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Tuskin

Tuskin
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Do not let anyone tell you that you do not matter.  I don't mean this in a patronizing way and I am not trying to give you a pep talk.  I am just stating a fact.  You matter.  Your existence in the universe is incredibly important.  The universe depends on you for its own identity, its very composition.  
We tend to remove ourselves from the vastness of our environment.  What can we be when compared to the quasars, the massive intergalactic light houses on the edge of the black, black ocean we call the universe?  If stars were judgmental, what kind of assessment would they make of us?  Tiny little pebbles of carbon, jitterbugging on a ball of mud that orbits an unimpressive sun in an unremarkable galaxy.  
We must meditate here on gravity.  A trusted way to explain the phenomenon of gravitational influence is to imagine space as a sheet held tightly at the corners.  Ever hear of someone refer to the fabric of space-time?  This is what they're talking about.  If you place a pea on that sheet, it's not going to make much of a difference (unless you're significantly smaller than the pea, and very close, in which case it would make an incredible difference).  Drop a bowling ball on the sheet, and you can see the fabric bend, and anything lighter rolls toward the bowling ball.   
If you were to disappear, to be removed from the universe entirely, if the constituent elements that result in the phenomena your mother called Isaac, or Bobby Anne, or Takahiro, if we were somehow able to banish you into the aether, then the universe would from that moment on be a wholly different place.  Your gravity, your own subtle influence on the universe, would be lost.  The whole of existence would shudder.  To think that if we removed you, you specifically, Bobby Anne, the entire universe would snap to attention at the loss.  However small and seemingly insignificant your gravity might be, you would be missed.  The quasars would know, and mourn with a modest bounce on the tight sheet of space time.  Removing you upsets a seemingly uncaring universe.
I feel sometimes that if I were never to have existed, the world wouldn't even notice.  We must all feel like this every now and then.  The days when no one calls, the slow, quiet and empty days between being in love, the days when no one makes eye contact and there is a general nausea about our own place in society.  But if you weren't here, if the matter you are composed of had never existed, then we can reasonably fathom that the universe would have ended up entirely differently.
Think about the great constants in physics: the speed of light in a vacuum, the mass of an electron, and the relative attraction of massive bodies (to name only a few).  They're all arbitrary.  The speed of light is a good example.  It is 299,792,458 miles per second.  Why?  Why isn't the speed of light thirty miles an hour?  Why does it stop where it does?  Why is there a seemingly preset limit on how fast a photon can move, or the gravitational field of a given massive body?  Much of theoretical physics focuses on the idea that there must be a single unifying theory, something that brings all the rules and laws of our physical reality together, the presents us with a clear link between all of them.  This would of course explain why light travels as fast as it does, and to a lesser extent why you weigh as much as you do, or why water boils at two-hundred-twelve degrees Fahrenheit.   
There is only a limited amount of matter and energy in the universe.  There is a great deal, of course, but there is only so much.  If there is indeed a 'theory of everything' (and many very well educated and extremely brilliant physicists think so) then surely the finite amount of matter and energy in the universe has as much to do with the "predefined" speed of light as the weight of an electron has to do with the Planck constant.  This is why I feel comfortable saying, with a good amount of confidence, that if the matter that makes you you was never to have existed, then the speed of light would be different.  The gravitational hold that the earth has on the moon would be different.  Every universal principal would have to compensate for your absence.
Many physicists also believe that if the physical constants of the universe were even slightly different, the existence of life would not even be possible.  Without you, Bobby Anne, you can plausibly state that no one else would exist.
But of course you're made up of more than carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and iron and junk.  You think.  You have experiences.  You condone and forbid and fornicate and create art.  You're life itself.  You've got the spark.
I want to try to get rid of that notion quickly.  There is no such thing as a "life force."  It's as quantifiable and real as pixie dust or hellfire.  Forget it.  You are made of the same thing as a greyhound, both the dog and the bus.  You are only different from a chunk of led because of the arrangement of your atoms.  Ninety-some building blocks and four forces holding them together, more or less.  That's all you really are.  Your thoughts, your memories, you're guilt and love, they're all products of a squishy lump of tissue made mostly of water, zapping signals across the tiny gaps between microscopic brain cells.  Electricity, carbon, some water.  That's what makes up your dream of becoming a professional wrestler or your beliefs about God.  It sounds so dour, doesn't it?  Not for a second.  Through you, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium and many other atoms, all lifeless in and of themselves, experience their place in the universe.  You allow sodium to taste itself and sulfur to smell itself.  You, in your holistic composition, with all the parts working in amazing harmony, are the vessel by which a bundle of cosmic dust has fallen in love.  And you're not important or significant or beautiful?  I disagree.  You are as important as the supernova that birthed you, as significant as the black hole that powers a galaxy, as beautiful as anything we've ever seen through a telescope.  As beautiful and more.
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Art and Death

2 min read
"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."
— Don DeLillo

Art & Death
Sometimes I see a documentary or read a biography of a great artist, writer or musician.  I find myself waiting for the inevitable turning point in their lives that sculpt them into something supra-human, icons of the human experience, obelisks that stand unhurt in the intellectual wasteland of popular society.*  The turning point, is of course, always a tragedy—always, always, always.  It breaks them, this shipwreck, this living cancer, and they rebuild themselves as something stronger, more beautiful and meaningful.  But still it is not worth it.  They'll never reverse the horrible thing that killed their weaker, sweeter incarnation.  All that they can do is try to extrapolate meaning from events so senseless.  That's what makes art so fascinating.  It's desperate.  All great art is, anyway.  We hurl gobs of meaning at art and hope they stick, and when they don't, we bend and wilt and sob and shake.  Meaning is so important.  It is the club with which we beat back death.  Disarm the world of its artists, and death is only around the corner.  Look at America: devoid of artists, as far as any influential body of society is concerned, we have imploded, turned inward, let our fear eat us up like unchecked leprosy.  Terror in a turban, in a beard or a bottle of shampoo.  The fags are assembling against us, the race war is coming, small pox and swine flu, black presidents and the quiet, seductive, nearly forgotten tapping of nuclear war on the world's black window.  America has abandoned its freaks and bandits, its clowns and beatniks.  Too dangerous, really.  Unrest, the artist's briar patch, exposes division.  Do not resist us…it is a display of weakness.    

* Remember always that popular and population are so closely related they might as well be inbred.
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This place is definitely not friendly to writers. No one will read anything over ten lines long. It's fucking disgusting. There are aquarium fish with longer attention spans than the people on this site. I'm not just bitching because no one comments on my writing, although it is a little bit of that--it's that no one really takes writing or reading seriously anymore. I just looked at the top literature submissions of all time, and guess what? Half of them fucking blow. I'm not kidding. I really anticipated being blown away (and a few of them were very good, don't get me wrong) just like I am whenever I look at the most popular visual deviations, but my heart sank deeper and deeper with every horrible poem I read on there until...well, here I am.
And I know what you're thinking; "Well, they're trying their best."  That's fucking bullshit, and here's why: If you were really trying your best, you would get some influence outside of modern rock music lyrics(the majority of which is also terrible, which only further explains the god awful poetry on here) and read a poem. A real poem. Something someone poured more than five minutes into.  Something by one of the greats. Have you ever read this?

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked
How about this suit -

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

That's from "The Applicant" by Sylvia Plath. It's fucking incredible, as I'm sure you've noticed.  Try this one:

"This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level of pain he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little."

That's from "Libra" by Don DeLillo. "The train smashed through the dark," and that last fucking line that still startle me every time I read it. Breathtaking, but you probably skipped over it.

I'm sorry, I'm just really depressed, and I know my own writing is suffering right now because of it, but seriously, fuck it. Why should I even try on here? Fuck sake, nobody is even going to read this. I hit the point of no return fifty-five lines ago.
I really hope some random piece of shit emo mother fucker reads this, one of those little posers that likes The Shins and claims to have read "On the Road Again" and writes poems about bitter sweet snowflakes crushing all he/she has loved or the azure blue sky that frowns down at him/her and seems to say "It's all for nothing." You know what? If you're going to continue to practice a craft as old as humanity itself with little or no respect for the heritage and beauty you have to live up to, then it is all for nothing.  Do you even know what kind of fucking shadow real writers live in? Do you know how bad it hurts or how good it feels to read a work that blows your soul away like a dust mote in a hurricane? Have you ever read a line in a poem or a novel or a short story that made you shudder with recognition? Until you have a half a million years of the written language weighing on your shoulders, you're not going to even be able to push down on the papyrus hard enough to make a mark worth reading, my friend. As if you even wanted to.  Fucking lazy fuckers don't want to have to work for anything. And if I ever, EVER see one of you people talking about how much you love Hunter S. Thompson, I swear to god I will crack you across the lips with a two-by-four. That man hated everything you stand for, and if he saw your maudlin ass on his peacock farm he would have shot you dead.
I don't have a problem with people writing badly. I have a problem with people writing as a means to accessorize their image.  The same goes for any other art, but all other forms of art (except music and film) have excellent practitioners on this website, so there's really not a need to defend them.  What I am saying is this: prose, poetry, drama, what have you--If you don't go at it with some degree of sobriety or seriousness, if you don't go at it with a sense that it is essentially work, just as sculpture is work, then please, stop fucking doing it. I don't care if you're terrible. That can't be helped. Just don't be so god damn lazy. You make real writers look bad.
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Enemy Mine

5 min read
This isn't much, but I figured since I hadn't updated my journal in about sixth months I probably should at least post something:

There will never be a good poem written about an enemy.  Prose is the cold steel maul you want if a declaration of hatred is your aim.  Something about the dedicated poet—she won't let such a truly ugly notion as an "enemy" into her art.  Sure, there can be devils and heartbreakers, like Plath's hulking fuehrer of a father, there can even be objects of hatred, like industrial society, as in Ginsburg's "Howl", but somehow that hatred always dissolves and the poet seems to polish a fiend into a fetish.  I guess you can never really write a poem "about" something without it becoming an ode.  Plus, hate poetry tends to come off as petulant and bitchy, never like the thunderous sledge strike that one has envisioned.
That make sense—after all, most popular wisdom tells us that hatred and loathing are emotions best channeled, controlled or even suppressed.  You don't channel love, or control humility, or suppress charity.  I'm not suggesting anyone should, of course, just that hate gets a bad rap.  Hate is funny when you think about it. Real hate, real deep, black, inky hate that stains your heart and makes you ill when you think about a particular thing or person, is never really explored.  Upon investigation, we often come to realize that the object of our hatred is more deserving of our pity, or at least our understanding.  These are the things that they tell you are wise.  I'm not going to argue with the logic.  I find it all too often to be true that, when you hate someone, you usually hate them because their motives can't be understood.  Once you get older and you realize that the bully that picked on you in school was brutalized by his father every single day of his life you start to feel more sympathy than anger, and perhaps even shame that you could not understand earlier.
However, all that being said, some hatred is justified.  After all, if the bully hates his father for hitting him, isn't he justified?  Or should he ultimately feel pity for his father, caught in a cycle of violence started generations ago? Here is the nexus of my argument: I think that eventually, everyone has the responsibility to quit being a prick.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand our enemies.  We should always strive to destroy our enemy by befriending him (or her).  Unfortunately, there is a small subset of society that cannot even understand their own misanthropy. Even worse, their derision of you (yes, you, and me, and all of us decent people) is so disproportionate to your feelings toward them, that it is obvious that there is not an option to "agree to disagree."  They are, simply put, just not high up enough on the evolutionary twig.  God created all men equal, but nature is a stone cold bitch.  Some people are born stupid, born aggressive, and sadly, born selfish.  All these traits can be controlled, however, and not all of them make for an entirely terrible person.  I have known stupid people who are also sweet and kind, aggressive people who are clever and charming, and selfish people who are brilliant and fun.  But its when all these traits coalesce that you have the birth of a villain.
Now, an aside here: I realize that "villain" is a ridiculous word in and of itself.  It denotes a kind of gonzo, a pirate with a hook for a hand, a bald millionaire pumping sewage into the water supply.  But I posit that there are truly villains in the world—large and small, but villains all the same.  You are fortunate if you have never met one, and you would know if you had.  Most people, at this point in the essay, have already thought of several people whom they consider villains.  If you still argue that "villain" is too simple, too narrow, consider this: there is someone out there, right now, who locks their child in a closet and takes him out only to thrash him with a broomstick or burn him with a cigar.  You know this person exists somewhere, he may even be your neighbor or a distant relative.  Now, what is this person, if not a villain?  Yes, there are deeper psychological reasons for their behavior, possibly even uncontrollable impulses that cause them to act this way, a mean little gene burrowed like a bug in their gray soupy brain.  But still—they are a villain, and a monster, and less than an animal.  Less drastically, consider the man at the bar that didn't like the way you looked at him, "all cockeyed and faggy," or the customer in line before you who growls like a bear at the girl behind the cash register, who, of course, has no control over his situation.    

...and I just kind of petered out here...but hey, at least I'm still writing, right?
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If someone asked you to think of the most rediculous ammount of money you could, what are the chances you would say...oh, I don't know...$700,000,000,000?  Just look at all those zeroes--isn't that obscene?  Does such a number even exist?  
Sadly, it does.  $700,000,000,000 to bail out some flagging US corporations.  Without this staggering ammount of money, our President assures us, our economy will atrophy and die, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless and even homeless.  This is, by the way, the same president that told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  
  There are a few problems I have with this crisis.  First of all, no one is explaining why we need to give these fat cats $700,000,000,000.  I've heard all sorts of analogies about the economy's "arteries" being "clogged," and the "need to defibulate" our financial market.  But what does that even mean?  I can understand that the credit market is in trouble, and the credit market is important, but why $700,000,000,000 dollars?  What is that paying for exactly?  Where's our goddamn receipt?  Does anybody know?  Does our government think we're too stupid to understand?  Or do they think we're smart enough to figure something out?
  You wanna know what I think about these gluttonous corporations, these money-gorged CEO's, these financial fat-asses?  FUCK'EM.  FUCK'EM.  I don't have any money.  Any money I'll get will come from a job that pays little better than minimum wage--why should I give a shit?  I don't have money in the stock market, like most Americans, and with the exception of some help from my family, every dime I get is won from the sweat of my fucking brow and squeezed from the blisters on my feet.  I know what its like to live paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes fall flat on my face and wonder where the next dollar menu cheeseburger is going to come from.  I'm not bragging about my blue-collar nobility--I'm owning up to it.  Let those business-suited motherfuckers burn their knuckles on a greasy spoon, let them throw up from breathing paintfumes, break their fingers lifting I-Beams.  Let's see what they're really made of.  If they won't tell me what they're spending my money on, then they should at least have the decency to stand up and say, "Here I am--I am weak and petty and full of shit, my guts are thin as water and I need you to feed me."  
That's what I think.
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