, for the umpteenth time, reintroducing, in that Austrian accent of his, an empty husk of a man unto the podium of Democratic theatrics. His inner vacancy splattered on a smiling visage, in a silly grin that says ‘for rent,’ as he makes his way to the microphone where he will recite his carefully crafted speech –by others – from memory, making sure he hits all the talking-points, making all the rehearsed dramatic pauses.
He mirrors, so accurately, the pattern of self-realization of every hollow vessel, as he once looked for contentment in substance abuse before he settled on that ‘mother’ of all vacant space renovations, religion; a kind of ‘spiritual-eye-for-the-simple-guy’ that results in a ‘born-again’ vivacity.
The crowd cheers on their heroes towards oblivion; milk laden herbivores munching on manufactured fodder of innocence, waiting to be relieved from the pressures of their engorged adders.
One is the incumbent and the other a symbol of America’s dream; both marionettes of hypocrisy and idols of pretence that reflect their bankrupt qualities the masses, have learned to adore.
They embrace and become indistinguishable.
I change the channel to a documentary.
At least here the lines between predator and prey are easily discernable. In the absence of meaning I settle for purpose, going through the motions of living. But the mind wants more. It craves a connection to the real, a taste of finality. Death becomes so attractive at times.
It’s not that I crave recognition or attention, but that I am possessed by a desire to find something, someone to not feel so alone; something, someone to share the joke with; something, someone to be real with, to become a child again, to stop analyzing the ramifications and to surrender to chance.
This need is what keeps me grounded to my humanity. I accept all aspects of it, with some bitterness.
All emotions have found a way of purging out of me, except that single one that wells-up until it knots my throat in rage. It now dominates my thoughts, not because it is the only thing I feel but because it is the only thing I am not allowed to feel. I live in a world where such displays of temperament are deemed intolerable and punishable – uncivilized. The consequence of unhindered self- expression would have unacceptable personal costs and it is this restriction that burns the fires of my rebellion. I am consumed with a yearning to release it in the full glory of its sexual force, exacting my own vengeance upon an existence of contradictions and indifference; yearning to spit in god’s all-seeing eye.
My mind is filled with visions of destruction, of smouldering citadels and decapitated corpses. The blood of morons splattered on my face, alongside a euphoric grin, their cow-like eyes pleading for mercy before I spill their unexploited brains before my feet.
There is so much stupidity to clean away, so much filth – a Herculean feat.
And if I should fall victim to my own fantasies; what a way to go? What a perfect ending?
The predictable ensuing feelings of guilt, compassion, and regret – products of my nature accentuated through cultural indoctrination, but easily dealt with and ignored in the presence of so much splendour.
How can a man remain a man when he is asked to bear his neck daily and is forced to accept the taunts of lesser beings? He loses a piece of himself; forced to turn womanly in his strategizing; forced to swallow his pride; forced to endure the shame of mental castration.
Most of this unexplored violence remains cloaked under layers of civility, as I do not even dare write most of them on paper, just in case they become discovered at some time, somehow.
Do you think you know me now? Fool, I am more than this.
How can I be encompassed with crude labels?

Yours truly, from the edges of sanity, Wanderer

I wrestled with the devil again tonight and, like always, I was badly beat. He knows all of my moves, by now, and he always manages to pin me with a clever promise and a dexterous threat. It’s my firmness that lets me down; my mass.
But all is not lost. In his hands I’ve learned much about myself and I have seen the world as it is. Through defeat I’ve become ethereal, losing substance with every fall. I’ve become water.
He now struggles to hold my will; winded by his effort to find a part of me to exploit, a part of me that still cares, a part of me to manipulate, as he once did so easily.
In the race of the everyday I have lost all concept of solidity. Objects drift through my fingers and pass through my mind without touching me. I am like fog.
Nothing is mine and I belong to nothing. This is becoming increasingly disconcerting, confronting the very essence of my primitive being.

I danced with the devil again tonight and, like always, he was the lead.
Floating through the moonlight landscapes, a nightingale played a note as I struggled to find his rhythm. Dark images that once made me gasp now only fill me with longing for the world I left behind.
This too is slowly draining out of me. My tears, crystal dewdrops forming on luscious canopies, dropping on the thirsty soils of continuous recurrence.
These silly creatures, I once called my kind, now look so absurd to me; penises and vaginas fighting for a place in a vast bacchanal, fucking their way out of meaninglessness. This is called life. A fool’s existence.
Mucus filled corpses governed by chemical necessity, spewing excrement, releasing gases, gushing liquids from every orifice.
Then with ridiculous appendages and soft grey-matter they search for eternity, for nobility, for truth, for understanding, so as to become more than animated dirt; a slow decay of cadavers obscuring the stench with perfumed deodorants, and intoxicating disinfectants. I laugh to stop myself from gagging.
Consciousness, as it is defined, is an orgy of engorged testicles and ovulating ovaries; every meeting a fuck-fest to weather mortality.
Cocks, pussies, tits and asses sum up humanity and an orgasmic spasm defines mankind’s creations; all that you see are remnants of multiple ejaculations splattered against emptiness, excrement of desire.
Priapus should be erected in every town square as a symbol of our real spiritualism. Every other idol has been but a variation of the original.
Holy trinities representing man’s triangular balance: father/son/holy spirit, mind/psyche/body, life/becoming/death, justice system/government/the people, instinct/emotion/intellect, male/sex/female, attraction/apathy/repulsion, good/neutral/evil, true/doubt/false, pleasure/contentment/pain, love/indifference/hate, master/power/slave, past/present/future, material/ethereal/immaterial, here/movement/there and so on. A fitting heritage for those to come… and come… and come…

I sang with the devil again tonight and, like always, he drowned out my feeble chant with a guttural bellow that stirred the dead. The tune reached a deafening climax before it tumbled into a silent murmur of discontentment; a splenetic lament for those exiled from the kingdom and condemned to build their own or perish trying; a dirge of indignation towards a god that had to pay for his incessant vanity.
Then, I realized that I was in the company of a friend and not a vile fiend as I was taught to believe. And there, behind the singing fallen angel, stood my father, smiling at me, like he had rarely done when still alive; his brow uncharacteristically soft and his glance full of gentle mirth. He knew what I will soon find out on my own.
“This world was not meant for eyes like ours. They see too much and can tolerate so little of it.” I heard him say.
“Behind every idol we see a fraud and behind every word we hear the motive.”
“How can I make myself blind to it without losing the magnificence, how do I become deaf to it without losing the song?” I wondered.
“This flesh was not meant for fires like these. It feels too much and the spirit warps in the blaze.” he went on, ignoring my plea.
“The most impressionable materials must be protected from such harsh environments or else they solidify into twisted shapes and lose their beauty and flowing glee.”
“How can I find the balance between my heated senses and my cooling mind, how do I absorb the world without letting it soil me?” I asked.
There was no answer.

Yours truly, from the shores of Styx, Wanderer

For once, to lie down in sleep and to awake into a world made anew.
All past events vanishing in the rising sun, as if they were a dream, and reality, once more, a pristine source of spectacles that dare you to make them yours. To be a child again, unhindered by the prejudice of hindsight and unsoiled by the remnants of experience; a naïve, curious, student of life, pure and honest in his thoughts and actions.
For once to kneel down low and drink deeply from the flowing waters of Lethe, that so sooth the wearied soul. All symbols of yore fading with one swallow and the scars that made them true evaporating like sweat off smooth skin. To be clean again, fresh and bright like childhoods Saturday morning joy, rested and ready for a day of play in the fields of happenstance.
But no such gifts are offered to mortal men as I. What is known cannot be unknown; what is done cannot be undone.
Mistakes either edify or they victimize, they cannot be erased from memory but only denied direct access to consciousness.
There is so much to regret, so much to recall with sullen grief, but nothing more grievous than my incessant need to colour humanity with my own brand of exaggerated decency and my persistent practice of openly speaking my mind with little insincerity and even less guile. This, most of all, has been responsible for my failure to put into practical use the products of my receptivity; this and my utter indifference concerning possible rewards.
The world was not meant for naive dreamers. No, this world was meant for liars and charlatans, spewing words through forked tongue and guiltless lips, wearing faces of ignorant innocence.
This world was made for self-deceivers and conceited pretenders, burying diffidence in delusion and uncertainty in feigned confidence.
This world was invented for actors that need scripts to find their words and wardrobe/makeup to fit the image they cannot interpret otherwise.
This world was created for simpleminded morons; vacuous spirits looking to be fulfilled by occult sources.
“The meek shall inherit the Earth!”
For what is more believable than what is already believed and what is more easily manipulated than what is ignorant of itself, hoping to be exploited?
The mind has an inbuilt propensity to grasp onto anything that flatters it and to totally ignore what will drive it mad; existential retardation which ensures that the living will continue to find reasons to persist.
What little deceit I have been responsible for was in passively allowing others to continue defining me and the reality around me, using epithets that did not correspond to my own, and in allowing stupidity to take its course and find its expected natural conclusion with no intervention.
My calm has been my retribution; my silence has been my faked approval.
However, even here I’ve not remained disciplined to my own insights. These occurrences, of my own culpability through silence, have usually and regrettably been prematurely sabotaged when, in an ensuing moment of credulity, I open my mouth and speak my conscience – a terrible thing to do in a romance-obsessed, politically-correct world as this.
If only I could follow through with it and let simple minds construct their own theater-stages where, swallowing my own pride, I can be cast to appear in the outrageous outfits woven for me, with a feigned earnestness that denies the ensuing ridiculousness of an inevitably shallow performance.
What has it cost me, this impatience with bullshit and idiocy, this arrogance of honor and dignity?
Admittedly, there’s so much I’ve lost; so much I’ve pushed away with my free tongue and relentless desire to be appreciated for my authenticity rather than for my performance; a desire to be valued for my presence rather than for my promise.
Friends, women, jobs, opportunities and even a child have been burned away with the fires of my vain straightforwardness. All of them thrown away due to some myth concerning nobility.
Nobility!? It sounds so absurd now. Not in this world; not at this time and place.
Where, in this cesspool of hubris, could such an aristocratic concept survive?
A “Philosopher King” would require the sheltering force of an entire Republic to remain untarnished in this universe.
Language is fraught with so many empty words of vanity, and “nobility” is but another example.
Only a pathetic creature, like man, could come up with standards of distinction he could never live up to and then feel ashamed about it; standards so ambiguous and murky that no dictionary descriptions can thoroughly encompass their nuances.
Have I learned my lesson yet? Have the last remnants of romantic idealism been purged out of me, yet? Have I stopped dreaming, yet?
A fool, I am, to have ever considered that there is such a thing as authenticity and dignity or that a thing like intimacy is even possible. A big game of dominance is life, where everyone believes himself the winner when speaking the phrases of partnership and equality.
Consciousness is built by subterfuge. Whose falsehood is labeled ‘truth’ is determined by power balances and circumstance, and has nothing to do with fact, supporting evidence, or idealistic fancy.
An agreed upon equivocation permeates social interactions and civilization is constructed on commonly acceptable approximations. These are called morals, values, virtues and ideals. Then they become established, out of habituation, and become traditions, laws, gaining the benefit of being considered truths, if they make it to the top.
Every human relationship is littered with ignored realities and underlying tensions; a natural consequence of trying to find conciliation in the conflict between intellect and instinct, or of trying to find harmony between human need and the other that quells it; a kind of negotiation between reason and necessity, attempting to avoid unconditional surrender and save face, despite of it.
People are not interested in who other people are, they are only interested in who the other might become, or could become, or should become. People don’t accept other people the way they are, they tolerate parts of them so that the other parts can remain accessible to them.
Successful human interactions are the ones where one or both sides accept piecemeal the realities of the other by either stifling the parts that collide or by masking them behind consent, so that specific shared goals are reached and specific shared interests are maintained.
A cooperative dance of illusion where no movements contradicting common rhythms are tolerated and everything that threatens the chimera is punished with exile.
Sometimes they may result in long-term affairs, empires of harmonious coexistence, when after the objective is achieved, anxiety, comfort and familiarity prevents change; the secret to a ‘good marriage.’
What does man appreciate more in the other than the reflection of his own imagination?
We are attracted to beauty because it gives off the imagery of health and spotless vitality, we covet; we are attracted to intelligence because it gives off the fable of power and control, we crave; we are drawn to the external to fill in the gaps in ourselves.
It is possibility that makes us disregard our reason. Possibility grounded on empirical elucidation.
We adore anything in the other that lends credence to our fantasies and hopes. Whether they are justified or not never enters into the equation, unless the dream is foreshadowed by awakening. Then we react violently in defense of our own errors and we blame the other for our own mistakes.
And here’s where I slip up by trying to reshape the imperfections in accordance to my own wishes, because I cannot bring myself to ignore the blemishes, nor can I blind my eyes to them for an ephemeral gain. It’s the power appetite of my nature.
Perhaps it is time for a reinvention of purpose, an adjustment in strategy; one of those adaptations that enhance existence and are the mark of a true survivor. Perhaps it is time for a reincarnation, just like the ones I’ve done before; a reawakening of the parts that slumber unused inside me, a forgetfulness that will reinvent itself.
If trickery is the lubricant of social participation and all a person is allowed to be is a projection of sensual information, then let it be I that decides what is perceived and how I am defined and let me be indifferent to all other interpretations.
A peddler of hope and thoughts I’ll be, feeding the wants in others so that my own are fulfilled; a yes-man to idiocy that claims to know the universe and constructs edifices of convenience to hide itself; a passive participant of agreeing positivism while I manipulate hope, ignorance and misinterpretation into moments of pleasurable ludicrousness.
Life is too short to be taken seriously and reputation too ephemeral to overly preoccupy.
It means nothing if you are praised or damned after death. This too fades in the eternity that follows. No more trying to connect honestly and no more remaining loyal to my misinterpretations of virtuousness. Virtue is personal and the world has nothing to do with it – or so they think, and I will no longer refute.
They consider the universe a playground; a vast, cold, wonderful, soulless gaming area and all that is in it but playthings to be enjoyed and forgotten.
Who am I to change the world? Who am I to resist nature? Who am I to want more? Who am I…?
All I can hope for is an “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.

Yours truly, knee deep in the fertilizer of life, Wanderer

There can be no more joyous day for the troubled traveler than the one proceeding after a long leg of a particularly demanding trek, and he is forced to refocus his sight upon a new horizon.
The bruises and cicatrices, that mark his hide, are reminders of the road left behind and symbols of struggles he successfully endured, to be worn proudly like war medals; each attached, through memory, to a battle that was survived, tangible evidence of what was experienced and surpassed.
There need not be bragging, no verbal testimonial presented, no admission of guilt; the body wears its past like a military uniform in the war of existence. Each blemish, each scab, each callous, each fading cut is a visual memorial of individual history, and those inner wounds that cannot be readily perceived, find their way to the surface through glances, scents, and gestures; through words, postures, and mannerisms; through subtle details of action and linguistic particulars.
A man’s physical shell is a narration of his past, a moving script of credentials; everything that has touched him has left stigmata of his perseverance.
It is this that connects the multiplicity of individuations and encompasses them in a singular being, where sometimes who someone is and who someone was bear little resemblance to each other; two strangers entangled through history by I fine linear strand of time – fused by a cord of memory.
In this way my early love for mankind has marked me well.
Such ideals I had, such high hopes, such expectations…such bullshit! I built podiums to raise them on; trophy cases for the, supposedly, laudable. The highest of these towers, the most honoured throne I reserved for, none other than, women; those mysterious god-like creatures that beardless men find themselves consumed by. To them I wanted to prove myself and from them I wanted to win my pride.
Such a slave to my instincts, I was. Such a victim of my ignorance, I was. And they, such willing nurturers off my needs.
Now, these same pedestals remind me of my past naiveté. They lie shattered within my heart; artifacts of lost innocence. I’ve destroyed them all, one by one, vandalized and deconstructed them into oblivion.
Only one I’ve dared to keep in hiding for all this time; a single tower of hope that has slowly decayed over the years, caused me much anguish.
There I had dreamed of placing the one I might have bumped into, by chance, out there on the open road; the one that would earn my worship; the one that would live-up to my expectations of human dignity and exhibit the graciousness of spirit and eloquence of presence I would be honored to walk beside and call my own. Oh, and what gifts I was prepared to give to such a goddess.
I’ve spent years offering opportunities towards this end, decades risking all for that off chance that she’ll appear and make it all worthwhile. It has all been for not.
This childish dream burns today in the pyre of matured experience, and with it the last pieces of my youth are burned away. Tonight, when the lights are turned down low and I lay me down to sleep,
I will incinerate this temple of romanticism, and the ashes I will scatter, as souvenirs of emancipation, across the void. In its place I will erect something indecipherable. A castle of obscured decadence; a crystal palace of distorting mirrors where everyone sees what they want to see and all are treated in the way they believe they deserve to be, without any contestation from me.
If they think they should be pissed on and spat at, then that’s what I will do. If they think they should be beaten and stepped on, then that’s what I will do. If they think they should be fucked like the little sluts they judge themselves to be, by night, and then adorned like princesses so that the world is fooled, by day, then that’s what I’ll do and more. If they think they deserve the privileges of royalty and the sacrifices reserved for gods, then I’ll let them continue to believe their hubris. If they believe themselves to be part of the chosen few and the holy gifted, then I’ll show them whatever faked reverence I can muster. If they secretly consider themselves human waste, to be used and thrown away, but insist on maintaining an air of faked pride and decorum to make excuses to themselves, then I’ll play along in the farce. If they think they should be praised and flattered with little justification for it or that they are, at the very least, my equals because they cannot claim to be my superiors, then I’ll become a shameless sycophant.
The days of me insisting upon honesty and imposing my own sense of honour upon them are over. The days of me wanting to embarrass them into realization, are over.
There will be no more resistance from me. No more placing my own ideals about dignity, pride and nobility upon those that have no understanding of them.
This solitary drifter will allow his natural talents to resurface, once again, and a wily grifter will be resurrected, like a phoenix from the dust.
I am nothing if not ingenious when I can control my impatience. This new course fills me with calm now.
The old tears of grief resurface as absurd hilarity and I laugh again, with the untroubled glee of a dotard.
Laugh and croon I will, in that eastern ululation, I reproduce so accurately.
Sing those old songs of a land long gone, which capture life’s tragicomic resonance and wail against reality. And those that hear me will stop and listen, and will find themselves quoting my words and will find themselves seeing through my eyes and noticing the things I showed them so clearly.
Nobody forgets the wanderer when they notice him in passing.

Yours truly, from the paths of possibility, Wanderer

Damn the French and their postmodern wastelands! It’s only fitting that I should find kinship with those great western outsiders of our times. What have I been all my life if not an outsider? Always the new kid in school, the stranger from a strange land, the foreigner knocking at the door asking permission to enter, politely requesting for a hot meal to eat and a warm place to sleep in?
In those moments, standing before the walls and closed doorways, when uncertainty grasped me, I awakened to the architectures of human creativity and studied the bricks one by one; saw the fragility of the cement holding them together and the subtle deformities in their form.
And when the door was, sometimes, opened I absorbed the atmosphere with a single breath, visually sweeping the interior with the clarity and curiosity of a new arrival. I seized details, learned the mechanics and made myself sensitive to the ambience, and the invisible tensions. I became conscious.
His words echo now, with renewed resilience, within my chest:

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

The Wanderer
The path ends! Abyss and deathly silence loom! You want this! Your will stayed to its doom!
Now wanderer, stand! Be keen and cool as frost!
Believe in danger and you-are lost.

Upon what territories have I trespassed now? Beasts of burden roam the streets, un-harnessed and untrained. What more dangerous animal can there be than the simpleminded one that has been unbridled and set free before real fear has taken hold of it, having never felt the limitations of its being?
Look at this world! – A repugnant zoo of bestial domiciliary.
What most, cultivated barbarians lack – in comparison to their wild brethren – is a sense of caution, derived through the humility and humiliations of brutal experiences. The wild has a way of imposing a more efficient disposition, a sense of cutting irony, and a more modest self-evaluation.
It demands respect! – Exactly what kennelled, cultivated souls have little of; their poise and confidence more a product of artificiality and unchallenged ego.
You give permissions indiscriminately; desensitize them from reality, by offering an assortment of realistic imaginings, splattered across their every sensual reference point, relieving them from the constraints of responsibility, morality, and religious horror, and what you might get… is this!:

Aldous Huxley wrote:

Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.

Liberty is not for all.
There has to be some innate self-regulating mechanism present before so much wealth and possibility is bestowed. There has to be some discipline of mind present before it is opened up to the universe. There has to be some hook-up present; a metaphysical plug-in; an innate virility of spirit – health. Passions must be channelled into dammed reservoirs so that their full potential can be cultivated and so that they do not lead you astray into flooded farmlands. Those that know not these disciplines become destructive to themselves and to others.
In my abject state, I offer a false face of tranquility, as my inner being churns trying to throw me into its turmoil, where I will surely drown.
I remember:

Julia Kristeva wrote:

Not belonging to any place, any time, any love. A lost origin, the impossibility to take root, a rummaging memory, and the present is abeyance. The space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the transition that precludes stopping.
As to landmarks, these are none. His time?
The time of a resurrection that remembers death and what happened before, but the glory of being beyond: merely the feeling of a reprieve, of having gotten away.
(Strangers to Ourselves)

And:

Julia Kristeva wrote:

Meeting balances wandering. A crossroads of two othernesses, it welcomes the foreigner without tying him down, opening the host to his visitor without committing him.

She and Derrida presenting an alternative to the more masculine:

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:

We must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of relationships between consciousnesses is conflict.
(Being and Nothingness)

Anima/Animus engulfed in a battle over our moral fibre. Who shall win? Who will we allowed to claim our futures? Who will dominate our collective unconscious?
What happens in this modern obsession of peering into the abyss, of deconstructing into infinity, is that the soul is dissected, opened up, laid bare until nothing is left but dark nothingness.
The onion layers, keeping the self in a cohesive unity, are peeled away, exposing it to universal flux. Culture, religion, authority, mythology, tradition, all discarded and defamed until one reaches the inner core and, discovering emptiness, he realizes that it was the layers, participating in unison, that made-up the mystery of identity.
Let them ostracize me now. The vengeance of the weak should never be underestimated.
Let the one that is sinless cast the first stone and let him smile, in that self-contented, self-righteous mocking way that so perfectly exposes his soul. Let him call it passion or ‘poetic justice,’ or ‘strength,’ or ‘majesty,’ or even ‘love’ (?), as he hurtles his retribution upon me.
They hold onto the Bible, or that popular postmodern substitute “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” like a safety blanket against their chests. They quote from it and worship the authors with only a selective abstract understanding of what was being said, or how it actually applies to real life.
What were Ghandi’s seven mortal social sins?
Smelling the blood from my open wounds let them gather, one by one, to feed off my energy, to spit into my gaping heart, jeering and adding their pebble of anger to the frenzy. Mass hysteria manifested.
They want to tear me to pieces for what I’ve said. They want to teach me a lesson for what I’ve dared. They want to erase it from memory by annihilating me. They forget, perhaps, that I, myself, have willingly and in full awareness of the consequences, placed myself here; that it is I that voluntarily laid down here on this hard ground before them and it will be I that decides when I shall get up and tell them, what they forget about who they truly are.
How easy it is to unravel a soul, especially when it is offered to you upon a platter. An onion, as a gift – it’ll make you cry before it nourishes you. They speak of love, and trust, and honour, these children of the west. They claim to have aspired towards nobility. They speak of brutality and war and ferocity… Ha!
But their actions… their actions… What do they say about them?
When they ask: why am I insulted? – Do they always flatter themselves with explanations that degrade the other? When they cast stones, do they forget their own vulnerabilities? When they love or hate do they demonize or sanctify the other, finding reasons for their indiscretions?
The lesson has been learned, so let me be silent now; stoic and serene, as I want to be, emulating my highest virtues. Let me live up to my own expectations and hold onto what memories remain of compassion and love. Let me hold my mouth still and my heart exposed.
I fear nothing, now that I’ve lost it all! I’ve felt this before. I’ve survived it. This world can’t disappoint me anymore.
Now, it is time for play and joyous abandonment to pretence. To be serious, is to hold onto ideals.
I have found none thus far.
So let me be like them: clownishly painted fools, laughing at themselves through others; sweepers of dirt under the carpets of reality; psychologically retarded souls with no capacity to forgive their idol for being human; emancipated minds lost in possibility.

Yours truly, from the frozen north of Hyperborea, Wanderer

What precious moments I’ve savoured; what instances of sublime near perfection I’ve collected:

I remember…
Sitting around a dinner table under a starlit summer day with a group of assorted characters, sharing food and drink and, united by a common tradition, a moment of rare camaraderie.
One of my companions was strumming a bouzouki, sending notes of twinkling tears into the night, and the rest of us sat there singing songs of grace, tunes of mirth and sorrow, melodies of absolution, embracing each other with both voice and hand, our spirits locked in mutual exoneration.
And the world? The world was momentarily exiled from our symposium of merriment and grief; our singing an invisible sonic wall to keep the demons away, a vocal wall of harmonic vibrations casting waves of disturbance through the air.
The evening lamb became our sacrifice to the phantoms of the surrounding darkness and the homemade wine a conductor of inner spirits releasing their energies into the midnight calm – intertwining there, for a moment, above our table in a melodic dance before drifting off into the nothing.
Oh, how I sang that night; my voice rising and falling, twisting and turning, straining against the knot in my throat, transcending my own physical limitations that held the better part of me concealed.
Tears pooled in my eyes, my heart gushing forth from every pore, my body tingling with the delight of release. Lost, I was, lost is elation and torment… taking them all with me.
We became one that night; a revelry of the damned, an alliance of the defiant, made courageous by the godly nectar.
And what songs we sang! What poetic curses we let loose into the dark! Anthems of resistance, ballads of love and hate, psalms of mourning, nostalgic hymns of remembrance; they became our shared reverence for life, our unified condemnation and we but instruments of the great unknown absolved from all liability.
And we cried… Cried the tears only those that have seen life at its fullest can, that only those that have felt the ecstasy and the horror of it all can fully appreciate.
And when the songs were done and the night turned into dusk, we parted, strangers once more, but now joined in the memory of our coupling denunciation.

I remember…
Dancing on a mountain top frontier outpost in the middle of nowhere, with only giant guard dogs and the surrounding forest as our witnesses. A band of soldiers, we were, sharing a common duty but also a common fate.
Dressed in dirty torn khakis and seeped in cheap Retsina we danced… danced like Zorbas only knew how, danced with the pneuma of our forefathers guiding our every step, in that manly hands-to-shoulders way, from a time before our birth.
We whirled in the darkness, dipping down low, swooping upon the sacred soil before leaping into the air, as if to set sail upon it, as if to shatter our earthly chains; the body spinning, weaving, and flowing with the rhythms of an Asia Minor that is no more, our ardent breathe sending shocks of heat into the winter air.
We shared a soul that night, drinking greedily from a common pool, supporting each other in our quest for divine transcendence.
What were we that night? – Agents of divinity, will-less minions to the sound of pulsating cosmic tempos.  Our bodies were taken over by nameless powers, ancient occult forces connecting us to a long line of shared descent. We were one.
But there was order in the seemingly ebb and flow of own orgiastic ecstasies, a hidden code of meaning in the circling flow and seemingly random patterns of our limbs. There was a symbolic imitation, so different from the thrashing and gyrating of more modern dances with their primitive sexual innuendos and garish vulgarity. There was a narration of a past that only men can reproduce.

I remember…
Waking to a sunbeam splash, her nestled face pouting against my chest, and her warm breath a caressing reminder of an earlier inner heat that engulfed me and pulled me into its abysmal depths.
My mind grasped for wakefulness but settled for the groggy half-stare into empty space, where body has yet to be rekindled into animation and just lays there paralysed but perfectly contented.
She stirred in her sleep and I felt her breast stroking me with its fullness.
A subtle smile stretched my lips as I dipped down into the memory of her thrashing desire and as the echoes of her earlier yearning groans resurfaced in my mind.
So soft and subtle she was, with a delicious round rump I loved to cup my hands around, and a face of large-eyed femininity that drove me crazy when she bit her lower lip, in that way she did, teasing me into tumescence.
My mind then drifted into the daydreaming serenades of imagination, where fact and fantasy intermingle with the carefree creativity of mayhem and, nourished by the unconscious, concocts circumstances of hidden need.
I cast her as my lead, a naked cherub running from me in a forest of doughy white mist, her muffled laughter egging me on with its promise, the curve of her bouncing buttocks making me gasp in anticipation. As I reached to grab her, she turned on me pulling me down upon her on the billowing cotton fields and I was snapped away into the memory of our first encounter:
We danced in a smoky crowded St. Denis club both of us uncertain as to what would follow, when chance decided for us. The swaying swarm pushed us against each other shattering the shyness, and there, surrounded by prying eyes we shared a first kiss and then the groping hands of unleashed desire and then…

I remember…
Riding on a winding road that cut through the Peloponnesian countryside like a wrinkle on a weathered hand. There was nothing but the sound of the wind in my ears, the tremble of the engine between my legs and red-soiled olive tree orchards against the backdrop of deep cloudless blue running by my eyes.
Along the way I collected lessons from past lives and insights from the geography; the jumble of remembrance becoming a tapestry of mingling instances, where past, present, and future become one.
I paid my respects to the Olympian gaming grounds, where men of old attempted to bridge the gap between body and soul and dreamed about harmony and ascendance.
I ran across the arena, where once audiences gathered to pay homage to the best of the best, and wanting to retrace their steps, I strolled upon their walkways and gazed upon their monuments.
Then later, down the road, subterranean chasms of Deiros reminded me of the high cost of creation and the easy nonchalance of destruction. Floating through the tunnels, I saw pillars that took centuries to be created – natural artistry that took millennia of undisturbed persistence to come to be – and yet how easily one could cut away a piece in a moment of brash selfishness.
Then, later still, swimming in the Aegean by a Byzantium fortress-city, I plunged into the abyss of azure, surrounded by schools of delicate beauty. The floor plummeted suddenly into hazy depths where my stare was met with a wall of impenetrable blue that sent a chill down my spine. I swam there weightless.
Looking into infinity can make a mind go mad. So, I turned from it, wanting to find an object to focus upon so as to quiet my trembling soul, but it beckons me still, that image of the void, it calls to me to come back to it, to dive into its mystery. The abyss.
Then, promenading along seaside village harbours, restaurants strewn by the water, I hear the tinkling of glassware mingling with the ocean pulse, the feint smells of roasting lamb meat on the salty air and proprietors pleading for my money:
“Please” he says, pointing to a seat, thinking I am a foreigner here.
I sit, ordering ouzo with the usual accompanying octopus, and I become spellbound by the setting sun, made more beautiful with alcohol streaming through my veins.
She’s there, as well, a curious creature wanting things from me but unable to ask for them directly, seeking for safe anchorages in me, but unable to accept the ones I offer, playing those games girls are known for and so good at.
I already know that she will eventually turn on me, wanting to excuse her own failings. She will call me the names she calls herself in her head.
The prophetic knowledge does not disturb me for now, choosing, instead, to recall her crumpled visage as I penetrate her, that bite on my arm when she comes, and her sweat drenched hair brushing against my face as she rides me in the night. The moment is not ruined. There is splendour in an even imperfect circumstance there is beauty in even an ugly situation. All is part of the abyss.
One must learn to cut away the clutter and focus on the sublime. There, within the noise, I can hear the feint resonance of a central hymn, a subtle reverberation of melody.
All else falls away. Not even she is present, nor necessary. The world engulfs me instead.

I remember… to remember.

Yours truly, from the chambers of Mnemosyne, Wanderer

I heard his pipes echo in the wood – light and mirthful, like dewdrops on the skin. Silently I crept through the underbrush, beneath towering canopies of green, tiny scratches of red upon me, wanting to catch a glimpse of this mythical creature.
The tune pulled me towards it, and I considered tying myself around a tree, like Odysseus upon his mast, to resist the call. But madness held the upper hand and there was little reason could do.
Nothing would hold me back from completing my quest, now that those pipes had stirred something slumbering in my spirit; something I had forgotten was there. But the more I advanced, the more I realized that I was making no progress; and the more I was denied success, all the more passionate I became, all the more I burned with desire, each scratch glowing crimson bright.
After many hours, and as the sun settled on the horizon, casting a deep green haze over my world, I chanced upon a pool of calm water, shimmering with cool delight, and I bent over to quench my thirst.
The pan-flutes grew louder, as if in anticipation, and I wondered if the creature was not in the lake itself. As I approached my lips to the smooth surface, wanting to break its perfection, there, reflected back to my eyes, a horned devil stared back, wide-eyed with surprise.

Yours truly, from the satyr’s lair, Wanderer

And when the time comes when we must part, who will make the first move, clasping hand to chest, in a gesture of self-control, when years of moments rise-up for a final pass? Silent and brutal it will be, I fear.
Not so much a scream but a trembling, a whimper chocking the throat, preventing despair to pass through unobstructed. Then, all will be lost except those small mementoes, broken into tiny pieces; scattered, like pebbles on shores by a sea with no-name.

Who will remember… how your eyes sparkled, when you smiled at me, and your lip quivered when I treated you in that manner of mine?
Who will remember… your grace and kindness, amongst so much vulgarity? Who will remember… how clean you were, despite all the filth around you?
I will. You can count on that. I will forever recall.

I’ve heard that it is best to forget, but I refuse to consider such sage advice. I choose to hold onto what others let slip through their fingers, palming them back into their secret pockets.
I will be honest about it: I will not forget.
If I am to make of my life a joke, told by a fool, then only I will be permitted to laugh. Tell me about your bygones because mine have yet to be.
Crowded metro stations, where my mind drifts to that cold December night in Tripoli – wood stove, barely enough to heat my shivers away as I consumed loukoumades with cinnamon dust; desolate and alone with my thoughts, and my memories, when you were still not even a possibility.
But I waited, not knowing why, or for what, I waited.
My whole life has been spent in some state of waiting. Waiting for the bus. Waiting for the end of my shift. Waiting for the results. Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for the sunrise or the sunset.
How common I have been when I waited for the change to come, over me. And when it did, as with all things anticipated, it left me with a dry mouth.
What should I drink to quench my lucidity? Some poison to lessen the world’s toxicity?
All it takes is for a genuine desire to die to make life worth living. An end to anticipation. An end to waiting. It’ll come, whether too late or too early, but it will certainly come. But, this time, I will not be waiting.

Yours truly, from the subway stations of departing arrivals, Wanderer

I’ve always been third-best. Not quite good enough to reach the top, not quite bad enough to fall under the perceptual radar, into the shadows of anonymity; always one ‘not to be ignored’ but, simultaneously, ‘not to be considered’ seriously; an in-player and an out-cast; charming but not a ‘keeper’; a runner-up to the runner-up – never made any great first impressions at all, unless I chose to open my mouth, and to speak my mind. A rare event, because most people prefer to keep others on the periphery, where they cannot be bothered with them – and that is where I kept myself, wanting to remain pleasant and inconspicuous, knowing all too well what would happen if I was asked to speak my mind.
But my dæmon would not keep me there for long. It had bothered me, at first, when I was young, wanting to break free, having not, yet, come to terms with reality and human nature – but not enough to turn me away, pretending it isn’t so. Instead, I became fascinated by it all. The crueler it was, the more I wanted to see. My pain fomenting anger and fermenting into spiteful curiosity, as a form of self-flagellation: every inch of this world, every secret, every rotting corps, every lost dream, and mutilated innocence was placed into my mind’s cauldron.
I poured salt on my wounds, only to discover its healing properties; the burn of healing, and I emerged as someone new. I changed my name to commemorate the event of my rebirth, and then I faded back into the shadows where I want to stay.

Yours truly, from the edge of anonymity, Wanderer

I prepare for my departure when I arrive, passing through the spaces for a repeating last time.
My fingers caress the surfaces, feeling memories of their demise; every moment mourning for the one before. I long for you when you are pre-sent; my eyes taking-in your every detail, as if you were already gone – I re- call you, over, and over again, and every time you re-turn you’ve changed.
Every sound echoes like a church bell in the distance that is so near; vibrations I drink-in time because it cannot last; with it comes the world, passing through me, and I through it.
I cry at the thought of the living, as if I were a-wake. My eyes settle for nothing; my hands never tightening into a claiming fist. In-stead, they dance over surfaces, careful not to disturb their place; fingertips moving over textures. I own nothing, giving myself to none, as well; I move through, remaining unmoved. I want nothing as my keep, because I will not be kept.
What I come across I hold, gently, for a while, twisting and turning it before my hungry eyes; weaving my-self within it, intimately, with the light.
I manipulate, I do not hold-on; I, then, re-place it, moving on with but my re-collecting mind.

Yours truly, from across the chasms of time, Wanderer

I love everything about water. I love it in all its forms: gas, liquid, and solid.
I love water because it reminds me of what I am, and of what I was and will, once more, become.
I love water because it connects me to everything and all. With it I stream down mountainsides and through intestines; I gush up and trickle down; I wash away and am absorbed; I rise up and I fall down.

Gas…
I try to grasp you, and blisters are my reward, when you slip through my fingertips; a painful reminder of my vanity, and your elusiveness ways. I conspire to contain you, to enslave you to my machinations, when you are, still, so soft and pliable, desiring to harness your secret powers; a bit of agitation, is all you need, to bring out your explosive energies. But then, quiet comes with you when you settle upon the earth to rest; all cool and moist, and heavy with memory. A subtle blanket muting sounds, erasing outlines; turning landscapes into mystical dreamlands a man can disappear within, becoming a ghost in your mystifying realms.
Walking through you, a dance with the sky; falling up and going nowhere.

Liquid…
Dancing, flowing, and engulfing me when I plunge into your promising menacing abysmal depths; darkness hides down below, but you buoy me up above, pushing me to where I can, finally, breathe.
You can devour me, and I drink you in, every drop a precious gem trickling in and flooding out.
You shower me, washing me pristine, baptismal cleansing away the grime of my past; your fingers teasing every spot with dedication, making me feel reborn. You remind me of parts I had forgotten were mine, invigorating my sleeping essence, returning me to lucidity.
I am awakened by your calming caresses. I feel a new man every time; alive beyond measure. But you will not stay for long.

Solid…
How deceptive you become when you turn hard and cold. Slippery and dangerous, you threaten to break me, pretending fragility.
Sometimes you fake firmness; a thickness of substance, tempting me to use you as support; underneath the thin cover, a liquid death in your embrace.
I tread carefully upon your surfaces, and every sound of you giving way makes me stop, in anticipation of what is to come.

Let it flow, into the desert of my soul. Let it wash away all my remains, leaving nothing behind but a sense of something past that will come again. At times I want to resist, and fight your currents, and at other times I wish I could abandon myself to their power, and let what will be to finally be.
If only the wonder of the flow will let me.

Yours truly, mind-surfing over the abyss, Wanderer

All multiplies with pussy around. The laughs, the cries, the bullshit flies… the lies.
Multiplication begins with a subtraction; suspended reasons, algorithms, depending on the seasons; and if anger flares, for he who dares, we’ll track it back to the sub-strata, armed with data, and extinguish it there, with care.

All’s hard when pussy’s around. The lightest word becomes engorged massive, the air thick, tumescent with a heaven-ness, pulling it all to a passive grounding; and when pussy speaks, may the gods be-ware and listen – hanging jewels and horny mules, dreaming of a humpty-dumpty laid bare, cracked and spilling over.

All’s magical when pussy’s around. Mind’s levitating buoyant, burn and crash, with gravity – oh, the depravity – when contemp(t)lation reverts, and converts, to caricatures of self-indulgent men-children.
Spent, they smile, for a moment, gratified, their powers rubbed into calming lethargy.

All’s fake when pussy’s around. Hair teased faces con-sealed; tight lips before heaven’s gate, hoping we’re not too late – friendships fall, when ‘bros before hos’ is no more than a prayer, hoping only the other’s faith remains true.

All’s dramatic when pussy’s around. First love then hate, the jealous (r)age; when pussy turns to cunt the deal’s done for all but the most desperate submit to pathos’ rant.
Emotions explode and then recede to prepare for a new ass-ault.

Yours truly, drunk in a bordello, Wanderer

I looked through the fissures in the mould; sudden rush when my eye came into contact with the cold; tears, warm, liquid fire running down. I guess I never thought I deserved anything from time.
I was never given the impression that I had a right to anything. I grew, like that.
My biggest regret in life is that I never managed to give my father joy. I never had the wisdom, or the courage to break through the sadness, and teach him how to feel content in the midst of depravity; rejoice in the moment, no matter what it was. But, I’m trying now. Now that he’s gone.
I’m trying with his namesake, the grandson he never saw, and who is so like him, in so many ways.
I’m trying to break in before the walls come up. Perhaps I’m looking for him in there, to redeem myself.
Lost moments.
Gestures, subtle looks, a hint of a lip tremble. Little things lost in little moments. I, almost, wish I could forget them.
Other times I reminisce, turning each one, in my mind, looking for every little crevice to look through, before they are lost in time.
Are you free from me, now that those little moments are falling away? I pull them back, never letting them go; each one a tiny little treasure; a precious little moment in time and place.
Did you know that when those moments were engraved in my brain that you had me? Now?
No, not now. Now, it is I who have you, in them.
The moment past and my hindsight licking every little droplet from the spoon.

Yours truly, still holding-on, Wanderer

Haunted by the streams of time, I gave-up self, and lost my prime. Distances I could not cover, not knowing they were there until it was too late, I found myself to be too soon, or that I had stumbled in too late.
“Regrets, I’ve had a few” the bard did sing, only mine were brutally decisive and irreversibly sublime.
Like a cosmic joke I first cried about, and then learned to appreciate the pun, laughing at the butt of the joke that was mine, all mine.
Reluctance and indecisiveness replaced by garish impulsive imprecision, I went knocking door to door, selling myself for nothing, until my shoes were worn thin and my lips had split in brine.
I made myself unmarketable. Settling for the two-by-four, I found comfort in the walls; warm embraces in the night, keeping out the strange noises and the starlight.
In time nothing stirred me, not even when opportunity came knocking. I settled down, but sleep did not take me, not even death.
Now, I’m making up for lost time, you see, trying to find my beat and my rhythm. The usual tricks do not work on me. I'm immune to hypnosis, motivational speakers make me yawn, inspiring speeches full of those emotional triggers, with no meat on the tone, make me simulate a smile; never been “head over heels” in love, though I have been fully in lust more than once, and the only time I come close to losing myself is with a bit of chemical help, but, even then, there's that little dæmon laughing at me right inside my cranium, where you can’t see him.
Want to impress me, give me honesty, and purity, because I can smell a lie a mile away, and despite being considered cynical I (re)cognize validity, though I may tease and prod it to get a sense of its precise value. I’m a collector that keeps nothing, holding a thick eyepiece to my good-eye, exploring nooks and crannies, judging but forgiving what is, like me, less than fine.
Have you met me? No, but you've seen me.
I’m the everyman and no-man. I’m of this time, and of no time. Here, there, nowhere, and everywhere.
I adapt, and shape-shift to meet your needs. You've bumped into me a hundred times, and I've stepped back to give you room to pass, wanting to see your stride.
I may have smiled and apologized, thought the fault was not mine, making you feel powerful and predisposed to be kind, relaxing to where your nature could creep through the attitude.
“Nice, but weak,” you must have thought, but I could slice your throat with my tongue, and drink your spirit like a wine, just as soon as I could caress that severe brow into a soft twinkle in your eye, and make you laugh with a clever self-deprecating shine, to make you mine, all mine.
I'm not impressive, nor do I make good first ones, or second ones. I fall under radars, suddenly gliding up, and up, until you have to lean back and squint into the sun to get a bead on me.
I'm like that third glass of wine, when the sourness gives way to a sweet and calming sensation.
You find yourself at ease, around me, as if we've known each other for decades, when we've barely met. I do not coerce, nor cajole, I convince, with subtle words, until you believe that what you've been given came from inside of you, and that it was there all along.
Never been ignored for long, though I tell myself that I wish I were, when vulgar spirits gather to feed off my milky-white pearls, nibbling at my toes; open mouths to let them slide right in. Swallow until full, and you can keep them for your own. I'm that generous.
The moment I open-up, and let my clothes drop, the shadows vanish, and there I am in the center of the light. Can you bear to look at me?
I'm not pretty, I'm excruciating.
So, you see, not all that past was lost, and if I was out of step, my footing was steady and refined.

Yours truly, getting down, but not out, Wanderer

If there is a benefit to being a hermit, and living a life of solitude and relative remoteness, it is that you can construct an order, a routine which is in agreement with your own, particular, metabolism; it is, that in the absence of surprises and unpredictable distractions, the mind is freed to contemplate and to simply be in direct contact with a world outside manmade regimentation and time schedules.
My circumstances are in direct correlation with my essence, and this immerses me in contentment.
Every choice I made, and will make, is guided, it would seem, by an internal motive, of which I am not entirely cognizant of, until after-the-fact. I have become used to trusting it, and letting myself go to its verdict.
My past has already set me on a path I adapt to with ease, and only struggle to resist the powers that force me to go off into necessary compromises.
As if some external invisible potency is in control, directing me, bringing me closer to an understanding of the religious sentiment, and fatalism. But I have no ability to settle upon such simple luxuries. My spirit prevents surrender. I covet control.
A restless mind picks-up and goes off into unchartered areas, leaving behind the comforts of domesticated living. I opt to do away with the superfluous, the temporarily essential, so as to return to my original path; harsh as it might be, it is full of profound rewards.
If I have been a casual observer, the ‘excluded,’ it has been a blessing in disguise. It took me a while to recognize it, and then more time to accept it.
Objectivity sharpens to a perfect cutting edge on hard whetstone lubricated by fluctuating temporal tides. My benefit is, for the common mind a curse, an unbearable cost some would call ‘evil’. A conventional perspective I can empathize with, having experienced this need in all men, when in my early years, yet to come to terms with my condition before I completely understand it, I felt cursed by the gods and resented by those who appeared to be of my kind, but were anything but; underestimated by those who confused kindness for weakness, and decency for a defeat.
I came to know the quality of their judgements, well, admonishing myself for ever having taken them seriously, and when they saw a part of me, it was through rage, and then they knew, those few.
Since then my senses have been ground down to a fine point, stabbing into the heart of the matter; a razor edge, slicing through pretences, and those high terms often casually thrown about.
Soft residue, chiseled away, with every encounter, falling on the wayside, I’ve been made hard. Hot passions of eros & thymos solidifying into stone, shifting upon the hidden lava below.
I do not dive into my depths, I let it rise up to greet the sun, and as I climb up towards an unseen summit, new tectonic forces push me upwards, over the clouds where the light is brightest.
I love cloud cover because I am a sun of my own, blazing in the shadows lighting the way; making the dim notice, if I expose them to it. Being excluded, dismissed, by those I no longer recognize as my own, has become an honour, and if I self-deprecate in their presence, it is a taunt they cannot fully comprehend, buried, as they are, in their baseness. To wit, I call myself ‘gamma,’ in relation to their sexual alpha/omega hierarchies; a ‘third wheel,’ to their dual, quadruple auto-mobile frenzied activities; I follow not because they lead, but to see them tumble and fall, blind in the darkness of their brains, the smallest stone is a boulder, for them.
Have I not been a reliable, consistent source of support and joy, for them; a shoulder for them to cry upon? Have I not ridden in the back, stayed in the corners, in their shadows observing and awaiting their call? Have they not come to me for advice, for guidance, for insight, for understanding, for a clever distracting jibe? Generous I’ve been, in these times of lost frontiers. One must do what one must do, and no more.
When surrounded by a single species, such as is my lot, it is wise to study and learn to behave, like them, as if I were of them; my empathy their sympathy, my contempt their hatred. I cover my scent with their fæces and urine, and walk among them, taking advantage of what they have to offer. I take care not to let them see my eyes. I feel no shame in my tactics, for even this emotion has been milled out of me. Emotions I reserve for my own, when and if I find them.
These others shall only have my reasoning – cold and severe; they shall only have my wit – biting and cynical. They shall have no more of me than this.

It has been a long hard hike up to the height of self-awareness. The climb up, was also a dive down into depths too dark to fathom. I almost drowned a few times, the absence of air pushing me to let go and float up to the surface. But, an inner spirit pushed me further into the abyss – internal mass adjusting my buoyancy to gravity. A “late bloomer” they called me, for I arrived in the twilight to attain what for the average was on the peak of noon. I acquired new terms for myself, some of them vague and unflattering to escape their suspicions, their noisy noses, and flicking forked tongues.
To the ‘gamma’ and ‘third wheel’ metaphors, I added ‘out of phase man’ – the one ‘at the right place on the wrong time, or at the wrong place on the right time.’ A slight but decisive temporal misalignment, keeping me detached from the median metabolism of this particular spiritual species, which I learned to identify and to separate into a multitude of digestive types; time/space distortions caused by a discrepancy between different degrees of dimensional presence: energy’s speed evading possibilities of interaction, when compared with the ‘slower’ material dimensional ranges, enduring more possibilities in its passage through existence; they’ve called this ‘extrovert/introvert’ when it applies to psychological attitude, I call it essence. ‘Lightness’ of reduced dimensions compared to the ‘heaviness’ of increased dimensions making all the difference – levels of space/time determining activity of mind/body.
Tension between my dainty mind experiencing the turmoil of capricious energy, and my own lumbering physicality, always late on the scene, producing heat in my nervous system. I learned to cool-off with long periods of sequestration.
Relieved by their absence, and my willful detachment from their incessant chaos; their boisterous ‘buzz.’ The more time I spent among them, the more they wanted me to participate, and my fatigue and stress grew, driving me towards the chilling breezes of solitude.
But, as their numbers grow I find it difficult to escape their multitudes. Increasingly I am put in a position where I must engage them, and do so on their level. I am, as I always was, mistaken for something else, when I wear the masks they provide for me, and I adjust myself, digging into my experiences, to play the parts well. They like me when I adopt their caricatures, and imitate their shallow presence with a talent I did not know I possessed in my youth. I have gradually grown accustomed to their superficial praises, and deflect their attempts to approach, knowing they would then see that it was all a performance I cannot maintain for long; knowing that if they see what I truly am, they would recoil in horror, and then return with hatred to avenge themselves for having been duped.
Applying the repulsive power of ‘no,’ the benefit of rejection, is not difficult, I must admit – women know this well. It comes out of me with ease. A sacred word creating a noetic boundary between me and other – a word, a symbol, of my appearance in the world; an extension of skin beyond the membrane containing flesh and blood.
Uncovering what I am made the command an expression of my discrimination, my taste, my unyielding choice. I will be more than this, more than them, or I shall die trying.

Yours truly, spinning round-n-round, Wanderer

I struggle to recollect my memory shards before they are forever lost. Like pieces of a fading jigsaw puzzle they have worn down, over time, their shapes deforming, their imagery gradually fragmenting and wearing away; remnants of colours and forms linger and tease, helping me to identify them before they are lost.
It was a summer, a long time ago, when I had a sort of solitary pilgrimage across Crete, with no clear destination and no time restrictions.
The ferryboat ride from Gytheio, on the southern tip of the Peloponnese, to Kissamo Crete was uneventful, though surprisingly long. At the time I had little experience with ship speeds and oceanic distances. With me I took a backpack, stuffed with toiletries, some clothes, and my newly purchased canary-orange Yamaha Virago 550 cc.
I recall that we reached Kissamo in the morning, leaving me an entire day ahead. I started my trip immediately, wanting to reach an unspecified destination on the other side of the island.
Traveling along the southern coast I crossed the provinces of Hania, then Rethymno, making my way into Iraklio. Every village along the way had a different ethnicity of visiting foreigners. I remember in one seaside village all the tourists were Swedes. Even their tour guides were blond. In another village all of them were rowdy Brits. In another they were all Norwegians.
Iraklio city was loud and cramped. Riding on my bike I found it difficult to maneuver through its traffic jams and make my way to its wide port, where I had my first break and a meal watching ferryboats coming and going from across the Ægean, loaded with humanity seeking, looking, and longing for what?
An elusive experience of existence? The perfect moment? Adventure? An escape? Were they looking for what was missing, and had lost? Were they trying to recollect themselves from the void?
What do men seek when they visit foreign lands if not themselves? They carry with them what they seek, hoping that a change of mirrors may show them a different aspect, a novel side.
Years later I would disembark and then embark from that very port on my way to Santorini, with a couple of friends, following the clues back to the source of a cultural murder – the smoking gun of Thera, doorway to the subterranean lair of lame Hephæstus, tormentor of Demeter. An omen of what was to come later in my sojourn through life.
Outside of Iraklion I happened upon Knossos, diverting my course. A magical place. I walked through its metal gates and positioned myself among some American tourists who had hired a tour guide, pretending to be a member of their entourage, taking advantage of her heavily accented explanations and historical insights. An orphaned chick I adopted an American flock, as she lead us to the throne room. I was immediately struck by its unremarkable dimesons and æsthetic strangeness. These ancient peoples were not of my kind. They were not my people. Their art, like all art – including language – exposing their cultural DNA. Historians are still uncertain about where the Minoans came from and what tribe they belonged to. As the hen gathered and guided her chicks away, I stood there frozen before the throne, finally breaking the spell when a new group entered. Quickly drinking in the room’s vibe, I quenched my thirst and I turned away like a modern Theseus following the mental crumbs of my memory out of this Minoan maze, back to my waiting ship. I unfurled its internal combustion sails and surrendered to the winds pushing me eastward towards Agios Nikola (St. Nicolas) wondering what divine gifts awaited me there.
Up until that point the city of Rethymno had proven to be more to my tastes. I considered spending the night there but decided to move on until dark forced me to stop. So, I continued on, gradually making my way to the last point on my travels, Agios Nikolas, by far my favourite of all of Crete’s major cities.
I spent the night there. My room, thirty meters from the beach, my motorcycle promising a way back, parked below the room’s small balcony.
I visited a nearby pub, later that night. Festivities starting at midnight, as usual, full of drunken Brits, and an assortment of European stragglers. Madness ensued, and I was swept away by Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology. A stranger among strangers, music and alcohol baptizing us into a communion of familiarity.
Soon I tired, as usual, and remembered, in my detoxifying sobriety, that my journey was primarily spiritual, rather than corporeal, and that it would be unwise for a lone traveller to become lost in another kind of maze.
Collateral lessons I learned? Motorcycle trips are tiresome. The butt becomes numb before the mind, forcing multiple stops. Fortunately, in Crete this necessity allowed for moments æsthetic joy.
Weather was perfect. Warm but not humid. The beaches were good but not as good as those on the Peloponnese; at least those facing south toward far-off Libyan shores, from where they receive their fine sands.
My solitary trip also taught me another lesson. That I was not as solitary as I thought.
At least trips are better if they are shared. Those moments of joy, those vistas, and those unexpected events are accentuated through corroborating testaments… and recalled with greater ease.

Yours truly, among fragmented pieces, Wanderer