Started a new job the morning of the eclipse. Down to greenwood in my corolla, breaks groaning, about to give out. Every red light could be my last.
Comic book distributor in a shipping warehouse. Park in back, walk through the back door, stand at a table with boxes of posters, illustrations. Put those posters in boxes, tape them up, slap on a sticker, note names and addresses. Unintentionally, I know something about the men in unit 3’s of apartment d’s on Prospect Drives and in Fairgrove Courts. They’re jacking off to cartoons.
Pictures of women with swollen milk bags, asses like two bronze volleyballs, sometimes wearing the barest of fabrics, a strip of fine cloth over their asscracks; big sultry eyes, curves no man could handle; sometimes in suits of armor, leaning on the hilt of a sword, hampacked tits bulging in a breastplate. Back of the warehouse in the early morning sending jack packages to every state, a few to England and Canada.
Excuse me; I’m talking about collector's items. Not meant for masturbation. Drawings of women with superheroic asses are for storage and display, home decor; what their owners jack off to is abyssal; leave it to Lovecraft for a description.
Five hours shipping boxes to shadowy abstractions in a windowless warehouse, the climate of the inside of a computer. Walk out of the (where?)house onto the asphalt, on a different planet, hot sun in a sky veiled with haze. Drive through the burbs and strips to get home before the moon puts out the light and cars crash and geysers of blood erupt on front lawns.
--
It’s a little like the early stages of a mushroom trip, the eclipse as it comes on. Back porch, grass and gravel and shadows of branches, white garages along an alley; stark, vivid, stomach turning and teeth-clenching. Three minutes of night in the middle of the day, a cold plunge darkness, and then light. One lick from the sun scours the earth.
If the sun were any closer or farther away, if the moon were made of flour and sugar, if my dick weighed 50 pounds—all life would be extinguished. Bow to probabilities, ponder the mysteries of the universe....then get back to work, order pad thai, watch a movie.
Casual consumer reverence for demythologized natural happenings. What distinguishes an event: first, its probability, then its flair, its striking effect.
Tell me about the science, the projector in my skull, the drifting scabs in the sky. Mechanistic principles, you see; feel the wonder, also of a physical nature. Marvel at the eclipse and forget the lunar crag where your head used to be. A once in a generation event: something else to swallow, another stop with a plastic tray on a walk through a cafeteria of experience. Surprised people could bend their necks any other direction but down. Mass man hasn’t seen the stars in a long while now. He’s eaten the whole milky way.
--
Driving on the interstate. Shipping myself to the shipping center; a burning engine among others, on the dynamite line between regard and rage. Semi-trucks and space cars weaving around me. 7 in the morning, the sky peeling back its dark skin.
The combat sport of everyday professional gladiators. Brush your tongue and comb your hair and head out for the chariot race, only you’re not up against champions but the roman mob. My body knows I’m dangling over a fiery death. Muscles tense like I’m opening a package from Ted Kaczynski. But I’m used to it, I can bury it. As Pascal was fond of remarking, man acts as if nothing’s the matter when he damn well knows something’sterribly, wretchedly wrong. Keeping a straight face under the heel of infinity, hunted by a hellish power. Trying to amuse myself while demons wear me inside out.
What’s one more bone crunching and soul searing absurdity, like driving 70 miles per hour to the comic warehouse to ship drawings of naked women to shut-ins? Continuing to ravage the raped out earth so that decomposing nerds can stay slack behind the blinds.
If I think about the terrors of infinite space and the might of a creator God, eternal law hitting me like a stone tablet to my temple, I’ll lose control of the car or join a monastery and miss out on all remaining pleasures.
There are games to play and naked women to look at, clothed women to imagine naked, pastries I haven’t heard of yet. Reading Pascal distracts me from thinking about what Pascal said.
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A demythologized sky but a re-deified earth. Every person a minor god with a psychological disorder derived from ancient Greece. Witch doctors everywhere. Which doctors read your chicken bones. No one loves science because science wants our love. We love only wisdom, forever feminine, because she teases and withholds, she doesn’t need us.
(Suspect the vocal science supporters of sweaty palms, real clam-handed groping of all bodies of knowledge.)
Never was convinced philosophy begins in wonder. Other feelings seem a likelier source; fear, disgust, anger, hatred, boredom and despair. Consciousness might be fear past a threshold, nailing a certain pitch. Fear as a baseline shared by all things, the trees shaking with it.
Wonder might be childlike, but it’s not original. We’re born in a storm of tears. Cries before whys.
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Early afternoon. When the day undoes its belt and lets its belly out. Enough coffee to kick a man from a coma, enough weed to send a grizzly into hibernation. Third porch, the one at the base of the side door and stairwell. Gray skies and light rain.
In the morning the rain was heavy, battering the roof of my car, splashing up on the windshield as I drove down the winding interstate, down a constantly flushing toilet bowl, water sloshing from all angles in a bleary darkness beaded by lights at the end of long metal poles, a swirling oily darkness cut by headlights, flashes of my metallic finish.
Go to the warehouse early, beat the traffic. Can’t do it on the interstate. The semi-trucks are out as always, shifting around, and I’m in the mix of the first morning rush, the city's first bout of the runs. Locked in struggle with an industrially hammered workforce waked by alarms and jolted by coffee and stuffed into ill-fitting clothes thinking forward and backward and to a hammock in the bahamas, anywhere and anytime but surging through a dark wet morning on the way to work.
Hard to believe we do this; for money, for ourselves, for our wives and children and husbands, our three cats and four dogs, our husband’s boyfriend and our girlfriend’s husband. Out there at all hours with a gun to people’s heads, a steamroller on their nuts, taunting everyone with destruction not even indifferently, not there at all, jerked around by invisible wires, launched by remote controllers in cloud bunkers.
The warehouse is empty, got there before the guy who runs the printer. Just me and those garish tits. Me and the ceiling lights. Glossy jugs in cardboard boxes filled with bubble wrap and packing paper, taped shut and labelled and put in a bin and thrown in a truck taken to another truck taken to more trucks until they stop at a strange man’s door where they’re taken out of a box and then arranged on a shelf or a coffee table or hung on the wall and when the man dies of cardiac arrest in six years more trucks will come and take it all to a dump or trash boat.
Do it for a few weeks until the next job starts. Economy passes me around like a loose joint. The industry industrial complex always has slots for balls without bearings. Work is fine, we have to do it. If everyone was on the couch all the time no one would deliver pizzas. But a kind of work, a way of life, where you’re not so much a man as a machine cypher, a unit— that’s much harder to accept.
Not so much a man as an insect. Hauling eggs for fat queens. One man on the road 20 hours a day because another can’t leave his house. A perfectly rational economic arrangement and a perfectly absurd existence.
Man is an end in itself, not means Kant said long ago. The other is supposed to be a mistery, a surprise to celebrate.
But in this modern environment where the beast Man - and women too - are domesticated they become so boringly predictable and unchallenging (Everyone also start judging accordingly and treat & examines the other like objects, this is why there's a popularity of so many different kinds of typology, from psychological/scientifical to the occult).
Internet only accelerates that, when you transmit what's in your skull to the screen.. and both become one.
By the way:
"Capitalism
Views all existence in the form
Of commodities. Nothing
Is valuable except to
The extent it will bring a
Profit on the market. Again,
The human being is reduced
To a special commodity,
Labor power, his potential
To make other commodities.
Labor power on the market,
Firepower on the battlefield,
It is all one, merely two
Aspects of the same monster."
Kenneth Rexroth
https://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/poems/1940s.dragon.htm#Italy
Woke up one morning to the realization that the commodity I was stacking into cardboard boxes and despatching for delivery was actually my own life's precious hours.
"It's hateful, and it's paid for, and I'm so grateful... to be nowhere"