Wheel of Time

The disk stood upright in the dust like some ancient timepiece cast down from a forgotten world. Its face bore the graven marks of vanished beings, their symbols weathered by winds that had blown across that red waste for millennia untold. The patina of verdigris spread across its surface like a plague, green against the oxidized copper, testament to ages of slow corruption under alien skies.

In the distance rose skeletal ruins against the ember glow of evening, columns broken like the ribs of some vast beast picked clean and abandoned to the sand. The sun hung low, turning the world to rust and fire.

No track led to this place nor away from it. The artifact stood solitary in its vigil, inscrutable, bearing its cargo of forgotten meaning. Scarabs and spiders marked their territories in the compartments of its face, their forms rendered in relief like some final hieroglyphs of a dying tongue. What liturgy or calendar it measured had passed beyond all reckoning and the wind made the only sound, scouring the dead world with mindless persistence, and the shadows lengthened, and the day died.

Dippy the Diplodocus rose from the deeps like some antediluvian dream made manifest, its great columned neck ascending from the gray waters of the lake. The Cudahy pumphouse stood witness, that cylinder of concrete like some monument to the age of steel and diesel, now dwarfed by this visitor from an age when the earth itself was young and the sun burned with a different fire.

The path lay cracked and weatherworn. The grass at its margins yellowed and sparse. No sound but the lapping of water against the shore and the distant cry of gulls wheeling in that depthless blue. The creature regarded the land with eyes that had seen the world when it was green and savage, when great ferns covered the earth and the only law was hunger and the brutal mathematics of survival.

It had returned as if drawn by some lodestone buried deep in the memory of stone and water, as if the pumphouse itself had called to it across the millennia, one testament to existence calling another. The shadow it cast stretched long across the path and the people came or they did not and the lake went on in its turning and the earth turned beneath it, indifferent as always to the affairs of men and monsters alike.

They drove through the country of dust and ruin, a place where the sun burned down like judgment, the sky above them vast and pitiless. The Cadillac, blue as a forgotten dream, cut along the blacktop, humming low like some hymn. Two cats sat within it, one black as the pit and the other tawny and watchful, the driver. Their eyes narrowed not with worry but with the cold calculation of those who had seen the world and found it wanting.

They passed saguaros like sentinels thorned and skeletal, reaching for a heaven that did not answer. The land stretched on, empty save for the wind, which bore no scent of life, only the stale breath of things long dead. The cats did not speak. Something had been left behind. Or waited ahead. Either way, the car moved forward, indifferent. They drove on.

The temple rose from dark waters like some monument to gods long turned to dust. The lunar disk hung in that firmament pale and absolute, a cyclopean eye bearing witness to the earth’s old corruptions. Rain fell slantwise through the darkness and the statues stood in their weathered vigil, their faces worn smooth by centuries of wind and grief.

The door at the summit, that blue anomaly, some absurd portal grafted onto antiquity as if modernity itself were but another stone to be laid upon the altar of ruin, testament to all seekers who’d climbed before and found at the top only what they’d carried with them all along.

The sea moved in its ancient rhythms, indifferent, immutable. The rain fell. The moon watched. And the door, that incongruous blue door, stood closed against the supplicant and the pilgrim alike, offering neither entrance nor explanation, only the cold comfort of its own inscrutable existence in a world where all answers are bought with the same coin and all climbers arrive at last to the same locked threshold.

A History of The Cudahy Taverns

Cats, Existentialism, Literature

The Capybara Sundial

They stood in their mute encirclement of the old stone dial whose gnomon cut the sky like some blade buried to the hilt, watchful and unknowing in the ruin of that bloodred firmament where the last clouds moved like smoke over a charred plain and the trees stood stripped and dead, each branch a black hieroglyph inscribed upon the horizon of a world that had outlived its own design, the beasts patient and stolid as though they had always been there and would remain long after the monument had crumbled to dust, their vigil primal and inexplicable, witnesses to some covenant made before memory, before time itself had learned to mark its passing on the sundial face of that strange pillar.

The cat regarded him across the rust-colored waste with eyes like amber coins struck in some ancient forge. Behind them the ringed planet hung enormous in the darkling sky, a judge presiding over dominions of dust. The creature beside him stood in its alien perpendicularity, eyestalks searching the horizon for what sustenance this world might yield or what communion might be drawn from the silence.

They were pilgrims both in a land that knew no scripture. The cat’s fur held the darkness of collapsed stars and its red collar was the only covenant between the world it had known and this one. The companion creature, orange as oxidized iron, as the very soil beneath them, seemed born of this place, extruded from the planet’s own weird geometry.

What word could pass between such beings? What language obtains in the transit between one world and another? They sat in that vast cathedral of emptiness and the wind if there was wind carried no answer. Only the patient mathematics of orbit and decay, the supreme indifference of the cosmos to the small and the breathing, the furred and the strange, all that moves and must one day cease to move upon the surface of ten trillion worlds or one.

The cats sat upon Andy narwhal in the crystalline dark, their caps the colors of some merchant caravan out of antiquity, rainbow-banded like Joseph’s coat. Above them the auroral light moved in great sheets across the firmament, green and luminous, a celestial fire that burned without consuming. The beast beneath them cleaved through black waters, its horn a pale tusk jutting forward like the spear of some drowned knight errant.

The orange cat’s eyes held the simple faith of all creatures who know not their fate. The black cat watched with an older knowing. They rode the leviathan through that polar waste beneath skies no different than those which men had watched since the world was made, wondering at their brief passage through the dark and whether any hand had set the stars or whether the stars themselves were but another kind of wanderer, alone and purposeless in the void.

The water rolled away from the narwhal’s passage in folds of deepest cobalt. What lay beneath no man could say. What lay ahead the same. And still they rode.

Long ago, when the moon was still young, a calico guardian fell asleep on a cushion of stone. Around her crept goblins with sacks of gold and pots of clay, hoping to steal while she dreamed. But the cat’s slumber was deeper than time itself, and her breath was the rhythm that kept the world from unraveling. The goblins soon discovered that each coin they lifted crumbled into sand, each jewel turned to ash. They understood then that the guardian was dreaming for them all—that her silence was the thread that stitched memory to reality. So they stopped their thieving and kept vigil in the shadows, protecting the cat who protected them, waiting for a dawn that would never come as long as she slept.

New & Improved!

Literature, Schrodinger's Dachshund

Pictures at an Exhibition

In that circular tableau where four luminosities—the modest taper whose flame trembles with the same hesitant grace as the consciousness of a child taking its first uncertain steps toward self-awareness, the oil lamp’s more refined radiance (suggesting perhaps the soul’s passage through civilizations of increasing sophistication, from the crude rushlight of primitive epochs to the elegant vessels of a more cultivated age), then that sharp stellar burst resembling nothing so much as the sudden, piercing moment when one apprehends, in the midst of life’s mundane progression, a truth previously obscured by habit’s comfortable veil, and finally the sun itself in all its pneumatic fullness, that orb which seems to contain within its swollen circumference all the accumulated experience of previous existences now ripened into a wisdom warm and all-encompassing—illuminate their separate chambers yet remain forever divided by those implacable black bars which suggest that even as the soul ascends through its successive incarnations, each life remains enclosed within its own inviolable moment, touching yet never quite merging with those that came before or shall come after, much as the various epochs of one’s own existence, though linked by the continuous thread of memory, retain each its distinct and unrepeatable savor.

In the ochre waste where the ruins stood skeletal against a sky the color of old brass the wheel leaned there canted in the sand, its compartments cut like cells in some vast and intricate honeycomb, and in each cell the figures stood or knelt or embraced in attitudes of supplication or coupling or murder—who could say which—their forms worn smooth as creek stones, anonymous, the wheel itself a mandala of flesh repeated, and at its center the alien regard, that hairless and implacable witness with its eyes like pits bored into nothing, and behind it the larger figure risen up out of the sand itself perhaps or simply waiting there since the world’s morning, its skull face turned toward some horizon that had long since ceased to exist, the whole tableau composed in that desolate light as if arranged by hands that understood geometry but not mercy, the aqueducts in the distance marching toward their own extinction, and over it all the sky churning with ancient poisons, and you got the sense looking at it that the wheel had turned and would turn again, grinding through its permutations of torment or ecstasy—no difference finally—each figure locked in its chamber like a sin in the heart, inexpiable, the math of it precise as death, the alien at the hub serene in its witnessing, and all of it half-buried in that sterile dust which was maybe the dust of empires or of worlds or just dust and nothing more, the wind beginning to cover it over grain by grain in the measureless noon.

In the days when the pyramids still remembered the names of their builders and the moon hung low enough to taste the smoke of copal fires, there lived in the city of forgotten gods a calico cat who had been appointed by no one in particular to guard a bowl of tomatoes so red they seemed to contain all the sunsets that had ever bled across the valley, and the bowl itself was painted with serpents whose scales were the colors of paradise before the fall, and the cat whose eyes held the green of jungles that no longer existed would sit there every night without fail, not because anyone had asked her to or because she expected payment in fish or cream, but because her great-great-grandmother had whispered to her great-grandmother in the language that cats spoke before they forgot how to speak that the tomatoes were not tomatoes at all but the crystallized tears of the last priest who had climbed those steps behind her, one hundred and seven years ago, carrying his own heart in his hands as an offering, and that whoever ate them would remember everything—every love, every betrayal, every small mercy and large cruelty since the world began—and would go mad from the weight of it, and so the calico sat there in the moonlight which was itself a kind of memory, patient as stone, her whiskers trembling slightly in the night wind that carried rumors of rain that would not fall for another three hundred years, and the tourists who sometimes stumbled into that courtyard would photograph her and say how charming, how picturesque, never knowing they were looking at the last guardian of a sorrow too beautiful to be consumed.

The composition, with its quadrants of sun, sprout, leaf and snowflake, presents itself less as a picture to be grasped outright than as a delicate arrangement of suggestions—each season leaning into the next with a sort of half-withheld confidence, so that one’s apprehension of the whole is not a matter of stark recognition but of slowly succumbing to the impression of something at once inevitable and elusive, intimate and remote. The solemn sun lingers above roots that, in their patient secrecy, foretell the tree’s splendor and decline, while autumn’s golden flames already whisper to winter’s pale breath, all encircled by a border of ornamental arabesques that seem less decoration than the very pulse of time itself.

Most Beloved Goodreads Author 2016, 2021

Existentialism, Fatalism, Literature, Quietude, Truth

Orange Sedans Contra Time

Platonic Form of The Car

Like some curio forgotten in an attic, a temple molders on a hilltop. Its ornate construction stands as a reminder of how little the past can teach the present. Between fits of mad laughter it calls, “Someday you and everything you love will be as irrelevant and forgotten and unfathomable as this.” Would those butchered there find solace from it becoming a tourist spot? – The Danzantes of Monte Alban

In the days before the Cadillac there was a massive and exquisite Pontiac, a Bonneville as old as the mountains, metallic blue, and equipped with rear wheel-skirts. Whereas its theft set everything in motion, this segment of my annals commands rigorous study. – The Chosen Chariot

Your toe brushes the landmine gas-pedal. The ravenous hood devours the road and the distinction between you blurs. “You” are the rational faculty of a mythic being: half car, half man. As if mocking the difference between transcendence and immanence, the soul of this latter-day satyr neither exists apart from you nor is it pantheistic. Though the product of a synergy, it can’t be equated with any sum. When the dichotomy collapses, when you become one, your coalescence is irreducible like some elementary chemical. – Town of Ghosts

When the next great historian writes of the decline and fall of our empire, I will have no difficulty pinpointing its zenith. If a wise man were called upon to demarcate the epoch when the automobiles were most magnificent, he would, without hesitation, name the Golden Age between the decession of Johnson and the inauguration of Carter. The cars were colossal and solid, forged from the purest sheet metal. Powered by the blast furnaces of the gods — the grandest V-8 engines — they had no peers in strength. In homage to Euclid, all the great four-doored ones exemplified rectangularity: the Cadillac Fleetwood and Sedan DeVille, the Lincoln Continental Town Car, the Pontiac Bonneville and Catalina, the Buick Electra and Chrysler New Yorker and 1973 Imperial. These glorious bricks blessed the concrete seas with their majestic bearing. And by 1980, darkness fell. The Great Ones were desecrated (“downsized” was the coarse euphemism) with puny bodies and feeble engines. What is there for a man to do but cover his eyes and weep as he beholds the degradation of what was once mighty and proud? – From A Great Length

An ant crawls across a sliver of sun on the concrete, from darkness into a patch of light back into darkness. Sound like anyone you know? Others follow, their paths labyrinthine, their obscurity abrupt. Far above, illuming ants and primates alike, contingent and transitory as both and cursed with the fragility this entails, the cluster of gasses recently nicknamed the sun seeps across the boneyard of Time toward its own demise. – Requiem for Gorillas

Living periscopes ascend, vindicating intuitions that they’re not mere plants. The pink froth of the sunset drips down the pods, sending their dark affinities squirming toward your feet like mutant apprentices deployed to ensnare. Purple eyes watch yours watching them watch yours. Follow the regress. Pretend you have a choice. One inference attains solidity. Lotus Pods are security cameras. Placed here to observe us. To observe you. Conduits of a Power more primal and remorseless and inscrutable than gravity, their segmented eyes gander not with indifference but affects unnamed by any human tongue. To what Mind do they connect? What dark soul presses against those convex windows? – Eyes of The Lotus Pod

Do hole-pocked patterns bother you? Radical idea: Stop looking at them! Turn off the gadgets. Unplug the digital intravenous. Open a book. There is no law of physics compelling you to “ask your doctor about Tryposoothe,” the new-fangled miracle treatment for “a serious disorder that often goes undiagnosed.” That this state of mind is actively sought by some Eastern religions is never mentioned. Where’s the multiculturalism? – Ask Your Dr. About Tryposoothe. Now!

Do Androids Dream of The Mars Hotel?

Ecstatic Raving from Publishers Weekly

The Abominable Unau

Existentialism, Fatalism, Literature, Truth

Inspirational Literary Memes

The Danzantes of Monte Alban

Eyes of The Lotus Pod

Requiem for Gorillas

A Town of Ghosts

Delirious Raving from Publishers Weekly

The Thematic Unity of Alex

Close Encounters of The Fed Kind

Serial Killers Who Worked Security

The Mushroom of Consciousness

Man, Burning

The Dialogues of Supernatural Individuation

Paean To The Chandelier

Zelda Alpizar 101

Mount Silenus: Home of The Abominable Unau

Maestoso the Dachshund, Why Is He Following You?

A Synoptic Survey of Estimated Prophet

In Defense of My Preamble

The Chosen Chariot

Petronius Who?!

Existentialism, Literature, Nihilophobia, Quietude

The Freight of Time

A History of The Cudahy Taverns

Temple of 11,111,117 Holes

The Platonic Reformation

Existentialism, Fatalism, Literature, Ontology, Quietude, Schrodinger's Dachshund

A Shabby, Not So Well-Lighted Place

The Dialogues of Supernatural Individuation

The Platonic Reformation

Plato’s Cave? Big Whoop!

Fatalism, Literature, Ontology, Quietude, Truth

The Shelf Life of Glory

Most Beloved Goodreads Author 2017

GIWWPN Genius Fellowship Grant

A Synoptic Survey of Estimated Prophet

On the Eccentricity of Bruce Springsteen

Existentialism, Literature, Ontology, Truth

The Shadow’s Dream

Greatest quote of all time? Pindar said we are the dreams of a shadow. Others agree on the first part.

Do Androids Dream of The Mars Hotel?

The Abominable Unau

Sweeter Than Honey

Annals, Literature, Truth

From A Great Length

When the next great historian writes of the decline and fall of our Empire, I will have no difficulty in pinpointing its zenith.

Few mourn their passage. Few know what has been lost. Perhaps the Truth swims too deep and fast to be caught in the flimsy nets of most men. What ennobled this period in history was neither our knowledge nor the opulence some enjoyed.

What merits striving? What should be sought? Fame, a function of herd contingencies, is obviously worth less than nothing. A mate can bring joy, but they are plentiful like stars and as different from each other as Tuesdays from Wednesdays. The best that can be said for the pursuit of riches is that it distracts from the grievous uncertainties of Existence, assuming, as you should, that most would crumble if confronted with the ultimate puzzle.

Posthumous glory, dependent on the beliefs of those yet to be born, is the most senseless of all. If the imbecilic estimations of the mob currently wandering the earth are to be ignored, how much more so the ravings of the brutes who will follow? Indeed, a wise man will shun renown like death itself. In this world of flux and woe, does anything warrant pursuit? Is anything intrinsically good?

Quietude, of course: a state of mind tranquil and serene, yet confident and affirmative of life despite its precarious nature. The courtship of Truth is long and austere, but it spares one from countless delusional allurements. Despite a paucity of honorable men, the pursuit of honor may seem a fool’s errand, but aren’t ideals unattainable by definition? Are they not the stairway from the swamp of our beastly nature? Dignity and heroism certainly merit striving, but intertwined with them, inseparable from them, is a man’s car. But not any car will suffice.

If a wise man were called upon to demarcate the epoch when the automobiles were most magnificent, he would, without hesitation, name the Golden Age between the decession of Johnson and the inauguration of Carter. The cars were colossal and solid, forged from the purest sheet metal. Powered by the blast furnaces of the gods — the grandest V-8 engines — they had no peers in strength. In homage to Euclid, all the great four-doored ones exemplified rectangularity: the Cadillac Fleetwood and Sedan DeVille, the Lincoln Continental Town Car, the Pontiac Bonneville and Catalina, the Buick Electra and Chrysler New Yorker and 1973 Imperial. And, of course, the Caddillac Talisman. These glorious bricks blessed the concrete seas with their majestic bearing. And by 1980, darkness fell. The Great Ones were desecrated (“downsized” was the coarse euphemism) with puny bodies and feeble engines. What is there for a man to do but cover his eyes and weep as he beholds the degradation of what was once mighty and proud?

Delirious Raving from Publishers Weekly

The elegant lane shifts, the Renaissance curls of their turns, even the smooth course down a straightaway, are these not calligraphy flowing across the pages of the road. Or syllogisms necessitating every coordinate on this perfect line. Though hurling through space at 120 miles-per-hour, one experiences it not as motion but the exaltation of surfing a tsunami in a luxury liner. Brush your toe across the landmine gas-pedal. The ravenous hood devours the road and the distinction between you blurs. “You” become the rational faculty of a mythic being: half car, half man.

As if mocking the distinction between transcendence and immanence, the soul of this latter-day satyr neither exists apart from you nor is it pantheistic. Though the product of a synergy, it cannot not be equated with any sum. When the dichotomy between you and your car collapses, when you attain oneness, the coalescence becomes irreducible — not like an elementary particle in the dusty attic of Physics, but a Necessary Unity in the basement of Ontology. Something infinitely greater than man’s powers of reckoning absorbs you. More cannot be said. Some experiences cannot be contained in the cheap Tupperware of language. You cannot take a shining star from the heavens and place it in a meatloaf dish.

An Odyssey of Historic Proportions!