Went to the beach today, I missed the sound of the wind roaring through my ears while waves smashed onto the beach with the sound of a drum snare. I saw something I'd never seen before. I saw a pinkish, throw-up looking thing in my path on the boardwalk. At first I thought that's just what it was: throw up or snot or something similarly disgusting. After staring at it for what must have been three minutes a gull suddenly landed over it and began to snap it up, eating it.
I saw that around the pink mall were little bits of matter, like rock flecks. I realized what it was then: it was clam shell, and the pinkish thing was the clam. My mind raced back to a National Geographic thing that I saw (or read) that seagulls break the shells of clams by grabbing em', flying up to a height and dropping them so that the pink innards.
Also while watching this grotesque-fact-of-life my mind raced, I tried to look away from the gull and couldn't. The clam slammed back into the bits of shell as the gull stopped and looked me DIRECTLY IN THE EYE, it's eyes confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, heroes die even if they play great guitar. Young men die too maybe.....and at the end all there may be is the stupid, thinking scream of living tissue.
Kept moving, kept thinking. Here writing. I addressed the whole of people's lives, the experiences that WILL end. All religions offer the same basic thing: The promise of a afterlife and the continuation of the mind's personality. The one universal thing scratches at the back of the human mind.
Death. Dying. It doesn't scare me the way I think it should. No matter how many facts about mortality deep down there is still the unshakable, blind assurance that this organism, Peter Huerta, could not die. Everybody else could die, they were extra's in the movie of my life, but not Pete, star of that long-running hit film "The Pete Huerta Story." Maybe I could eventually come to understand the untruth of that emotionally as well as intellectually...maybe that was the final depth.
Shivery unwelcome thoughts....the human mind cannot comprehend NOTHING. We don't remember going to sleep....
I wonder how it would be, to lie in the biggest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence of a moths wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
I have an ache in my lower right ankle, the pain itself now-seems very sweet.
I wonder about life, as if that this life itself prepares for death by offering some wonderful final hallucination, the actual semblance of an entire life. Or a infinite after-life....that you go where you probably always THOUGHT you'd go. Heaven, hell, or grand-rapids, it was your choice-or the choice of those who had taught you what you believe. It was the human minds final great parlor trick: the perception of eternity in the place where you always expected.
Awhile ago I was rushed to the emergency room. I don't remember much, I just remember being beaten up, than that time skip to being inside a ambulance, then to waking up in a hospital bed with IV needles trailing from my arm and a catheter inside my penis, a oxygen mask around my mouth.
Death, even though I lived through it, I have never been so close to death in my life. Because it was BLANK don't you see? And that part that was so cynical of life and the philosophies that I was exposed to spoke stronger than ever because at the moment it was being wired into my survival instinct. I don't remember the hospital itself, me being beaten up, or the ride home or the waking up of the next day. What I have of those are images too vague to make sense of. But I remember that voice speaking to me. It said.
"You have finally pushed to the brink, and did death come? Yes, but there was nothing spiritual about it. Nothing happened. No one was whisked to heaven or hell. They just stopped. The pain you're feeling right now is the pain of abandoning a delusion. There is no higher purpose. There is no God. No arbiters or right or wrong.
You don't have to like reality, you only have to be strong enough to fact this life until body breakdown. You may live a life of rural serenity, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. There is nothing beyond this. There is no essential "good" in living.
You have to win now. You have to win because winning is a place marker that proves whose winning, which is nothing, you have to win because it is A INSULT TO LOSE. There is no one to justify to. No God swept down to save you, bad things happen and if God is there he's turned a blind eye to you. If things like this happen to you then God let's it happen, and when you say "I don't understand".
God replies: "I don't care"
I'm so tired though. I'm tired of being as lonely as a robin in the rain. Not having friends to be with or tell me where we're going to or why. I'm tired of people being ugly and nasty to each other. I'm tired of all the times I wanted to help but couldn't. I'm tired of the fear of the dark.
Quote from of Mice and Men: "Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. . . . With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowin' in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us."
"But not us! An' why? Because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you"
Guys like us!"
Yeah, guys like us.
Right now, if there's a sad sack anywhere on the planet who needed a little magic in their life right now, I am that person.
