Wait for all the drugs to take effect. Drink your beer slowly. Sit, poised, ready to strike, just in front of the keyboard. Wait for it, Wait for it. Let the nausea strike first, the gag reflex; then the tingling; always the tingling just next, in the ears, like a shine right off the bottom of your earlobe where a fragment of magnesium just ignited. Think of the greats, the craft, the way you look at the thread behind where you just spun it together. Never get ahead of yourself. Remember that. Feel the soaring, like your feet letting go.
Oh, fuck. What was the blue pill you just took? Was it an upper or a downer? Christ; who gives a shit? Let your neck roll, until it feels like its going to break free. Dive in and dig around, look for it and watch for it and wait for it; this is a god damn piece of gold, you’ll think, and you’ll set it down because there is something bigger. Fuck the itching, just keep typing. You’ll drive to the store if you’re not thinking clearly, so don’t, don’t think clearly, think in foggy vistas and on turrets waiting for the approaching army, they’re gonna be here any second.
You do this for 10 years and you know it will never stop. No ending in sight, this is how you are going die. You know it, clearly and with fury. Rage, pent up from too many unfinished fights where the other guy wasn’t dead, comes out of your pores just like the guy who hemorrhaged everywhere cause they removed his liver and piped everything through his spleen and told him he couldn’t have a drop of alcohol and he did; A whole 1/5 of Vodka which could be as many as a billion drops as far as he was concerned. But you’re not concerned. You keep plodding away. You smoke another joint and eat 2 more pills. You write and masturbate and think of the end or the beginning – but you never waste time on the middle. “That’s the god damn journey” you tell everyone, “it ought to be just like life, a fuckin’ dream.”
And you parade on about your ideas, like no one has ever had them before, like you might be Edison at a party, mingling, grabbing ass, fucking anything that moves, only because it’s not like your Ex. and you’re fuckin’ Edison. But you never waste time getting upset when they don’t see it. They’ll tell you that you’ve got hungry eyes, and they’re right. They don’t dream the same way you do, in blues and oranges with solid grey devices that ruin your sleep and always make you ashamed for the orgasm that just soiled your comforter. They sit and stare out windows and you jump through them. Damn right you’ve got hungry eyes and the whole world is going to get eaten by somebody so you better get your fill. Drink more; with a concentration this time; with a purpose.
Go ahead and throw up; as much for how you feel about yourself as for the swaying room around that requires a release. It helps to keep a bucket by the typewriter, by the refrigerator, next to the couch, next to the bed. People will complain of the smell, but if you’re lucky you can take it longer than they can and they’ll stop coming over. Avoid the needles, though, as that steals your work. At least for most of us; whole armies have laid their weapons down just to sit around and spike themselves – remember that it’s always easier to kill the self than it is to kill someone else, but don’t let that stop you. “Suck in your gut,” “buck up boy,” “all the cool girls are doing it,” will be repeated to you – fuck them. Let them swirl around with the rest of the air that needs to be polished from to many greasy fingerprints getting their share; can you feel the oxygen that’s been around for eternity? Get more beer.
You’ll fly through the world and live. People will say they remember you; it’s not their fault, it’s not yours; you’ll say, “I’ll measure my success by the number of people at my funeral!” just as pleased as pie with yourself and your kindness and you never forget that the Presidents’ funerals are filled with people that were in their debt and rich men are never threadbare in their casket when there’s trophies to murder for. You never stop to consider the similarities, so you eat some of these red ones here, then you can’t stop … screaming at no one for nothing, “You son of a bitch for this life! You fuck cock piece of shit for laying the choices of my soul on me! I’ll grow, you fuck! I’ll grow like a god damned redwood and then I will do nothing; just like you, you …” stuttering on, lingering on accusations of infanticide of turquoise, imaginary orphanages on the other side of the world where nothing reigns supreme and life isn’t worth a shit, you’ll loose nothing and gain nothing, making a hole twice the size with no effort. Then you’ll close your eyes and sit down and everyone around you will wonder just what you’re doing to yourself – they’ll think they remember a nicer you, a kinder you, not this raving lunatic. But you have to be – some people have to be gay, some people have to be tall, some people have to sell nothing to non-existence. Fuck it, give it a shot – drink a swallow (just one, maybe two … “i’d kill a motherfucker for less than that on the outs.”, what’s stopping you?), lick you finger and wish the end of it was gone, so you say you lost it in the world war, rather than everyone fingering it out that you lost it because you can’t hold onto a picture long enough to get it down, out, like a shit or shake. Well, it’s your funeral and you can fucking do as you damn well please: go ahead and dance and bellow and rub your feckless cock against all the thighs of those who loved you enough to show up – see which one will stay to finish the job off the right way. Yeah – you’ll know all about it and you already do, so you throw every life away, every single fucking one, you toss them out like Today passes on by Yesterday. And every life is one more death and you’ll dance that way and this and think about it all and finally, you’ll fall in love.
It’s to be expected from your ilk – but you don’t need to hear that from me; you’ve heard it from all the living things: notes pinned to your shoes with blades of grass where the ants have written out, in their own dead bodies, “If your world would end as quickly as ours, you’d know safety.”, so you think you understand. You hitchhike to the San Andreas fault to see where the world is supposed to fall in and all you can see is a street of desperate black trying to overcome the yellow ants. You stand in the middle of them, thinking you will know safety and for some cosmic reason (you’ll understand later), you don’t die that time – or any of the other times you really should have. You’re keenly aware of this and throw your life away again and again. You won’t get it for a long time and every time you do, you’ll forget it. You’ll write and write and pump out the shit from stringy ribbons hoping to let the ghost of someone once better out: there must be a middle somewhere, but you will throw yours away at least one million times; you should know where you’re at in that course, but of course, you’ll forget.
You’ll saunter into calculator grinding systems and think of the world as square, sometimes L shaped, talk about ramblers, cape codders, condos, upgrades and foil inside where your heart used to be: it’s keeping the space wrapped for storage. You’ll tell everyone you hope it comes back to you one day and low and behold you’ll be putting it in the pawn shop just as soon as you get it back – if I weren’t the narrator, I’d kick your ass for that one thing alone, but it’s just you: you’ll dream of someone and they’ll come around, just as clean as your dry cleaning. Measure up, [drink a beer], impress impress impress; then jump to conclusions – what the fuck were you thinking of? One more life used up, was that seventy-five? Have a joint, it will make it wetter. “Cigarettes! That’s what’s missing at this party!” the little Asian girl will say. “Do you have one?” She’ll whisper it right into your ear: like you’re a lizard and she’s a fly. They’ll do this all night long if you let ‘em. Don’t let them. You won’t. “I have a chocolate dream of us, and there’s delight all over the packaging.” She won’t be scared off; Christ, she speaks significantly more languages than you and she can think. You, however need a drink to keep this up. Slap her: she likes it: threaten to fall in love with her: she wants it; violently oppose intimacy: she loves it. You’re fucked. It’s not a shock the way it was finding out how a woman can turn love on and off; that’s not even a fair comparison; two thousand lifetimes to understand the impetus of now and the unreality of this existence. Sure they loved you alright, but now is a whole different thing than yesterday. You’ll understand the World War then, at that moment, and all your dreams will be missing the tip of your finger. That’s the time to sit down and seriously decide whether or not you want to eat all of the black ones or some of white ones with a pipe. The little Asian girl will find her own spot to die.
You get out on the road and dream of different places, you dream of different worlds and while you’re walking alone in the desert, after you’ve forgotten about water and are drinking exclusively from your flask, you imagine the new world into being. You make it a trick – imagine the world where everyone is happy, imagine the world where everyone is decent, imagine the world where the workers aren’t exploited, but they all bore you in one way or another and sooner or later, you will imagine every world possible and sitting, waiting, right here will be the golden nugget that you had set down an unfathomable number of lifetimes ago and it will be too late. Your mixed senses derailed to the point of unrelenting destruction of lifetime after lifetime in a series of wasted visions and missing time co-ordinates. Stop. Find your eye. Feel it and poke at it gently: you know this pressure; the ordinary steak that you rave about from the four star joint looking at you as it was; the earthworm that you rescue from the sidewalk after the sun has come out; you have that pressure down. And the throbbing temples from news reports of anonymous factions of fuckers slowly fucking themselves into the most beautiful genocide ever; better even than the small pox’d Indian that leaves you wishing for a long shower after going to their casino: A small token to Gandhi’s path of enlightenment. You hitchhike to the end of the world and decide to come back.
Craving safety, you re-read the Ants’ note to you over and over again underneath freeway overpasses. The cops ruin a kind-hearted blow job; safety is averted. You hadn’t wanted that anyway; just that afternoon, you were beating off your friend and you weren’t sure if you were going to hell or not. Maybe the cops saved you; you won’t know this for a long time to come. Neither of them understood it either. Years will pass by and the note will disappear and it will become just a standard part of living: you will stop destroying things without meaning to; but don’t jump ahead; you’ve still a haul ahead of you. Hearts and Minds, son, Hearts and minds.