Living the life---Contained in it is the code of the maintained life that shoots up through the human-being’s back like the spinal chord; and segmented just the same. The human animal—this is conventionally refers to an authors sense that this idea is somehow ironical, which it clearly isn’t—is the driving force for all human action, and interaction. Art is sex, art is bodily hunger art is nerve ending disturbances, and left-over dream-cake. Life is also—as all things left to themselves for a great long time—cluttered, an absolute mess of images, feelings and sparks of empty-train inspirations, waiting for you to board. Who’s conducting? Where’s it headed—why are there so few on board (besides this woman in a black hat, and the teenage-baseball-boy in the next compartment)? So much of life is rooted in the fear that the living life might be hurt or pulverized in the train. Spiders down a secret tunnel, crawling, biting, laying eggs on the forearm—infection, abscess, gangrene, amputation, sepsis, death.

I knew enough about the destination to know it was not likely dangerous to my life. One can often see the habitable, nesting inertia of the longer life necessitates the hammer- smash of little jaunts such as this. I drink cranberry juice; the sun doesn't set as the aircraft travels with the day across the ocean--so I pretend, looking through the glass, and the warped fellow travelers, bloated male-flight-attendant, Sky-Mall Magazine Text--blazing red like auxiliary power on a submarine. Cleaning my fingernails. My shoes are uncomfortable. The man sitting next to me asked if I work for a famous IT company; I don't.

Everson

I Wrote This a While Ago:

The death of Everson was expected. His father died the same way. Sleepless nights and half conscious days, he drifted along until his death caught up with him—nothing dramatic. He was standing on a dirty side street, with Coke cans and cigarette butts choking up the sewer drains. Greasy uneven bricks surrounded him, and the recesses of the broken tenement house windows made him feel like he was in a soggy bird-cage. An immigrant boy sat on a green knoll behind a waist-high chain-link fence in front of one such house. With his drippy nose and scant clothing, the boy was like a fixture—more like the bricks than like me Everson thought. As he admired the boy’s head with its crew cut and sanguine unknowing expression, Everson began to die. The pain itself was not all that great. It was rather like feeling his body go to sleep—like a creeping nothingness. The pop which could have rendered him unconscious, instead greatly distorted his sight. The boys head blew up like some repugnant circus balloon. Confusion at this sight together with a diminished sense of equilibrium caused him to crash instinctively to the ground whaling like a stabbed animal. The man tried abortively to escape his confusion, as if waking up from all nightmares was practice for this moment. Slipping into his coma, he began to give up and make peace with the nothingness, as all dying things must do—in this regard Everson was certainly a pragmatist: if going with the flow meant less pain for him, then why fight it?
Everson was not an important man. His life was middling