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    hardie karges 11:52 am on October 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , friends,   

    My friends are my family, 

    unfettered by ties of blood and other quirks of fate that can’t be undone. My friends are the family I choose, not the family that begat me. The family that begat me doesn’t always get me, yet they themselves are different aspects of me in the flesh, the same DNA spun up into three different forms, the same cards dealt three different ways. My true friends would do any thing in the world to help me, because they know I’d never ask it of them. My nuclear family is a time bomb waiting to blow, the tracks of blood mute testimony to the struggle for a happy family, just like the wall-hanging asks God for. False friends are the people who hold you back, wrapping you in a fuzzy pink shawl of comfort and mediocrity, village communism, the leveling influence of jealousy, all attempts to break ranks brought tumbling down by the jeers of the crowd screaming for blood. Any excess of income must be balanced by excess outgo to placate the judgments of the losers. Any excess of confidence must be subjected to the doubts of the naysayers. They wrap you up in all their expectations and smother you. They prick you gently in the softest point in your thick hide and proceed to castrate you, essential to proper domestication of the wild species. To get ahead, you gotta’ leave others behind. If you slow down to let them keep up, they’ll just slow down further until no one goes anywhere, village communism. Welcome to the third world.

     
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    hardie karges 11:38 am on October 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    Push-button people push buttons to get a response 

    even where no buttons exist. Familiarity breeds contempt in one world as surely as Asians breed rice in another. I think Europeans and their like thrive on individualism and discord, whereas Asians and their like thrive on conformity and order, the closer the better. Westerners like ‘their space’. Asians hate to be alone more than anything else in the world. For me the goal is to have a mobile phone that works anywhere in the world and never have to use it. For a Thai the goal is to travel with as many people as possible. Problems in Asia only arise when the pecking order is not clearly established. Marriage is a special case in both hemispheres. Offspring and their parents are typically closer than the spouses themselves in Asia, the blood connection speaking louder than promises that can be broken. In the end it’s no different in the West when things fall apart; the kids are the fruit that endures the uncertainties of transient attraction. Still, though blood is thicker than water, sperm is thicker than blood. The hand I play is more important than the hand I’m dealt. The people I choose are more important than the people I’m stuck with.

     
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    hardie karges 9:25 am on October 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , machismo,   

    Violence play in the background 

    of every encounter between people without pigment, only one step removed from the jungle from which we escaped on to the broad open plains of the future, complete with battle-axes, beer, and long cold nights with heifers. Sounds like home. Violence is abstracted into games and contests, competition and capitalism. For the people of color who stayed back in the ‘hood’, the violence is open, not merely alluded to. The jungle lives on and life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short. Humans maintain their close relations with their close relatives and the price of bush meat is cheap. The Middle East lightens up a little, but not much. Religion takes over where instinct leaves off, and women bear the brunt of the burden, propping up the overweight egos of hunters who can no longer hunt, and caravan raiders with no more caravans. Asia prefers the hierarchy of suppression. You kiss up and you beat down. Everybody knows their place whether they like it or not. Elaborate rituals back-fill the logic of repression, but the end-result is the same: you gotta’ serve somebody.

     
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    hardie karges 12:35 pm on October 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    When the day’s all done, you’re still and always alone; 

    the only question is to what extent and by what design. Is it of your own making or a death sentence? Little by little you build your empires one brick at the time, wall by wall, room by room, just to watch it all fall down in one broad sweep of the cosmic broom. If you don’t tear it down yourself, then someone will do it for you. Love is scary, staring into the great unknown, big brown eyes connected to infinity. It’s that falling feeling that I crave, that bottomless pit in the stomach, that sudden drop on the roller-coaster ride of life, that lack of center, that makes me feel most alive. Machines and their machinations only delay the inevitable. Space is comprised of singularities, impure and infinitely dividable, recombining at random with anonymous partners. Still mechanical sex is only as good as the mechanics behind it, and nothing compares with that tractor beam of pure attraction between two would-be lovers making the leap from conditional tense to indicative. That’s the force that maintains the race, to reproduce and evolve, by bits and pieces, little ones crawling underfoot and reeking.

     
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    hardie karges 8:44 am on October 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    The love between a man and woman can’t be trusted. 

    Asians have long known that. The only love that can trusted is essentially that between blood relatives, particularly between mother and child. You don’t trust your choices; you trust your fate, whether cruel or not. Sex implies possession as much as it inspires love as if the very act of penetration were as much a birthday bow as a ribbon tied, a gift-wrapped prison. Every penetration is a key inserted and turned, whether to the right or left, open or closed, is left to chance and the dance of the dice. But possession is only a contract, real or imagined. Blood is your self, interpolated and extrapolated, from the past into the future, like a poker hand laid out to show. We look at the past with the microscope of the present as if men had always thought the same way, as if they’d always loved their wives and kids or anything else long considered sacred. They didn’t; it had to be learned just like everything else. The thing a man wants most in a wife is a good girl who also gives good head, and likes it, a Brownie who knows who to use her brownies, a woman equally at home with her biscuits in the oven or her buns in bed. Many a prostitute can polish a mean knob, of course, but that doesn’t count, not in the modern day and age of democracy and free enterprise.

     
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    hardie karges 9:28 am on October 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    Now I just need a parallel reality, 


    and that never the twain meet. Half a world away, a full 180 degrees, lies another world ready and waiting, a tablet upon which to write, Peru, the flip side, the mirror image. Thailand is great for people with low self-esteem, but ultimately may be a dead end. Thais themselves tend to have low personal self-esteem for which they tend to over-compensate with a national superiority complex, notwithstanding their generally low ranking in many of the world’s important statistics, such as education, research, and development, etc. Peru seems to be the South American equivalent of Thailand, slightly bonkers, a relatively open society, and nice-looking women. Obviously I want both worlds, single and married, East and West. Maybe that’s one thing one can do in Thailand, as long as one defines the situation carefully. My ancestors followed cows across continents. So can I.

     
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    hardie karges 7:27 am on September 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    Never give more than half of your self to someone else 

    or she just might take it all, and not even give change. Half a love is plenty, especially when you’ve got nothing. Sometimes it’s hard to ‘break up’ even when the situation seems like it has a limited future. You can’t make it better, and you can’t shut it down, so what do you do? If you’re a traveling man, and creative to boot, you make it a part-time gig, as long as the little lady’s cool with the deal and as long as you still enjoy the sex. If there’s nothing else on which to base a decision, and money is not an issue, then let it be sex. That’s only natural. Couples that ‘stick it out’ long after the physical love is gone are accomplishing less than they could otherwise. ‘Sticking it in’ is more important. The couple that lays together, stays together. The sexual act is penetration of another dimension, natural selection in process, the choice of life.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:49 am on September 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the wife, the kid, the three-car garage. 

    Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the microwave, the DVD, the five-liter fridge. I sleep best with a ‘vacancy’ sign flashing outside my window and the roar of the freeway in the distance. I feel best at about five hundred miles an hour, not looking down but looking up, beyond atmosphere and trivial pursuits, to the level where the sky fades to black, just like some predictable movie selling soap to bored house husbands. I need love but not in my face. Just knowing it is there is usually enough. Once it descends into the Hell of internecine squabbling and righteous indignation, then I’d rather be alone, just me and the elements, air earth fire water. I just need to know it’s out there, waiting for me, just like I’m waiting for it. It doesn’t have to be reduced to chores and snores, shopping lists and rent receipts, and jockeying for bathroom rights. Love’s better than that. Save love for the sublime and the subliminal aspects of existence, the passage of solids into vapor without the intermediate phase of liquid, the passage of matter into spirit without the intermediate phase of thought, bodies making love in mid-air without so much as a glance downward, suspension of disbelief. Let the idle mind do the dirty work of handling liquids and scrubbing cracks. Let the hired hands change the tires and splice the wires. Let the experts fix the clocks and deal the stocks. Love should be pure and powerful, a force to be reckoned with, not a force to reckon with. Lovers should meet under waterfalls and rainbows, not under storm and stress. Lovers should meet between silk sheets and satin shirts, not between rushed dinners and hushed desserts. Love should be placed right on the pedestal where the Romans put it, posed and poised, romantic to a fault.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:09 am on September 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    I depend on the kindness of strangers 


    for the love to sustain me, not sex, but love. Alone for years, I got my love from dogs and children, memories and speculation. Recollecting a long lost incident would send shivers up my spine. Kids are great in any language, not yet hard and cold like the cities we build them. I could extract the love from a rock. This is rapture of the deep, the euphoria of terminal decadence, the smile of a man who knows that death is near. The walls that surround me have doors that open out to worlds beyond. I’m at odds with the world but getting even with Nature, killing time before it kills me. I’m learning to crawl again as growing pains fade at 50 and rigor mortis sets in like a Flagstaff winter, cold and hard, the stiffening that comes with age, an old baguette ready to be starch for the soup.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:28 am on September 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Why do I put myself through it? 

    Why do I stick it out just to get it whacked off time after time after time? Why do I go through the motions just to be left there hanging when it’s all over? These are the questions to which ‘love’ is the answer. I do it all for love, all for the future, all for the great unknown, ink tracks on a blank slate, a palimpsest washed over many times by angry waters and casual surfers. They know nothing of the fine line I walk every day just to maintain a delicate balance between the void on one side and chaos on the other. The created world in the center is the world that I love, a world of frequencies and tendencies to exist, uncertain by definition and dependent on the good graces of history. Divine intervention has already occurred, and the result is a spectrum of color and a symphony of sound, a profusion of life busting at the seams of my jeans. It’s an incredible time to be alive, witness to the end of an era, testifying to the ignorance of our self-appointed leaders. Armies of the night fight the good fight and lay low during the light of day, awaiting instructions from below, gut reactions unerringly accurate.

     

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