Women:

I heard her telling a friend beside her that some man only wanted her body. Her male friend tittered and agreed and they both let burst righteous and beatific sentences about the shallow and one dimensional nature of men.

The separation of body and soul and mind is the byproduct of religion I find the most irritating. The body is treated as a machine carrying some greater you that will burst free of its bonds one day and shoot up to a home perfected for it. The vehicle of perfection inside you must endure these many days here in our blood pumping conveyances and survive all of these sensual motivations and firestorms.

When people say that you want their body and not them, it leads to a question: where does your body end and you begin? Is it in your brain? That network of biological switches and reostats swimming in the chemical bath manufactured by your sexual organs? Is that where you are? The ending of all those nerves coating the parts of you that you think of as a world apart?

That is bullshit. My hands are me. My feet are me. They are seamlessly connected to the network of predictions my brain makes every millisecond and the stored information of my synapses. My skin is me, part of the community of life entire that makes up my part of space. I am and will continue to be a body until my time as a functioning consciousness machine is over and I am reabsorbed into the breaking shore of loam covering the rocks. There is no greater me that is subjected to physicality. I am physicality.

I am the way I hear the tubes warming up in that old amp in the corner. I’m the way I feel the strings of Grandad’s old guitar through the bottle neck slide on my pinky. I am the muscles sending a sledgehammer into concrete.  I am the rush of demolition and the concussion of the explosions i have created. I am the smell of rosemary in hot olive oil. I am the night above me and the sandstone walls of Dominguez or Paradox or Disappointment lit by cedar fire under a cast iron skillet. I am our silver moonlighted bodies naked to the rain shot through with gold and smoke.

Those sensations — the starlight, the heat of a fire, an old Stratocaster through a Blackface Twin, the legs wrapped around me in the bed of a pickup truck–they are more honestly me than any debate or reasoning or church meeting. Whatever passes for spirit, probably a network consciousness too chaotic and thickened to comprehend, is more present in the communication of her teeth biting into my shoulder and her nails scratching down my back than the thousands of words ascribed to God in some old dusty book or poetic words mumbled in a coffeehouse.

And that is why I revel in what I am and never let that part of me, the sensual and animal, fall into a jail cell of shame or neglect. I break and build and love and hate.

You can say I’m just horny and I’ll say I just want to know you a little better inside than anyone else. 

That’s what I was made to do.

That’s why I love stibnite. Bladed habit and overall cool as shit.

I feel sometimes like I need a social cosigner. And I do. Generally I have to have somebody incorporate me slowly into a social situation and tell everyone I really am cooler than I seem at first. At least I think that’s how it goes.

If I ever make a signles ad profile thing, I’ll won’t put any pictures up. I won’t go on about work. I’ll just say this:

Dogs and children usually like me.

It’s true. Dogs like me. The dogs people say hate men or hate strangers always seem to come around to me. It’s gratifying in a way. My former wife made a lesbian friend who invited us to easily the coolest Thanksgiving ever.  It was somewhere between a pride parade and Plymouth Rock. They had a dog that ‘hated straight men.’  Later that night he was sleeping in my lap.  Dogs love me for some unfathomable reason.  People don’t do that. Not grown people. But kids do. Little shithead kids who irritate the hell out of me follow me around like I’m Jesus or something.

I guess I can say the same thing of gay people. Lesbians love the shit out of me, and I don’t know why.

So I guess whenever I think I’m a social failure by virtue of having Neanderthal features and build, a scary baritone, and being raised by a cult, I can remember that the most reliable judges of characters, namely dogs, kids, and lesbians, approve.

The rest of you can go fuck yourselves.

We sat up in the parking lot drinking Thunderbird and Mad Dog trying our damndest to get drunk on $4.65 we had scrounged from ashtrays and couch cushions. There was a desperation to her drunks.

She swam in them and breathed in them and burned herself away in them.

Sobriety for her was a terrifying thing. You really have to have seen both to know the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk. Alcoholics have a compulsion, maybe biological, like the compulsion to eat or breathe. Drunks have no motivation save that they are scared of their life. We sat in the car and discussed our future and my leaving and said nothing of me ever coming back. I have always been frightened of promises. She tried to drink herself to death, but had too young and new a body to do it. I would be not be surprised to find that she was living or dead.

I sat with a friend the other night talking about the failure of her relationship. It’s not a catastrophic failure like a bridge collapse. It’s a slow disintegration as unstoppable and irreversible as all encroaching death must be. It has failed, but is still standing like the piers and guy wires of some burned down bridge.

We sat and talked and let a couple beers go mostly flat before we drank them. Newcastle benefits from such treatment. She lost herself to the story and told me she hadn’t ate in days. She was ashamed of it. Like most people, we’ve had enough pop psychology rammed down our throats to think that every quirk is a disease and every variability in our brains is a disorder. I told her not to worry about it. Obviously I’m not one to believe that someone losing their appetite when their world burns a little is that bad a thing.

We are incredibly imperfect machines. We’re a Rube Goldberg machine when coping and interacting with the world around us. With each other. I wonder sometimes what a person is. That they are merely biological is a given, though I find that simple fact more holy and sacred than any idea of a soul.

We live our whole lives locked in a cage of biomechanics and chemistry sensing an environment through piled illusion and millions of discrete counterfactuals every single moment of our existence.

That makes spending your last five bones on Thunderbird sound a little more reasonable.

I’m more of a bourbon drinker, myself.

Like most people, I set goals at the gym. Not heavy and hard numbered goals, but still goals.

This will sound ridiculous, but my goal weight was 190 by January. I was doing good. Staying lean, because that was part of my goal. Hitting the gym six times a week religiously.

But then I had a sort of melt down. I try as much as I can to avoid ever really talking about what is actually happening in my life, without pretense or metaphor. I don’t like talking about such things. But I will make this one exception.

Someone I care a lot about is gone. The details don’t matter. It hurts. I am a lot more grown up about this sort of thing than I have been in the past. I’m throwing away the useless parts of the process and internalizing what I can use. But it took a minute to get there.

I spent a whole week drunk. Not a little. I probably shouldn’t have driven to work in the mornings. In a strange way, it was on purpose. I don’t want to even register any of these emotions in another week, so I power-sulked. And it worked, to a point.

I’m being this honest for a reason, knowing full well you, the reader, are probably as uncomfortable as I am with it. I weighed myself in the gym and saw that one of my goals is impossibly far away. I wanted to be around 190 by January. I lie to people and tell them I’m close to it. I’m not.

I weigh somewhere around 170 right now. It’s easy to see why. I forgot to eat for a while. I’d be too sick with the liquid flu to get to the gym. I wouldn’t eat in the mornings. I sort of lost motivation to buy food. Really let myself down on that one.

So, there it is.

I was doing good. I was brushing up against 185, three weeks ago. I could have done it. I don’t see any way I can hit my goal.

I’m a sad Panda.

There is a welling hatred in humanity. It belies any struggling claim of divinity that a religion can muster.

It’s a black laquer artery.

Some of them are redeemed. They make guitars.

Or breakfast.

Other than that, fuck ‘em.

The slanting beams of light scraped clean the corners of the room. The piles of clothes and darkness held onto small points, crucified, where the heavy blinds failed to occult the day from the room.

There were her thoughts. Memories, unwelcome and ruthless.

There were the nights where the whole night sky of the ceiling flamed above with the grasping and sighing. There were the conversations, ideas submitted to the medium of sound, that lit the corners of the mind with sacred silver fire. There were both, and vacillations untold between the two. There. On that bed.

You can sense The Gone. You may not know hate when you see it or violence in another’s words, but The Gone is a real thing. And it was everywhere. The room, constricting and claustrophobic had a great gravity and void of immense empty space where once bodies had shared and minds had mated in the air between. The Gone bleeding out in the holy sepulcher of the dark.

Spiritual death among the still quickened breathed in the world entire.

In the desert, past the confines of her there would be a truck crossing some bridge over the playas and bajadas.

The Gone would be there, too, but in higher form. In the form of honesty and the return of a lover to his estranged. Eight years sober, but never clean. Never without it in him and through him, that hunger and need.

And the needs of a person are their world entire. He had been sober and been happy, but all for her. For the need, for his real love, he was never sober or happy. Those were not the requirements of that love. The love of any substance is the love of the holy darkened self.

And so she sat watching her glass go clear and the lines form like tree rings as the water evaporated into the expanding universe of The Gone.

Look, I don’t write a popular blog. It has briefly collided with a sort of popularity and crashed back down, but never sustained more than a small, but most appreciated, readership.

But you know what I can do that very few of those fancy 45 comment a day bloggers can do?

Stop by Border’s, tip back some coffee, browse the rack, the real, honest to god (not Local Authors) rack…and find my own name.

Suck it, bitches.

Ok, that was rude. But really. Suck it, bitches.

Ok. So, there is a swelling of pride I was not anticipating upon seeing my name printed in a nationally circulated magazine.  Is it The New Yorker or Darkhorse? No. But it is a magazine I’ve read and loved for years that is circulated widely. And now I have a terrible write-up and a worse picture on the contributor page.

It also does something else in my head. This is a real magazine. If I can publish a goofy short fiction and get a sweet 29′er out of it, I guess that means I’m a real writer. An author.

I have no more excuses.

Update! For NurseMyra!

Casey Smart has a bred-in Calvinist inability to say nice things about himself.  That inability is the product of a religious upbringing in his native Southwest Colorado. He lived an eventful childhood of arson, petty vandalism, car-theft, and train hopping.

His academic career is spotty but storied.

He mostly lives and rides in Grand Junction, Colorado.  His time is spent as a cartographer and occasional geologist working throughout the Colorado Plateau.

His writing is generally middling and his riding skills are such that he is rarely injured.

I woke up in someone’s bed this morning. There was a minute of panic that never made it through the headache entirely. Then I realized that I was waking up alone, and had slept the same way.  Possible disaster(s) averted.

Upon further memory investigation, I determined that I was at a friend’s house who didn’t let me drive home. Further still, I had woke up in that exact place before. And under nearly identical circumstance. And I had spent the previous night drinking the same person off my mind.

I don’t think anything one person does can ever be blamed wholly on another, as that would imply crass causality. But neither can the blame totally settle on the self for exactly the same reason.

That statement sums up, more or less, my entire philosophy on human relationships. There is a network of experiences and relationships that pull or push people into their behavior, good or bad. It removes blame from the individual, and I bristle at that.  ”What about justice!” I yell over the sound of me sharpening my spear.

But  first bristling instinct is generally wrong in these cases. It does allow a certain laziness.

I have noticed fundamental differences in the way we think. I never trust first instinct until I have ran it through possible interpretations, dragging it through a mired and horrible place feelings go to die.  It is a struggle toward a more accurate reality.  If I had to point out anything in the causal network that would make me think that way, I would be split between being raised around religion that was sometimes harmful or deadly to its believers and the justified and pleasant feeling of killing people you were told you fundamentally disagreed with. Because we were right(!). War is the ultimate act of gut instinct. That’s why warriors grind their teeth at the idea of diplomacy. It gives everyone a chance to come to their senses. This way is hard and slow and takes away that great feeling of being absolutely right. It removes being right entirely in most cases.

The other method of thinking is one where you already know the world around you. It’s color and shape and they way everything moves. And when anything doesn’t fit it, you kick it out. I think that’s how justice systems work.  Anyone who has ever been a cop or criminal with any critical thinking at all can determine the impossibility of justice.  What generally happens is that a person is determined to not fit, and the conviction follows.  Meaning, the person is tried for fitness in the system, not for their crime, though we take great measures to be just.  This way has the advantage of allowing a person to be right and to feel right about something.

Neither way is stupid. If I had to name them, I think the first process would be scientific and the second philosophical.

Those two modes of thinking, and they probably both exist in every person, have no ability to ever make anything better for anybody.

You don’t know what a long time is, she said.

And that was accurate. I was gone less than half the year, so I figured it was nothing.

You don’t know what sad even is, another one said.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe I don’t.

Neither realized they weren’t being nice.  People are unfair that way.

Something in the booze makes you remember the things people say. It is unfair that way.

If I had a full tank of gas and wasn’t slowly listing to port already, I’d be in Mexico.

Fuck ‘em.

One:

I am not convinced that stirring raw egg whites into orange juice for breakfast is the weirdest thing I do from day to day. Because, really, I do some weird shit. Before you get all judgy, consider how much weirder it is to mix some whey powder out of a plastic jug full of chemicals into water and drink that for protein. Egg is about the most readily absorbed protein out there, and pretty much the original diet for mammals.  Yeah, I just went fucking Triassic with that shit. What?

And I also submit the fifteen pounds heavier, by weekly average, I am than I was at the end of October with no real change in waist* size. I am getting monstrously, laptop stealer strangling huge*. And it is probably because of the dozen eggs I drink a day.

So quit looking at me funny.

Two:

So, I had to come up with a plot piece the other day. I whined about it previously. Anyway, with fifteen minutes to go, I googled “Plot ideas stories.”

There was this one that looked promising where you pull out reading materials and start pointing at words. I only had my geology books nearby. I came up with “Rock Hammer must stop machine.”

At ten minutes and four pages into where that awesomeness led, I realized I needed to wrap it up. The story was called The Passion of the Rock Hammer. And it needs some definite work, but is awesome. Awesome enough to be put in the anthologies.

Of Awesome.

Anyway, the next few days will see a big departure here. I would like to really focus on this Rock Hammer thing, but I’m not sure where to go with it. I never saw myself as a humor writer, and most attempts at being funny in writing go over poorly.

That rings truer the last few days than any other time I can think of off hand. I just had to physically restrain myself from ranting about Facebook.

The point is, I have to have the thing built up before the end of the day Sunday, anyway, so I’ll post it on here. And if it’s easy, then I’ll just keep going with it.

Three:

No, really. Fucking Facebook, I swear to fucking god. That shit is retarded. It does not belong in the anthologies of Awesome.

Because it sucks.

*Not really.

**How in the fuck is this word not recognized by WordPress? Every other blog on the internet is some chick bitching about her waist.