“Where is my faith? Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness ... If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul ... How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, ... What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true” -Mother Theresa
Look man, everything everyone has ever told you, everything you have ever told yourself is a one. Big. Fucking. lie. It wasn’t even intentional. It just happened like that because it couldn’t have happened any other way. When you are on the threshold of freedom and adventure its then you realize how artificial the whole thing has been. These things, they just don’t exist. Its like you’ve been brainwashed by Hollywood and fantasy novels that romanticize the reality of life. You start running in circles to the point where your feet burn holes through the concrete floor incapable of acceptance. This isn’t Jurassic Park, not by a long shot. Even when you realize you’re doing this you won’t stop. No. Of course not. Human being have never followed common sense solutions to these types of problems and its safe to say they aren’t going to start now. What do you think I am experiencing over here that is so different from where you are? Do you think people aren’t human here? Do you think humans over here are oblivious to pain, Shangri-la? Or is it the opposite, that you don’t think people don’t have long fulfilling lives of happiness, sensory indulgence, and deep meaning? Whatever you’re assumption is toss it out the window…and please don’t come looking to me to shed some light of clarity on the situation because my lens is just as blurred as yours, the only difference is I’m sitting in the front row. In fact, I’m probably the worst person to consult because half the time I just want to draw an comfortable reaction out of you in spite of the contrary facts. Everything is a distortion. Nothing is real and honestly, I have a very very big hunch that the closer you get the more inaccurate you are about things because you start to become increasingly more certain about what is going on—only deviating further and further from the truth. When you know, you don’t and when you don’t know, you do…What would it mean for me to make that statement? Can that even be reconciled? Thought implodes and my brain fizzes and sizzles for all eternity. Its like, what the hell are we doing?
“So if this isn’t it, if you aren’t living a fantasy dreamworld and we are both equally stuck then what does it mean, where is the fucking tunnel out of this prison if you claim where you are isn’t it?”
“Well, I could tell you but it wouldn’t matter because I don’t think you would go that way even if I led you to the entrance as it’s an infinite tunnel of shit, meaning there isn’t actually anyway out.”
“Then how is it the way out?”
“The way out is just hitting rock bottom and realizing there is no way out. When you do that, you’re free.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Accepting there is no way out of hell will turn it into heaven…”
“Explain”
“Non-attachment, non-judgment, non-resistance with the understanding that all things cannot last. Eventually it just becomes a movie and rather than act in all the drama you can sit with the audience, which is much more relaxing. But, you can’t do anything to detach, it just sort of happens. So accept there is no way out and learn to let it be as best you can. If you can’t do that the gauntlet of just being alive will do it for you but it will hurt a lot more.”
“Do you actually think that’s true”
“I don’t know but I hope it is”
I think Kathmandu could use its very own seaworld…It would be a really good combination—like techno music and a hangover. I think that’s what the third world really needs—more theme parks. Fuck this bullshit about social development, civil engineering, and foreign aid. What the hordes of slum dwellers and lepers ought to have are free passes to theme parks. Think about it. What better attraction can you imagine than giving fat, white bourgeoisie tourists slugging fanny packs and two foot camera lenses around the opportunity to gawk at people with melted faces pummeling down a log ride or zipping through a rollercoaster loop at speeds of over 60mph? Hell, you could even set these fat cocksuckers up with baskets under the ride so they can catch various body parts that fall off due to the whiplash and zero gravity experience. The person who snags the heaviest limb can win a free chicken hot dog (keep in mind we need to respect the tradition of no beef in a country that is 90% Hindu…Wouldn’t want to offend anyone, Jesus fuck no, I, of all people, wouldn’t want that, no, no, no, no)…We could then weigh out the body part using a giant scale with the limb of a man suffering from elephantitis on the other end. Golden concept. To think, I am currently working a job where I interact with children…Speaking of children, there seems to be lots of homeless children running around here, being exploited by “homeless pimps” I suppose you would call them. They tend to beat kids up, deform them, and then send them out covered in dirt, torn clothing, and with a random infant of several months to garner more sympathy from people walking by. I think these kids would make great prizes for western tourists. Think about it, you get them off the street, into a nice home, and people can leave feeling like they’ve made the world a better place. Catch a torso, win a baby! This theme park idea, I think it could be kind of turned into a social development project. For instance, the water here—complete shit. Looking at water from the sink makes drinking from your toilet seem like a healthy idea, at least in that case you know where the poop is coming from. I mean, who likes taking a shower and ending up more filthy? So what I’m thinking is for this log ride idea of ours where the maimed, deformed, and terminally ill will be the central attraction—we could fill the flume with all the waste, filth, plastic, and toxic chemicals that normally go into the Kathmandu drinking water and then put one of those “splash bridges” over the flume for tourists to stand on and get hit with an explosion of liquid trash. This will make for an interactive experience where the tourists can get the first hand experience of life in the slums on the Bagmati shore. Now, this ritualistic animal sacrifice that goes on at the Dakshinkali Temple. I’m thinking we can incorporate this into the park by taking the religious element out of it and bringing it into the food stalls. Make it simple. Give tourists a knife and let them kill their own meal, slice its fucking head clean off. We could make it fun and mix it up by giving them different weapons—samari swords, battle axes, tomahawks, chainsaws, scalpels, blowtorches and if we provide the government with enough baksheesh maybe we could scrounger up some of those gnarly looking riot squad squad weapons. Although, I am not sure how effective rubber bullets are in killing goats…chickens would be no problem but not so sure about goats. Maybe the high powered “crowd reduction” blasting hydro hose would take them out—I don’t know, I’m not a scientist *raises hands*…Now, instead of having Mickey Mouse running around handing out balloons I think we should get giant sized costume characters of various Hindu deities. I think having a 12 foot Chamunda running around would be great for the park. If you don’t know who Chamunda is, she is one of the seven mother goddesses and a form of Devi, often depicted as having up to twelve arms, wearing a necklace of severed bleeding heads, standing on a corpse, with a skeletal emaciated body with three eyes, a “terrifying face”, drooping breasts, protruding sharp teeth, long nails and a sunken belly reminiscent to a starving child with malnutrition you often see on the T.V. in between re-runs of shit worthy sitcoms guilt tripping you into donate seven quarters a month—Chamunda looks like this all the while drinking blood out of a severed head. Yeah, I think the kids would really love her. We could have her hand out the severed goat heads from the food stalls, maybe stick a straw in them and make a coconut type drink out of them. Animal slurpies. I don’t know just throwing the idea out there. Photo ops, the whole nine yards….Now, I am sure at this point you are probably all asking yourselves, “Yeah, Jerry, this all sounds like some great family packed fun but what is the main attraction, what is it that is going to separate this park from any other theme park? Because I’m just not seeing it?” Well! Let me tell you! You see, I’m not sure whether or not you know this or not but the nation of conditioned happiness and plastic smiles known as Bhutan, you know, the one that has made smoking cigarettes illegal, has a public dress code, and whose previous King introduced national ethnic cleansing by kicking out nearly 135,000 people who could be traced back to Nepali descent (not Bhutanese) despite having family who had lived in the country for multiple generations going back as far as the 1600s. Something like 25,000 of those people died after being kicked out of the country due to disease and famine caused by the horrible living conditions. Most of them were children, hilarious I know! So these people, 77,000+ still haven’t been relocated, meaning they are living in shit stain refugee camps in Southern Nepal, dislocated from family who managed to remain in Bhutan and without a home. Now, since these people are sort of up in the air for grabs and without permanent settlement I think we could dress them up and create a sort of “small world after all” type ride but using real people instead of machines! Since they have no longer have any national ties or real community I’m sure they won’t mind adopting a new identity where they can pretend to be from another culture. And if they do, we can just tie them down with a ball and chain. All the while singing songs of joy, expressing brotherly love and intercultural acceptance, love, and kindness. You know, singing about compassion among humans, conveying that natural instinct to help one another. Peace on Earth and blah blah blah…It’s like relocation without actually taking them anywhere—psychological relocation & rehabilitation to further promote…concentration! It’ll be great! They’ll have a place to live, a job, and food to eat! Now about the food situation. This might be a little “out of the box” but hear me out because I think you kinda gotta “be that way” if you want to make this thing work. There is this 700 pound woman named Donna Simpson who lives in New Jersey, she has a website where she makes money by posting photos flaunting her fat and videos of her eating. She is currently gaining public notoriety because she is aiming to gain another 300 pounds to claim Guinness World Record’s title as the world’s most obese woman, despite already suffering from a slew of incurable diseases due to her weight. Now, you’re probably thinking, how much money can you honestly make off of a website of a morbidly obese woman eating piggish amounts of food? Well, according to the news article she is bringing in nearly 100,000 dollars from over 7,000 people who are official members of her website, festishtically watching videos of Donna originally titled, “Eating a pie”. Donna’s four year old daughter serves as her helper and feeds her in preparation of her epic run for the title of world’s most obese woman, excellent parenting. Now, how the hell does this woman’s genius apply to our Kathmandu theme park I’m sure you are asking? Well I’m thinking we could do the same thing in reverse. See, Donna spends nearly 800 dollars a week on food in order to become the world’s most obese woman—we can’t do that here since the middle class wage on average for Nepalis is a little over a thousand dollars a year. I mean, how the fuck can people afford to eat that much a week here when its their yearly wage!? However! Maybe if people will pay to see someone blow up to enormous proportions they will pay to see people shrink to skeletal size? And the best part is, because we are in South Asia all we have to do is walk down the street to find someone like this. We don’t even need to make them emaciated to the point of near death because they are already like that! We maybe can add an internet stream into their everyday lives, I’m sure McDonalds would blow their load to sponsor this. Think of it as an extreme version of the Jared Subway guy…We could pull it together and have these people eating a McDonald’s salad, advertise it as, “What keeps South Asia Skinny—McDonalds!” In terms of corporate sponsorship, there is another American woman (we seem to have a trend here) Karolyne Smith, who allowed Golden Palace, an online casino, to permanently tattoo her forehead with the black text phrase “GoldenPalace.com” for around 10,000 dollars. Now, I think this could be an excellent advertising tactic. Maybe tattoo some of those Bhutanese refugees who are about to be relocated to foreign countries with some corporate logos? I say we contact American conglomerates—Walmart will leap at this shit—and offer forehead tattoo space for sale and in exchange they pay for these refugees to come to a new country. Win-win my friend—you are going to be a rich and happy human being free from the depths of an existentialist wasteland devoid of inner purpose.
Delicate glass you are standing on, eh? Am I talking to you or myself?…I’m not sure...Who said that? Right, not me…Then it was you?
“Dig the eyes out of my face
I can still see right fucking through you
Fuck you and everything you are
I’m me, we’re us and that’s all”
I am the poison running through your veins. The battery acid melting through your skull, bleeding into your mushed pulsating grey coils of psychic energy. Flexible sunshine tastes gooey and I crumble into crunched up bits of wasted potential. Failure to integrate self-acceptance in the face of my companion’s falsified judgment…Well its created through misinterpretation but what is reality but personal misinterpretation? Right. Masked mirrors concealing my formless features. Danger! All Structures are unstable, proceed with extreme caution! Slippery people sliding As I spin down the drain, splashing into a carved sandstone gorge with crystal ice water…shawaa…it does feel good man…it does feel good…but the near violent pull of the magnetization from one end of the spectrum ricochets my…I don’t want to enter into your thoughts when I can’t escape mine but what choice do I have!…The trance is the repetition and your just stuck in a cycle of rise and fall, rise and fall and I’m sitting here preaching alchemy but I think you are missing the painful reality that you have way WAY over identified your naked awareness with fleeting emotions and suffocating thoughts that cannot be reconciled to a deeper purpose…Well, gee wizz I don’t know if that’s really the case. NO! Shut the fuck up! It is! You’re wrong. I AM RIGHT. Stop thinking, stop writing, and please stop trying to be profound. Just please fucking stop I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t wanna be here anymore and if there was such a thing as home I would go there but I smoked and tore it all to shit and its just a charred blackened hole in the carved out tundra of frozen emotion. A tomb where the Tibetans left the dusted bones of over a million family members brutally slaughtered by the Chinese. Staple my eyes shut I’ll still burn clarity right fucking through the steel.
“Damn dude, maybe you are just a little strung out?” Gerald says to Joseph.
“Well, fuck! Of course I am! Everyone’s out to get me! But the way out is through and so I’m just letting it clear out of me through my vocal cords.” Joseph says.
“I think this is stupid.” I say.
“No one fucking cares what you think Walsh you two faced shit!” Joseph says to me.
“Right. Right…How could I have forgotten…” I mutter to myself.
I prayed for something to be real, for something to be true but instead it all came undone and ripped a hydroshock round through the black heart of you. Spiraling round round round incapable of facing the utter simplicity of self-delusion. Too caught up in hectic roulette spins of the imagination, leading to a red river flowing from an exit wound caused by a hollow point with a hexagram tattooed across the shell. Click, click, click, bang. And now I’m free to say whatever I please.
Joseph continues, “Look man, its like you intergalatically teleport through the riveting crevasse in the center of your pineal gland and merge with this godhead that explains to you the meaning of Jesus, Buddha, Ganesha—all those motherfuckers—like the various archetypes of the self—you are the holy trinity expressing itself through the psychological confines of your fragmented ego and then these fucking little liquid type formless bastards come out of your chest and eyeballs. And when they speak, they start blowing these giant crystallized bubbles of linguistic potential rather than creating sound but like, it is sound, and then you take the bubbles and you morph them into, like, into conceptualized thought with your third eye, which merges into the world of conditioned form, like allegory of the cave or some shit, and then they start telling you to do the same thing when you return but before you can make a move you explode into a thousand pieces and then fall back into the prison cell that is the human body! And so I’ve been going around trying to read peoples’ auras and like vibrating my chakras so I can merge with my divine purpose and achieve orgasmic oneness with the noosphere and morphogentic field of infinite potential, thus saving the human species from the chains of ignorance and mental slavery. I’m telling you man it was like these fucking crepuscular rays pouring down from Shiva’s thrown atop Mount Kailash and I’m like..whoah…heavy man…heavy…but aside from all that I’m kinda broke and need to buy a bus ticket home, can you lend me a few bucks?”
“Mistakes are part of life as is humiliation. Accepting this makes your stay here much easier. “ Gerald says pulling himself back.
“Can’t we just not take everything so seriously all the time and just do something fun that isn’t insane, deep, or important? Jesus Christ…” I say, turning my head left than right and sighing as I make eye contact with both of them.
Perform the trepanation I can’t release this, slicing through my skin, loaded on oxycotin, I cringe and images of my future lives flash forward through my eyescape, obliterating the figure ground. I can’t distinguish one thing from the other. The dissonance begins to flutter and the material world breathes heavily, slowly vibrating with ancient energy. I hit my bone with a chink sound, bringing me back to a haunting hardened reality I thought I had escaped. The brutal truth of the situation here requires a screwdriver to my skull to empty the internal trauma. The metal splint digs in and I begin chipping away at the smooth marble holding my existence in place, with each jab an epileptic flash singes through my body like a flashbang explosion and suddenly my vision floods with a melting horizon somewhere out in a snow desert beyond the known boundaries of Kashmir and suddenly everything is deafly quiet. There is no pain, no pleasure. No apathy, no violence inside me. I am just here, standing in an empty desert of endless sand dunes surrounded by an arena of 20,000 foot snow capped peaks that break beyond the cloudline. A reignless double-humped camel walks by, grunting, and spitting a little bit beyond where I am staring into the distance. He doesn’t look once towards me. The sand is fragile soft and sifts through my toes like its falling through a limitless hour glass. The sun faces me high noon, beating down on my chest, warming my skin and healing the circular hole on my head from the failed trepanation that I presume must have killed me—or else I’m in a dream world created by a coma, I don’t know but for some reason it doesn’t really matter to me. I turn around and see that the desert is perfectly divided in half by a swirling line, separating light and darkness. The side behind me is illuminated only by the full moon’s light. No stars. I turn around—no clouds, only the sun. Odd place. I would suggest a spiritual significance to such a landscape but I just feel sort of blank and the atmosphere is truthfully—just weird. I figure fuck walking into the darkness. You’d have to be retarded to do that, knowing there is a camel there is probably something around here that can eat that camel and I’d like to be able to see whats going on around me if that is the case—even if I am dead or in a coma—I still seem to have physical sensation and I don’t need an eternity of being devoured—at least not right now. I start walking, following in the camel’s footsteps. The sand crunches beneath my feet, the world around me is silent. I begin whistling a tune to myself, which is also weird because until I tried drilling a hole into my head I couldn’t whistle. It would be like if you opened your mouth and started talking and another language came out—just weird. As I keep walking, my whistling grows louder and deeper. I move my hand with a wave like motion and suddenly a guitar wa-wa sound starts flowing all around me—okay. I change from whistling to laying down a beat and when I do suddenly the earth quakes and vibrates all around, blasting sound that overwhelms everything around me but manages to synch up perfectly with the wah wah flow. The audio is no longer coming from me but its just everywhere and its moving in direct synch with my every step and physical twitch. The closer I get to the sun the louder it grows. The more intense my movement becomes the more in flow it relates to me. The mountains are trembling so heavily from the bass the snow on the tips are being shaken off and the sand is jolting up several meters into the air. I’m moving freakishly across the moonscape desert and the music compliments me perfectly until suddenly I’m directly under the sun and I throw my torso down, hands bent, and—stop. No movement, no sound, everything hits a stillness beneath the sun and then—it drops. The music kicks back unfathomably more intense than before. The bass drop breaks the mountains into crumbled dust, the sand is jolted up so high it just evaporates (along with what appears to be a camel) and suddenly I’m on this grassy hill in the middle of darkness surrounded by 30,000 wacked out people in some sort of tribal fashion of freakish color, we are all covered in neon pain and tossing millions of glowsticks into the air while this heavy heavy electronic music plays from a stage in front of me “look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone..1…2…1.2.3.4…DROP” and everyone just explodes into each other as multicolored tubes of fluorescent flash rain down upon us in a cataclysmic frenzy of dazzling insanity. We control the music, relaying it off one another, each of us vibrating beats off each other creating this unheard of synthesis of every sound ever recorded into a fury of human group mind expression…permanent liberation and joy…but then something happens... It is as if I’ve fallen into quicksand and I my body begins to melt, feeling like I’ve fallen into a jar of molasses…People around don’t seem to notice and all of the sudden my skin turns inside out and I fall apart completely like a split pillar. Pause for five minutes…I need to eat my butter naan and momos…Damn that was delicious, too bad I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Where were we now? Oh right….
…I open my eyes. I’m resting on a body of sand and I can’t see a thing beyond two feet of me. Its like I’m sitting on a stage and the spotlight is on my body, blinding me from everything in the beyond. I look up and see only light but no form to accompany its presence. I keep trying to tell myself how things are but they keep fucking shifting up on me. The light begins to dissipate into itself, closing slowly into a dot, eventually leaving me and everything around…silent…and dark…very very dark…The winds start howling and the sand blows like razor blades into my skin. I’m shaking in this dark hole. Save me Jesus, can you hear me? I look into myself and I am confronted by nothing but worms and parasites. There is nothing in me. There is nothing here. There is nothing worthy of salvation. The darkness is overwhelming and I begin treading my way over the blackened sand dunes, stumbling and falling over clumps and mounds of disintegrated rock. The wind hisses and the blowing sand burns my eyelids shut, crusting them over while the crystallized fragments sting my skin like a scorpions tail. I fall into a pit of cacti, bloodying my body, scarring me permanently. Looking over my shoulder, I can feel them breathing down my neck—rattlesnakes and gila monsters—forked tongues piercing my ear hole, whispering sadistic temptations, encouraging me to succumb to the pale ocean below me. I begin to experience dehydration, mad hallucinations, overwhelming fear and physical torture as I make my way blindly through what appears to be an endless field of prickly cactus and freshly hatched reptilian eggs. Just as I am about to give in to grief and despair I suddenly break through what feels like a thin glass layer and I find myself—once again—in the light, in fact, standing right where I was when I arrived in this realm, feeling quite fine, no wounds or psychological despair of any kind. I can see the moonlight back beyond the cactus fields I crawled through and where I had woken up after the music, which I can also hear off in the distance towards the sun, almost beckoning to me. The only difference is this time around there appears to be a multi-colored sand mandala. The same camel walks by and spits on the mandala before it blows into the wind. And now I am here, just standing here. No bliss, no deep peace, no meaning, no deeper understanding, no grasp as to what happened, no anger, no overwhelming pain, no stress. I am just here, wondering what to do next. If you have any suggestions, please fill me in. I can be found in the trepanation hole, drop me a letter or feel free to swing by at any time. One can feel quite alone here sometimes so, do call…
For the record: “Nobody gives a damn who you are or what you are so do what you want—unapologetically.” –This guy whose website I was looking at a few days ago. He had a picture of himself posing on some ice in Antarctica in the background with a bunch penguins nearby. He was also wearing sunglasses. I suppose it is quite sunny in Antarctica due to the ice reflecting the sunlight. I wonder if you went there if you could bring one of those penguins back for a pet? That would be kind of cool. I've always wanted to hug a penguin, maybe thats my purpose in life...
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