Every day like today I walk in and watch him pour ferment into the mouths of woozy patrons, dispensing vice for a fee. At the end of each night he and I peel the drunkest from their stools before collecting sop-wet singles from the bar. Tonight was a good night, he said counting, and I nodded and asked how much. He told me but I didn’t hear the number. Still I smiled because he looked proud.
Read more →One must wonder what good Kant’s solution to the free will problem is when it steals from us our sense of empirical identity, dismissing such caused desires as mere appearances and then taking that which we can’t see and subjugating it to a rational prison of our own construction.
The Groundwork seems laced throughout with the faulty notion that once individuals understand every desire, inclination or need they have is determined; that they might somehow no longer find such attachments palatable in the face of free moral law. When the laws of freedom are only those laws that we would follow when we act from reason, and when more often than not we seem to understand ourselves as existing apart from such freedom, perhaps there is more to be said for what brings value to the human experience than what is merely free or rational.
Read more →The world was outside and it was finally over. Vivienne turned the knob shut. The dead lock slammed in its socket and rung through her fingertips, startling her more. She watched her slow hand tremble up toward the door chain, where it fumbled to hitch the bolt to its frame.
Vivienne collapsed against the back of the door. Her knees buckled as she fought, halfhearted, against her own giving way. She sagged to the floor, legs splayed, resigned. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and sounded the cacophonous miscellany within when it dropped beside her, which only aggravated the throbbing in her skull.
Read more →I’m questioning the extent to which truth has relevance for human beings.
Our cognitive framework is such that every object must first be distilled through our subjective faculties in order for us to recognize or understand it. With this in mind, it’s easy to see the fundamental nature of truth for human beings—that is, truth is only that fiction which we hold dearest. If truth is necessarily objective, and if there exists in the world some object of this kind, then it is immediately and by definition tainted and thus made false by our senses through which we can only subjectively perceive and make sense of it.
Read more →If I could be reborn, if I could be somewhere simple, where streets aren’t wet with sick and slop, and I could be a gentleman. I could be someone I loved. Someone who knew how to love her. Then I would know what to say those nights we were sprawled beneath the star-lit everything.
I closed my eyes and breathed deep the fresh, fragrant hay rounds near the bypass. Where we lay was enveloped in an orchestra of crickets supported by the steady bass coming from my truck engine. It was cold, but we were warm.
Read more →The city below was shrouded in the distance to here. Faraway sirens and three a.m. trains groaned for attention amid the pitch dark of my thoughts. Tipsy pedestrians doddered home in an undertone of drunk emotion, which, caught in the updraft, winded together and danced loose with leaves and light refuse until it finally reached me in a solitary whimper, a medley of how the world felt, and we bonded.
I lay flat against the roof, staring at the big, black nothing above me: a sky poisoned by the steady drip of street lights and neon signs. The surviving specks weren’t stars at all, but suggestions of a reality rendered unreachable for the blind-sided citizens of tomorrow.
Read more →The true spectacle of Mozart’s Don Giovanni exists not in the anti-hero’s sexual transgressions, but in the audience’s delight and subsequent moralizing therein. Da Ponte’s libretto was billed as dramma giocoso—a genre of opera that mixes elements of comedy and drama; but Mozart catalogued it as opera buffa—possibly with the understanding that its moral lesson fails to teach. Instead, the opera strikes at the very core of what it means to be what Kierkegaard called an aesthete.
The aesthete is one who holds aesthetic considerations above all others in his moral decisions, and it is the only other choice available to human beings who think themselves unfulfilled by the ethical life. Don Giovanni, for Kierkegaard, is the idealized, exaggerated aesthete, an archetype whose life is directed not by God or moral consideration, but by what is interesting.
Read more →I’m so fucking bored with the trajectory I’ve placed myself on! It started early in life, and it just kept on until, before I realized it, I was here, and I was doomed to be here. But if I’m charitable toward myself, I’ll accept that it happened before me and I am just the far off ripple from a drop of water long ago into this ocean of discontent.
But why blame anyone? The truth is, it’s the causal framework through which we function that determines the path we’re on. But we can’t take this truth for truth. Because if we do, then we lose the ability to blame, or give credit, and characters like Gandhi and Hitler are no different but their place in the history of all.
Read more →“What an absent-minded wreck.” The students giggled together as Morrison stumbled across the cobblestone path. It was early in the morning and the professor was headed to his Monday section, sacrificing his grace to the broken slabs through untied laces and worn out wing-tips.
The professor wasn’t absent of his own mind, but of the world. He was an intellectual miser, a serial collector of thoughts and ideas that furnished his mind until it became his home. As a child, Morrison was fascinated with the world around him, with god and existence. He was a rare sort of child, one of those who love knowledge and take it like candy from strangers who don’t have their best interests in mind. Such children follow their hearts off that cliff over which dangles baiting Truth.
Read more →The secret lay in his gait. He had only to think of his own lightness lifting him from the unforgiving streets of his neighborhood, until his toes dipped lower than his heels and his legs began to dangle. He skipped slow above the familiar, broken streets and sidewalks, over fields of earth and crabgrass.
It was getting hard for Carson to distinguish between his visions and reality because he woke up in dreams just as soon as he’d in fact fell asleep. In his dreams, nothing was much different from his waking life other than in his dreams he could fly. Some days the soft breeze would buoy him slowly higher, until he could kiss the stratosphere, and it was there he would meet with God.
Read more →The abortion I am; unfulfilled,
unused and through this left
useless unless used up
my family’s extended for dying
and leaving me behind
to bear the palls of men worth more
them salty & me saccharine
not still civil but still not Marine
somewhere between
stillborn and being
but still being thanked?
for being
An underwhelming fuck and a few dollars on the nightstand: this, my friends countless reminded me, was what being a man felt like. Before the military, I had only ever made love. But I finally understood that love was effeminate. Sex with a prostitute was less exchange than broadcast, not love or even fucking but better described as being fucked at. They assured me affection was an innocence cured by distance and whores, and I believed them.
Read more →