Telephone

 

Emptiness of emptiness, Qoheleth says. Emptiness of emptiness! All is emptiness. All return to their long home, and the mourners will have their parade in the street. The silver cord snaps, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to earth as it was, and the breath returns to the Creator. Emptiness of emptiness, says Qoheleth, all is emptiness.

The god you imagined you need to please is no more than a particle of dander adrift in unlimited space. Emptiness is form, form is emptiness, blessed is the name of the Lord. 

I try to talk to my soul doctor about my soul sickness, but can’t quite describe the troubled state of my mind. Later, after our WhatsApp therapy session I remember it is time for my annual MRI to check in on the tumor that lives in my inner ear, ringing in my ear, like the telephone of Doom. I don’t want to answer it. I mean I don’t want to worry about it. I don’t want it to be a problem. I want it to disappear on its own, like magic. But I have to make the phone call and make the appointment.

The thing is a tumor that has occupied the inner canal of my left ear, near the auditory nerve. It is not cancer, but if it grows it can cause hearing loss, ringing in the ear, loss of balance, dizziness, facial numbness or paralysis, and if it grows big enough to press against the brainstem it can prevent the cerebrospinal fluid from flowing between brain and spinal cord, the golden bowl and the silver cord. The fluid could build up in my head (hydrocephalus)  increase pressure in my skull, and threaten my life.

Why worry? It’s all in my head! If they need to they can cut into my skull and remove it. No, it’s not like getting a tooth pulled, it is brain surgery, but a hospital website assures me that “improvements in imaging technologies and skull-base surgical techniques have made surgery for acoustic neuromas safer and more effective than ever before.” So, every year, near Thanksgiving, I get an MRI to see if the thing is growing. Between scans I have a whole year to put the thing in my head out of my mind. But now it rings, the telephone of Doom. Pick it up.

I try to imagine soul lightning shooting up the stairs of my backbone, out the crown of my head, showering me with light, and radiating a rainbow nimbus in the emptiness, a blessing. 

Pick up the phone.

Hello?

Gone, gone, gone

 

The famous flamboyant combover still wraps the skull of the corpse that somehow still stands at the center of this dismal farce, brain and heart both dead, yet the mouth moves and noises spray out that sound like words but are not words.

"How does it still stand?" "What do the noises mean?" reporters ask experts who recite ancient fables and the latest magic numbers and the rest of us watch from our sofas until our souls drown in puke.

Where’s the playground, Donald?

Is that where you’d rather hang around?

Not buried in the ground:

Here lies a class clown.

Rust In Pieces

You were a bully and a class clown and learned nothing in school but that you can get away with it all.

Torturing the disabled and mocking the poor and uncool and nerds who got good grades — what the fuck do they know? — grabbing the girls and exposing yourself.

You got away with it all.

Your first big business deal was when you sold your soul to a Mephistopheles for morons, for natural bullshitters like you, for fascist idiots like you, who taught you the art of perpetual litigation, obstruction of justice, laundering money, conning the rubes, and getting away with it all.

 

What the fuck do scientists know?

This is Your Reality Show. 

If you don't count all the Covid deaths it doesn't look so bad, and if you don't count all the votes you are a winner

I am serving you an eviction notice. I’m canceling your culture. You are no longer to live rent free in my brain and you need to vacate these sacred premises. You foul the air with your virus and gas.

If it were only that easy, ignore him and he’ll go away and I can be serene, but he holds my attention like an unending car alarm at 4 AM. I don’t want to let it keep me awake. I don’t want to let him keep me awake. I want the end of this assault on consciousness. I want to go back to sleep, back like we were in 2015, asleep.

This will not be over when it's over, I said.

AP called the election for Biden, but I knew because of the cheering outside. It sounded like the World Cup celebrations but I knew it meant Biden won, and I knew it wasn’t over, and i didn’t get out of bed to go dance in the street. 

Outside it was like the liberation of Paris but I stayed inside and watched From Russia With Love, starring Lotte Lenya.

Unless you talk to normal, sensible, people, you would lose all hope in human evolution, to the extent that it is in our hands or heads. It is hard to not hear the anti-reality crowd claim the need to heavily arm themselves to fight the Stalinist Biden and the ISIS Bolsheviks in the Democrat Party who have manufactured tens of thousands of fake ballots and stolen the election, just like we knew they would.

Is this what I need to be thinking about now? The surge of fascism in the States of America? Can’t I go back to sleep?

I just open up an IPA  and watch Thunderball until sleep takes me away — gone gone gone to the other shore. Amen.