Sugardisaster

It’s interesting to note that the scientific phenomenon of a Black Hole is an area of space where the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape after having fallen past the event horizon (boundary past which events can’t ever be observed – that which represents the maximum extent of the particle horizon – the extent of the visible universe. In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking describes the Event Horizon as “the point of which light is just barely able to escape.”). The name comes from the fact that even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) is unable to escape, rendering the interior invisible, or black.

Besides being undetectable in their own right, black holes are a theoretical construct mostly left as-is by the world since the aptly titled 1979 Disney Classic The Black Hole starring Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine and the voice of Slim Pickens. Apparently director Gary Nelson purposely left the ending ambiguous so as to reinforce the awesome and mysterious nature of the universe. That or the ghost of Walt Disney came to him and told him that spacesuitless humans could survive the pressure and cold of space in a vacuum. It could happen…

Actually, in order to outwit a black hole, I mean to say in order to get out of a really bad situation with evil robots and the disembodied voices of Hollywood stars (Roddy McDowall also appears), your Escape Velocity (the speed it takes you to get the hell out) would have to be greater than the Speed of Light. Einstein explains in his General Theory of Relativity that since nothing we know of actually travels faster than 299,792,458 meters per second, you’re screwed. But what a cool way to die, right? Being ripped apart by the…hold on, we’ll get back to this part.

If Black Holes are undetectable- wait, is this a stupid question?- how does one “detect” them?

First, we know that black holes are once-massive stars that ran out of fuel (hydrogen) after which their own overweight gravity caused it to suck into itself (a rather fun Friday night party trick), at a speed faster than light, therefore creating an area marked only by its extreme density and darkness. The fact is that a great majority of these gravitational anomalies have been found to exist at the known centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Woot!

So are black holes slowly sucking everything into the center of galaxies universe-wide? Are we a glass-is-half-empty kind of contracting universe rather than a glass-is-half-full kind of expanding one? Is Entropy the governing system of all we know? Is this at all connected to what I perceive to be my receding hairline?

Leave it to Braniac, but back in the 70s, Hawking figured out that, theoretically I should say, due to quantum-mechanical mumbo-jumbo, Black Holes emit radiation. Aptly-dubbed Hawking Radiation, the energy that produces the radiation comes from the mass of the black hole. Ergo black holes, like the nether regions of Polar Bear Club members, are shrinking. The rate of radiation increases as the mass decreases, so the black hole continues to radiate more and more intensely and to shrink more and more rapidly until it collapses, or as I like to think, stops sucking itself off, something Marilyn Manson just can’t seem to grasp.

A cool effect of Black Holes is that if you had Liv Tyler waving to you on the Hawaii Luau Beach of the earth and you, studly Ben Affleck you, were slowly flying off toward the Event Horizon of the Black Hole that was World War II, she would be waving to you for the rest of her life and then some, because, due to the dual optical illusion of curved space and the time it takes said light to actually get to her sad cow eyes here on earth, she would never see you cross the threshold of the Black Hole, but merely watch you get tinier and tinier. You though, stud, would actually have been crushed long before you ever reached the Event Horizon, being ripped slowly apart cold and lonely in space long before you reached the Black Hole Singularity (the center of the Black Hole) by gravity worse than any Zero fighter plane piloted by an under-trained and over-amphetamined teenage Kamikaze pilot ever produced while crashing into the sea, earth or otherwise.

So what does all this have to do with Love, Photography, and you? Is life-affirming Film and its antithesis (what is the antithesis of Film…Nonfilm…how could that be? I just blew my mind!), the Black Hole of Film? Nay, starman. Sit your burnt sienna ass down ass down Maxmillian, mach schnel! The fact is that to many of the infinite Afflecks floating through Tokyo-space toward their inevitable doom at the of hands of inescapable Kabukicho Yakuza gravity, the death knell of the Event Horizon represents only one microscopically possible future rather than a fixed boundary. Are we wrong to deny destiny? Are we perverse to fuck with fate? Do we deserve to be hose whipped? Most likely yes, but we may enjoy it. It’s your choice but just so you know, 5 out of 6 theoretical ex-girlfriends agree, LOVE (whatever that means), in all of its illimitable and untold cosmogonies, is inescapable.

Mahalo.

“For you the world is weird because if you’re not bored with it you’re at odds with it….For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”

There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time…If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for ? Why the hesitation to change? You don’t have time for this display, you fool. This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.” **

**Abstracts of Carlos Castaneda’s JOURNEY TO IXTLAN (Vol. 3)

The actual words he had read in a book years before, appeared to him out of thin air, whispered in unison by the surfeit of snakes slithering all around him. This was not so strange. What was was on his sockless feet now bloody with bites he wasn’t didn’t have any toes.

In fact all of his dreams of late had been of vast deserts landscapes filled with snakes and scorpions, scarabs and sharks, normally terrifying creatures of earth, whom rather than being at odds with man, were able to arrest his reality within the realm of the memories kept inside the collective consciousness, from the atavistic times of pre-society when animalia held sway and dominated the feral veldts and primordial seas and we battled for the right to be. More so than all of this, these onetime symbols of sure and painful death, figured to be more so messengers of transition, bringers of prophesy, conveyances of epiphany. One merely had to get past the book’s cover. The snakes continued biting.

He had grown immune to their final -literally- biting words, the poison that seeped within him and the teeth that tore at his flesh only made him more aware of the fact that he had been so busy lying around dying, that he neglected the proverbial writing on the wall, in this case revealing itself through his own nocturnal doorway into the collective dreamworld, that he could choose to stand up, look at his hands, fly, whathaveyou, all while under the delusional power of what society referred to as “real”. He remembered the pigeons scuttling for food he had seen one Sunday morning while reading at the local coffee shop. One in particular, despite an apparent hobble, seemed to be faster, or at least more zealous, than the rest in the hunt for random crumbs from the scones of patrons ignorant of anything but their own encroaching mortality. He had attracted the attention of a overactive toddler while pecking for orts and while scrambling underfoot to escape the soft-scaled godzilla child I caught an window of perspective and saw that he had no talons, claws or whatever they were called. Wait, what are they called on pigeons? Eagles, hawks and big birds of prey have talons, of course, but what about doves? Does the supposed bird of peace sport talons? And what about its black sheep of a cousin, the pigeon? I suppose it could be said at least this one is not pigeon toed.

So what was happening? Was he awake? Losing his mind? In some alternate dimension? Merely dreaming? Suddenly in bed, sitting up and rubbing a red spot on his arm, the thought forced itself on him, “You ate that pigeon in China and now it’s somehow back to claim revenge, isn’t it?”

Falling asleep again was not easy, but eventually slumber sneaked up and took its hostage. Though this dream was almost always the same. Always the same shocking two-dimensional waves of color, bereft of depth though gradually separating into fields of blues diverging into discernible horizons. These horizons stretch and grow angularly entering into the third and fourth dimensions as they progress toward some unknowable future when, for the first time in all this, waking ego enters into the equation: I realize I am here, somehow: flying, bodiless, astrally projecting, a part of the luminiferous æther. Though I can’t glance down at my arms for example I do know of the concept the arm, skin, blood, bone and muscle, etc., though it is of no concern as I glide through, no, am part of the transition from beinglessness into a gestalt of more than mere humanity.

It is then that I realize I am the pigeon. I know I have no feet which matters little once aloft. I begin to sense depth from a heretofore unknown height. I can perceive long running lines breaking to and fro toward the ever-lengthening horizon. These lines connote angles which break into cracks and fissures of a blue purer than what seems to be a vast blue-ice-white ocean forming beneath what would be my feet, if I had them. The angles begin to run as wild winged pegasi against a backdrop of pure azure, leaping and gamboling frivolously though with an ease and inherent strength rarely experienced in the man-made. The angles eventually fall beneath the ever-swelling ocean and delve deeper than what occurs to me as the crux where my human consciousness and avian body combine, deeper than I could ever survive without pressure-relieving equipment. Leaving wide sheets of soft to hard blue gradient running orthogonally toward the curve of infinite and eventually to black I dip and swerve through the air, closer and closer to the surface of the water, shining my projectile pigeon-form reflecting back up at me, until , glancing down for a millisecond, I take my eyes off the horizon and suddenly, no more <i>I</i>, just <i>it</i> tumbling through the sky, up and down meaningless, a blinding sun flipped parallaxically here and there due to gravity’s perverse anal retentiveness. Caught in swaths between white hot light: these same blue lines angling ever closer toward me, yet now and then mixing in with shocks of green and yellow, hues of varied and appealing warmth, spectra ranging from said warmth to a cool of brazen hussy lips colder than ice. All this in a circus acrobat’s fall from a wire suspended from God only knows where onto the sudden net of a summertime lea between two arched hills not uncharacteristic of a woman’s hips enthralled, plush with breezes. I is not I. It is We.

Then quick as all that the I’m back to myself, my body, my life in Tokyo, still cycling the mean city streets, still getting hit (by cabs) and hitting on (cabs) through all the dismal gray and glass and metallic heat reflections, pushing ever on through to that bracing blue forever set in my eyes at some distant horizon that I can’t quite convince myself is reachable, and am equally unable to persuade myself to stop trying.

Keep on riding.

A few hours over a complete revolution around the sun there I sat in my normal place, back of the stage, surrounded by wires and plugs, drums and amps, with the lights flitting about me, floating like drunken multi-colored butterflies with extensive tails rooting back to the light source from which they sprang. Unable to see further than just beyond the edge of the stage, I could just make out what seemed to be a writhing mess of claws and fangs, ice-reflected neon caroming off mirror balls, the slow-motion opiate laughs of evil women so often described in hardboiled books, blue cigarette smoke weaving in and out of the Dark just beyond my line of sight, visible then not. The crowd bulged and gave like a giant crush of wave water held back by some giant invisible force, about to call it quits, sparkling with the eyes of women, some dead as mannequins, others animate as voodoo initiates. We fine-tune and riff on our instruments, battling with the DJs overwrought selections droning into the great mush of din punctuated only by squelches of misinterpreted feedback and the birth of stars too far away to be more than imagined before a thousand years time.

The music begins. I start the pound and thrust, twist and surge. The crowd and I move in opposition, a ship willy-nilly on stormy water. The Music: swelling, dark, punctuated, essing like a snake to and fro all about me, coming into me and warming the blood, shaking off the inevitable pre-DTs, melding the sticks into my hands, making me one with the sound of the wood on tom, snare, cymbal, creating a sense of order in the random darkness. It”s around the 2nd or 3rd song when I begin talking. I’m speaking Japanese, not my native tongue and I can’t hear myself, but I know I’m talking about jail and how it was one year ago tonight that I was taken bodily from my workplace by 20 men with halitosis and cheap fleece, interrogated for 48 hours, arrested and housed for 25 days at a holding facility for Christmas.

I can hear in my mind all those things that rumble back and forth monotonously like so many Sisyphean boulders coming out of my mouth as if of their own volition, their own will, as if they had finally crossed the line between Thought and Action. The clamoring and liquid body just that side of the stage snarls and gnashes, in concert with my own motile mass, its tendril arms and beaklike maws reaching and laughing, pawing, drumming, and still no one listens. The word Freedom emerges over and over again from inside me. This is Freedom and you don’t understand it. This is Freedom and you don’t appreciate it. This is Freedom and you don’t know that without the other, without the darkness, this has no meaning, no light reprieve, so let’s thank Capture and Kidnap, Hostage and Seizure, Binding and Enslavement, Subduction and Subjugation. Yes, let’s thank Internment and Incarceration, for without the Yin of these dark forays into the unknown territories, there would be no such Yang to cut through that unknown darkness.

Mouthing Freedom one last time into the mike, I feel it before I see or hear it: through the unrelenting formation and breakdown of the darkness just before the stage, that invisible hand falls back and the Rush comes. By means of a tumult of charged air, the boom emanating from the serpentine crowd’s collective mouth – quite possibly ambiance-induced – flows through me just as the sound originating in my belly, forced up into my windpipe by my diaphragm and aspirated past tonsils, tongue and teeth into the vacuum of space just before the lips where the real world begins, where words hang timelessly for a moment before meaning insists itself on you, escapes annihilation into the wires and amps, emerging as the only thing fit to say at a time like this:

Freedom Rock.

The display clock on the table reads 20:22, blinking in its precise green LCD manner, which somehow settles my nerves. I turn over and reach for my cigarettes. Lately waking up has become a ritual of smoke first, see if the girl was around after. Fine by her too, so far as I could tell. She emanated a variety of offensive odors every time she returned to our home in the wee morning and still would crawl onto our doublewide futon and successfully snatch the covers, sighing triumphantly, obliviously. Of the odors, the least of which was the cheap sweet potato shouchu she swilled down in a vain attempt to cover the different brands of cheap men’s aftershave she inevitably wore on her slick, greasy skin, I could sense a remnant of sincere feeling, like the smell of dried salt on supple skin after an ocean swim. I had stopped caring about the covers being stolen from me a while back. Like a soft avalanche of crestfallen love, slowly the erosion of our relationship buried me in its pure white indifference.

She hadn’t returned yet. At least I didn’t have to pretend to act poorly, pretend I still didn’t know. Make believe I still thought she was out with her all night cram groups studying for their big wig-making exam, or out for yet another Yuki’s birthday party, or playing Guardian Angel to women walking home from the latenight commuter trains in Shibuya and Shinjuku (that was my favorite), or anyone of her lame-ass excuses. I wondered if anyone could be honest again after something like this. Then wondering about my own level of remaining honesty (assuming I survived and successfully broke this leeching parasite off me) I thought of everyone in the city. I pictured all 18 million folks. The salarymen and office ladies, waiters and clerks, sidestreet vendors and barmen, pushers and whores, touts and yakuza, punks and cherry boys, cosplay and otaku, little daisuke and little takako, Koizumi and Asashoryu, all the couples in love and all the loveless couples, and all the nameless individuals wandering the vast nameless streets in search of…

…Phlump…The clock, as it read off 20:33, fell to the floor. My tatterered copy of an 11th century Moorish tapestry wavered before the wall behind my head shaking and trembling like paper-mâché in the wind. Something had struck the building, something menacing, something with an angry design. I dropped my cigarette and, jumping from the bed, grabbed my pants, ran to the bureau and threw my personalia into a duffel, making sure to grab the bankbook and our namestamps. Walking hurriedly I paused beneath the sturdy oak shoji doorjam and took three deep breaths. The tremblor faded slightly and I made for the door, glancing back as I slipped into my shoes only to notice the futon sheets growing smoky and bright, trickling orange flames growing wild, as I heard that catch of the door shutting for the last time.

There is something sublime and something horrible about becoming what one sensed one would become. Having only vague inklings and minor visions of future forebodings is akin to walking into the final exams of a course one has never studied for and slept through most of the classes. These thoughts, or dreams even, still remain uppermost in the mind though. They are not so much a worry nor fear, but rather a potential energy upon the cusp of undergoing a kinesthetic change to the physical realm. And ultimately beneficent, as one’s power grows to affect one’s environment. Like from the powerlessness of being a toddler to the ruthless enigma of energy of a young boy. The body moves and I can control it. It is an altogether warm and cold feeling of being able to see the future before it happens and not being able to do anything about it. So what of seeing the effect of the cause, sustain the root of the occurrance in hand and hold fast henceforth. This is the way.

But which came first: Omens or belief in omens? I see and hear things, before they happen to me. I read and watch references to them in books and on television, minutes, hours before the actual occurrence. Three ladybugs in the shape of a lotus petal land on me at once while a salamander watches me from the crack in center of the floor. A person I don’t know approaches me and casually name drops these things. Did they just wink? Do they know something? Do they see these signs as well?

Something is wrong. It’s palpable. But I still see things, and they fit. Or they want to. And they want me to notice them. They cry out to be seen amidst the jackhammers and idling engine white noise filling out the soundtrack to our days, they wear green lycra spandex and dance a two-left-footed jig in a Sony Business Seminar and they wave rainbow crucifixes in KKK meetings. There is a great big puzzle to be pieced together, there is work to do.

So here’s me, holing up in a stormy Caribbean Hotel a la Bogey in Key Largo, sweating bullets, waiting for the storm to come, falling in love with the woman you don’t want to know, all the while the homeless Seminoles who do the landscaping are pounding on the front door to let them in and, of course, the murderers are in the back room plotting your demise. Best line of action. Get a drink. A tall drink. Preferably on ice, but that’s probably a luxury you can’t afford in this heat, not with the storm coming and the power out. The electricity has gone from the wires and outlets into the clouds, charging the air, all those invisible + and – ions roaming around just waiting for a nice fat target. Like you. Everyone’s waiting on you, bubba. What you gonna do? What’s your next move? Make it too fast and bloodthirsty drugrunners got the guns to your head. Too slow and that storm’ll pound you into the sea. What’s left but to open the door to the servants and at least save their lives. But in doing so, in letting those mohawked and braided warriors in need of shelter inside you see a flash out there, close to the beach, coming from the ever-rising water’s edge. It’s moving, beautiful, flashing like a beacon, seems like a call for help. That or it’s a siren’s ruse. Ruse or not you must go. Like it”s the last thing you’ll ever do. Suddenly it’s as if your whole life has been leading up to this, as if all those shit decisions and bad choices, empty promises and broken hearts lying in the dirty wake that is your past, may have been the only way to get you to right here, to be seeing this flash that’s uncontrollably hypnotizing you down to the shore in the midst of what looks to be a queen mother of a hurricane. You know it’s risky, you know one way or another you most likely won’t live out the rest of the day. Yet with night setting on soon and the dusk egging you on into one last adventure, you wonder if you’re worth anything to anyone, and maybe, just maybe you’ve got enough left in you for this one try at something good, this last chance to prove yourself, to prove you’re worth a goddamn, before the murdering lot of them get their chance to fill your belly full of lead, before the cops come in and get it all wrong, before she can sink her hungry teeth into you, before the whiskey runs dry, before the ocean swallows you whole, for good or ill.

What do you do?

You go is what you do. You go and crouch low, walking into that monsoon gale, the rain sheeting down more like shards of glass into your skin which normally feels like old leather but now is so on edge that it’s like a baby’s rearend, your nerves so alive, taut like all those perfect breasts you’ll never see again. Shut-up, you fool and concentrate. Keep your head low and your eyes trained to the sea. Forget the horizon line, that’s how all those shipwrecks got tossed into Davey Jones’ locker, staring at that horizon line that never ends, that far off thing that just kills you like some devil woman all in heels and makeup whispering your name you can never reach, but you continue to pursue to the ends of the earth, of which there are none. Damn fool. Eyes on the prize now. Those jackals inside probably know you’re gone by now, probably on their way out to find you, to fill you full of death. Maybe the injuns slowed ‘em up though. You can always hope they’ve got enough life in them left to know what’s what, but damn that whiskey. It’s a disease. A slow dirty maggot of an affliction that’s just seductive enough to make you think it’s a…Dammit! Pay attention now! There it is, floating just a little ways out, flashing like an supernatural entity. This ain’t no damned bioluminescence, this is something…Quick! Grab it. Ouch, damn! It’s hot, almost cold it”s so hot, and bigger than it looked a second ago too. It goes way down there doesn’t it? Shit, no way to lift that. You can’t give up now you worthless piece of…you’ve got nowhere to go back to, and no one would be there even if you did. At least die with the small piece of dignity the good lord gave you before you pissed it all away on cheap women and booze. Grab at it, fer chrissakes! At least end it all acting like you were alive once. Maybe it’ll count for something somewhere. Here they come, damn! As you reach for it something whitehot enters you and you feel the heat of exploding organs beginning to melt away, but don’t let it go…Dive man DIVE!

And there you go. Down, down, into the deep, and down deeper. until the light aqua turns dark and your only light is this preternatural rock formation welling up next to you tapered at the top to make it look small, guiding you down as it fattens out like the base of a volcano. Suddenly it dawns on you you must be breaking laws of physics as you were just standing in five feet of water and now you’re diving straight down and there’s no end in sight. You haven’t taken a breath now for minutes and the trail of blood from the bullets which should have torn you apart and should be attracting a school of sharks in these infested waters no longer flows from your body at all. You realize you’re not even swimming but rather being guided. You are being taken. But willingly. Images of the past flash before your eyes. The few good times soften the razor-edged sorrows, but you don’t care. Words like Life and Death have no meaning. Women and Whiskey even more so. Love and Hate. Happy and Sad. Up and Down. All meaningless. There is only the Black and the White and they meld into one another as if a melted Reese’s left on a leather carseat in the summer sun. You are the Light. And the Light is you. But you are also Darkness. And the Darkness is you.

It hadn’t hit him yet. The character in the book he had stolen from the library, a Hemingway failure by all standards, didn’t know she, his young love, was already gone, though still she stood before him, eyes rearing up big diamond sutra tears. She knew. She knew long ago. And our reader supposes Hemingway’s main character, the dying Colonel, knew it as well, somewhere deep, within the hidden delves of self unseen, through flashes she would exhibit, that she would never touch him again, never laugh nor pout, never eat and drink with him nor, more devastatingly, peer into his own shallow eyes with her own deep pools of brown sunshine. Those orbs of lustrous beauty, universes unto themselves, would lose all their shine for him and slowly, oh so achingly slow, turn away and in seeing other things without him by her side, without him to validate what she saw was true and good, would slowly turn his life here into a kind of death, though one that would never make his heart stop functioning. For that was all he was thenceforth: a function. No love, no purity, no wealth of life, not even a man, merely a function.

This our reader could sense from merely perusing the shell of what Hemingway’s prior novel had taught him about loving and losing. It came as no surprise that our reader could read no further and, in dropping those yellowed and borrowed pages reflective as a mirror, nor could our reader feel what once lived within his own heart, what for a butterfly’s few fluttering winged moments had encompassed our reader in complete ecstasy, what had made him feel that, despite all the wrong choices up till now, they had come to a certain fruition of faith, that despite all the fuck-ups and squandered opportunities there had been something whole and true there for a while, if only for one of the ever fleeting moments in which one knows epiphany.

He turned to the window and the darkening sky beyond seeing nothing but the wind. A whole and simultaneously empty wind that blew through him as if he were now nothing more than the flimsy screen which attempted to keep the bees out.