notforprophet

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Art of artifact?
Be not so hard on yourselves.
The waves still wash the sand.

All the talk of snuffing and killing and mixing it up here on Xanga (Crim, Deadeye, et. al.) has played on my mind. To the point where I actually pondered—but for a moment this morning—carrying a concealed piece again. Picture me sitting around the coffee shop (where I happen to exactly be hanging, and writing this, and from which I’m about to post this) actually looking at everybody who looks at me as if they’re thinking of beating me to the draw. Oh yeah, what’s that point? What’s the point to that, you ask??

Picture this: a young man, living alone, no parents, no girlfriend, just a job and a huge house filled with over 200 plants (spent 1 hour each day watering ½, then the next day the other half). And seven weapons. Assorted mix: rifles, handguns, shotguns, one semi-automatic. Strategically positioned around the house. And I practice. In the dark. Pitch black. Rolling out of bed. Rolling off the sofa. Seizing the cache, loading, locking, in the bitch of the pitch of blackness that stares back at me without expression. Never locked my doors. Just hung a sign: “If a friend, come’on in; otherwise, think again.”

Picture this: a classroom filled with 250 students, my classmates. A funny Physics class where the professor (Jearl Walker, used to write for Scientific American) popularizes his Flying Circus of Physics road show by graphically demonstrating all types of physical phenomena. So one day he is laying on a bed of nails to prove God knows what and another day he is dousing his hand in water and then dipping it into molten lead to prove God knows what else. Always something. Always a twist, always some amazing unexpected or counter-intuitive outcome. One day while he is discussing momentum and inertia and transference of kinetic energy, a distraught student rushes into class. Obviously outraged about a grade, the borderline student starts berating the professor with threats and gesticulated insults. And then he pulls a pistol. And shoots the professor. The professor flies backwards, hits the wall, and slumps to the ground. All the girls are screaming, and I…I reach into my book bag and pull out my .38 special. Oh yeah, I’m a 4.0 student who plays chess all day, renowned for the intellectuality of the conversations I fall into, never without a copy of the Tao Te Ching and the mystic Merton’s “No Man Is An Island” in my back pockets, able to amuse others by reciting arcane poetry in totality, and… I discretely carry a loaded piece. *Who’s next?* I wonder. And in self-answer I visualize a bullet penetrating the back of the assassin still looming over the fallen professor. But wait…the professor moves—he’s alive. What’s more, he hops to his feet! Is he wearing a bullet-proof vest? Is he Superman?? No—the “disgruntled student” was a teaching assistant who fired a blank to assist the professor in demonstrating that day’s lesson on mass, inertia, and momentum! I take my finger off the trigger and slip the pistol quietly back into my book bag.

A buddy of mine who's uneducated beyond high school but is a street-smart mastermind, having mixed it up quite a bit with knives and guns, escaped deadly pursuit by popping manhole covers and fleeing underground, and has privately confessed to me to taking out somebody “who had it coming to him,” used to constantly harangue me with his belief that I had certainly killed someone sometime. “Come on,” he would chide, “I see it in your eyes. You have that look. I know.” So I finally told him: “that look” of involvement was awareness by proxy: Death as a psychic scream ripping a hole into this fabric called consciousness.

And I’m relating all of this, all of this, to clear the road for my next blog. Which will be brutally honest. And to many, unbelievable.