Enlightening Nonsense

“The three great Laws of Thermodynamics can be paraphrased as:

You can’t win;

You must lose;

And there’s no way out of the game.”

—Beyond Supernature by Lyall Watson (p. 260)

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It was about 11:45 on a Monday night when my viewing of a bootleg copy of Avatar was interrupted by a heavy knock on my door. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

“Who the fuck is it??”

“POLICE.”

I hit pause. Great, a 3-hour movie will now be even longer! Then again, if I am taken to “The Tombs,” the underground holding cells in the city, rumor has it they don’t even have a DVD player there. I immediately ran through a list of the recent illegal activities of which I had partaken.On the grand scheme of shady characters, I come up somewhere between “pussy” and “wannabe.” But still, it’s late on a school night and the “bad boys, bad boys” were a-knockin’ for me.

Abandon went to the door and started barking. Apparently being raised vegan for so long she has grown to hate “pig,” too. “ONE SECOND. Abandon, come over here.” I went to the door and looked through the keyhole and saw some official-looking guy in a suit. “Can you show me your badge through the keyhole?” I wouldn’t know a plastic shield bought from the dollar store from one issued by the State. I couldn’t see very clearly through that fish-eye view anyway. This was more to buy me time and get my bearings about what the hell was going on as I started to gnaw at the cyanide capsule in my cheek.

He pulled out a badge and I unlocked the door. I was thinking of putting the chain lock in, as I know my rights and didn’t want to risk the pig glancing into my apartment and making some bullshit excuse that he had “reasonable suspicion” to snoop around. But I hadn’t put that lock in place in a long time and somewhat remembered that because it had been painted over it required a little effort and I wasn’t much in the mood for any effort, little or large.

You say, “If you have nothing to hide…” First of all, shut up as that statement shows you have no understanding of the 4^th Amendment. Secondly, I do. I opened the door a foot and peaked out.

“Look, I can explain the bootleg copy of Avatar. I’ve been pretty broke lately and as a result of my poverty my idea of entertainment has been catching cockroaches in my apartment and throwing them out the window and so when I saw them selling somewhat current movies on the street, and not old ones like E.T.which I saw about 25 years ago and while it was pretty good back then I doubt I’d like to see it again, I thought I deserved a little entertainment in my life—beside catching critters and watching drug deals in my neighborhood—and so I bought it and if that’s a crime then so is having a Jerry Springer-like entertainer like Bill O’Reilly on television and calling it ‘news’.”

When dealing with the police…

RULE #1: Never admit to anything. In fact, better to keep your mouth shut.

“I’m not here for a bootleg DVD,” he asserted.

“Oh, phew!”

“I’m here to sodomize you with my club.”

“Uh, can we finish the movie together afterwards?” I asked

He told me there was a shooting right across the street from my apartment and asked if I saw anything. I asked for a few details, such as if it was drug or gang related, as I was going to be a bit pissed at my local dealers if I found out that their business dealings in my hood led to the men in blue, or in this case a suit, knocking on my door in the middle of Avatar. Now if I were watching something lame like Iron Man 2, I would have probably been pleasantly relieved with the interrupt.

I found out that at about 10:00 a girl was shot from behind. He said they didn’t have any indication that it was gang or drug related. “Did you see anything?” he repeated.

“Well, only the first hour or so but I still have about two hours left to go.”

“Not the movie, the shooting!” he clarified.

“Hmm. I did hear what I thought was fireworks at about that time but people have been setting off fireworks on this block over the past few weeks and I just thought it was par for the course.” He asked me my name. “Asananda.” He asked me how to spell it and I did.

“Last name?”

“X.” He looked up from his pad and gave me a look that said, “Bitch, what are you trying to pull?” I said it is my spiritual name and since I had nothing to really offer, he gave a look that seemed to say, “Fine, fuck it.”

I told him, “I just moved here recently. I know it’s not the best area but I have already been hassled by the police and have seen cops hassle others in the area and am a little reticent when the ‘bad boys’ come a-knockin’”; he didn’t seem like one of those Men In Blue dummies and I figured he would understand the word “reticent.”

“It’s not a good area,” he said and smiled at me, as if by just being a member of the Great White Brotherhood made me an upright citizens brigade, despite all the illegal objects in my apartment and things I’ve done that defied the law of law. I almost was expecting him to say, “What do you expect with all these Spics living here?”

“Anything else you need from me?” I said, in a way that seemed to ask, “A glass of cold iced tea or maybe a back rub?” In a matter of moments I turned from an outlaw to a precinct bitch ready to give the copper a hug and a handjob. He told me that he was done with me and then knocked on the apartment next to mine. I thought about saying, “You want to hang out some time?” remembering the recent episode of The Simpsonswhere Homer became best buddies with police chief Clancy Wiggum and how it became somewhat of a non-ass sex Brokeback Mountain but saw that the police suit had his mind on business and getting a reach around from me was the last thing he wanted at this time, well, maybe right behind having a black President.

I watched out my window for awhile as the cops, most of them in suits, checked out the area across the street, from sidewalk to cars, looking for I don’t know what—a bullet casing, a bloody footprint, a used condom with semi-fresh semen that could be sold at the local sperm bank. I thought about when the “fireworks” went off and how I had thought about looking out of my window but was like, “Why bother?” I thought about confronting the drug dealers tomorrow and asking what happened and say that if their drug dealing is bringing guns onto my street that this is going to be a problem. And then I thought, “Let’s get back to the movie.” And I did.

Movies have been a muse of mine for a long time. They often allow me to get in touch with feelings or thoughts or ideas that I don’t always have access to sitting around my apartment eating Bon-Bons and wacking-off. At times the ideas that come to me seem to have little to do with the movie I just saw. When I saw the movie Art School Confidential, which was nothing special, as I was walking home from the theater, in between thoughts of “What a waste of an hour and a half!” a flood of poetic lines filled my mind, effectively drowning the bed bug that crawled into my ear one night and took up residence on my cortex. I went home and wrote “Liberation,” a multi-page poem about breaking free from the prison of life’s game, a piece that I felt more deeply connected to what was going on inside of me at that time than any of my other pieces. Granted most of the others were on the topic of the dryness of a nun’s vagina…but still.

The basic story of Avatar is about a soldier who travels to the lush moon of a distant planet called Pandora as part of a somewhat Blackwater mercenary mission to extract a valuable resource with which Pandora is loaded. The problem is that there are natives there, who just happen to be huge and blue, and they probably wouldn’t take too kindly to the “aliens” saying, “Hi, uh, excuse me. You guys are going to have to leave while we rape your land and maybe a few of your hot blue chicks.” Basic story: Boy meets blue girl. Boy falls in love with blue girl. Boy kills for blue girl.

I just cut out about a page of description and commentary I had written about Avatar. Because the movie is so friggin’ long, you have to set aside 3-hours just to talk about it! I will just touch on the IMAX (big picture) of how it relates to what’s going on with me.

Dopey McJarhead, our protagonist, questions which is more “real,” his life as a cripple lying in an MRI-type metal coffin while his brain and being occupies his science lab large blue avatar body, or the avatar body that lives, eats, breaths and falls in love while his human body lies still like a corpse. He also realizes that his whole mission is a lie.

I’ll save the “Real vs. Matrix” discussion for the New Agers who like to talk about reality and not live it. But the hard-hitting truth for me is that I find my life a lie. Or maybe it’s what society calls “life.”

“You must work hard to get anywhere.” “You have to set goals.” “What kind of future do you want?” While I’m predominantly broke at the moment, the idea of slaving over a goal for a “better” future seems ass to me, regardless of whether it would be what society calls a “successful” or “productive” life. I don’t really care if it involves sharing with the world the beauty of yoga or crippling communities with oil spills, it is still just the Matrix—and waking up from the Matrix is just as crappy, only now you have holes in the back of your head and along your spine and eat nothing but an amino acid oatmeal gruel.

How many people are doing shit jobs in order to “support” their creative passions. My sister’s secretary is a writer working as a law secretary to pay her bills. My sister has literally said, “She’s my hero” because Sister X has bought into the old, “You have to sacrifice” lie that religion has preached for millennium.

I don’t even know if I’d be at peace being a paid writer. You may say, “Swami X, that sounds like winning the Lottery for you! You write about a nun’s dry vagina and someone actually pays you for your scummery!”Sure, and then there will be deadlines and “This isn’t good enough” and more edits and “Your last piece sold more” and “We need a little less Catholic-bashing” and the next thing you know, it’s another fuckin’ slave job that has sucked my life out to be thrown on the corpse heap like the rest of the dried-out bodies out there without a soul. And the worst part would be the insult of being called a “success” for “doing what you love”!

I have to get out of this apartment. Not because of crime. I don’t really care about that. I mean out of my attachments to crap that has filled up my space. Out of needing over a thousand dollars each month just to have a roof over my head. Out of fighting for a success that I couldn’t give a shit about achieving.

The truth is, I haven’t been doing much “fighting” for some time. I fought in the ring. I fought to keep girlfriends who left. I fought with girlfriends who wouldn’t leave. I’ve fought with my parents, bosses, friends, family, people in suits, people wearing robes. I’m tired of fighting.

“You’re just depressed. A lot of people are going through challenges now. Sign of the times.” Thanks Dr. New-Age Freud. I have been aware that my current level of conscious development has been come to through a series of ups and downs, zeniths and nadirs. I accept that this is part of the game. But I’m even tired of that game. Riding it out to the next peak seems lame. I rather get off the lama altogether and just lie down.

I’m tired of arguing. I’m tired of proving a point. I’m tired of listening to morons. I’m tired of listening to brilliant people. I’m tired of being told how I should think or feel. And I’m tired of telling people how they should think or feel. None of my damn business and it will probably result in more fighting anyway. The only feeling I have now is that of being tired.

A shooting…a final break-up with Ninja via text message…a pretty raw food girl telling me about her bowels…a fitness trainer telling me about his visions for community…

I’M TOO TIRED TO EVEN GIVE A SHIT. I was too tired to put an exclamation point at the end of that last sentence.

And so I died tonight. The me who cares, who needs to be defended, who seeks a better world, who had thoughts of books to write and places to see. I’ll still probably find myself in patterns of behavior that seem to care until I can gently rest in the silence of being a nobody and a nothing and be fine with listening to people like my sister and others tell me about what a waste of potential I am, as if being forced into some kind of spiritual mission isn’t slavery all the same only with God cracking the whip and us standing around acting like because he’s doing it it’s all okay. Well it’s not.

I rather God strike me down dead than take another beating and have to listen to you apologizers say how righteous his abuse and your kowtowing is. I’m like a semi-hard dick who thinks, “What’s the point—I’ll get hard, blow a load and just get soft again. I think I rather just be used for peeing.”

I think I rather just BE. Be left alone. Be on my own. Be left to roam. Be an orange cone. Just be. I guess this too will pass. And then I’ll be bitching to no longer be. If I’m not too tired by then.