Nathaniel Clark

This is Nathaniel. I apol­o­gize for not hav­ing writ­ten lately but such is only one among my many human faults, and eas­ily for­got­ten, which is just about the same as eas­ily forgiven.

I was at the zoo the other day and was enjoy­ing myself thor­oughly until one of the zookeep­ers hap­pened upon me and mis­took me for an escaped mar­mosaur. He chased me around for half an hour with a but­ter­fly net before I deceived him into approach­ing and deliv­ered a hard round­house kung fu kick to his face. I ruined his good looks.

After the zoo adven­ture we stopped by Pirate’s to have a few beers, then spilled our bod­ily flu­ids into the tip jar and ran off in a mad fash­ion, dig­ging through our gar­ments as we did in search of obscene human fea­tures which we could wave about. At that point we were too far gone for fur­ther rec­ol­lec­tion: All I know is that the next morn­ing I left a trail of pud­dling fluid behind me wher­ever I went which smelled like nov­elty pud­ding, the ori­gin of which I could not find by any prob­ing. It still remains a mystery.

But to the present: Another school year at UCSD has ended, a year which I should have had noth­ing to do with and yet hell, I find myself here again. There will be a break from my duties, dur­ing which time I will no longer be exposed to the youth-laden oxy­gen to which I have become accus­tomed. I worry what changes, phys­i­o­log­i­cally, this might bring. As much as I try to carry myself oth­er­wise, the truth of the mat­ter is that I am an old man, and I must assume that this truth will make itself ever more appar­ent in the com­ing days. The only word to describe my death is ‘immi­nent.’ I sup­pose that is the case for us all.

In the mean­time, expect more updates from me soon. I will try to include pho­tographs, prob­a­bly of assorted leafs and fences, but I can and will make no promises. I hope you do not hold this against me. My cen­ter is frag­ile: Your good will means every­thing to me.

PS. If you were not already aware, I have taken a high rec­om­men­da­tion to apply to be on the next sea­son of the hit tele­vi­sion show Sur­vivor, where seven ghastly cast­aways vie to see who is the best and also to win the prize. My vio­lence would make per­fect tele­vi­sion, and so long as I deprive the Amer­i­can pub­lic of this I am liv­ing in some man­ner of sin. But I do not mean to shame myself.

An odd day, no doubt. An odd week. Hell, an odd month. Some char­ac­ter from some book I can­not quite remem­ber say­ing “The signs align!”, the writ­ing is on the wall but it might be a code. Aye, there’s the rub » To decode is the first step to the con­se­quent action, and in this world– so sus­pi­cious of the Voices, you know– it might be wise to pause before run­ning the ol’ schizo-crypto-analysis. Brings to mind the Emer­son dilemma, when he is asked about the voice– the inner voice– that he fol­lows; what if it is not God’s voice, but the Devil’s? Since I was 16 I have loved his answer. So per­haps I have given you an asym­me­try there, the old “Look before you leap” but “He who hes­i­tates is lost”. I am not ashamed, though– as I just read on the Athe­ism Web:

Sec­ondly, logic is not a set of rules which gov­ern human behav­ior. Humans may have log­i­cally con­flict­ing goals.

.: In truth, it feels like today was set adrift, float­ing still close to the shores of Real­ity (I can see it from here!) but mov­ing at a very dif­fer­ent pace, a mean­der­ing lazy cur­rent. I have a per­va­sive feel­ing of dis­con­nec­tion, like some bet­ter part of me is laugh­ing and know­ing that that which my senses is describ­ing to me is not quite real, but let’s go along with it for the pure hell of it.
.: I keep look­ing up, out the dark­ened win­dow, and expect­ing to see the hum­ming­bird mother, tucked into her nest… but I don’t see her, or them– they have disappeared…

Tucker had recounted for me how the eggs did hatch, and for a day there were two impos­si­bly small hum­ming­bird babies, black and stunted, curled amidst the breast-feathers that the mother had patiently woven over the last num­ber of weeks. But then, by the time I returned from New York, they were gone. I fear the worst.

Dark out­side, and inside the silence that fol­lows the angst-scream of Sunny Day Real Estate when the CD is finally stopped. Try­ing to find an anchor.

a quick and heart­felt thanks to GURU Labs for com­pil­ing sev­eral RPMs, mak­ing oth­er­wise ornery installs an order of mag­ni­tude eas­ier. But spe­cial thanks for the xmms-mp3 plu­gin, miss­ing from the Fedora upgrades… else I wouldn’t be hear­ing soma.fm and “Happy Hour All The Time”!

.: you are kindly requested to remove any obsta­cles that might exist to the pro­cure­ment of my liberty.

.: as the most cher­ished lips on the planet say, “What­ever…”, rolling it out of the soft cav­ern and off the tongue like a wet mar­ble, but tonight its mean­ing orbits nearer to “whichever”: which ever direc­tion, paths upon paths, bifur­ca­tion through the moun­tains and snowy woods.

it has been a great day, tak­ing me by com­plete surprise.

so i focus in on the abdomen, another “We rep­re­sent the con­cerned!” all the way from Psy­chic Radio, page 1; but this is a cast-off, a failed exper­i­ment, replaced by its bet­ter… but never mind that, now; just let your eyes slide earth­ward. The stom­ache, the grund, soft intesti­nal pock­ets and tan-t’ien, Odysseus lashed to pole, small but­tons hid­ing the pubic hair that traces up to the navel, no cop­per discs can really con­ceal. Look to the future, you’ll know exactly what I mean… exactly.

“So you see– so you see– so you see– a cer­tain L-O-quence can arise– dig?- drum­ming on the mean­est state– and here I mean voc-ab-u-lary- of existence.

“qua-quo-quell-cope, hon­est abe, hon­est abe.

“It’s an enthu­si­as­tic endeavor. Like– you know– you know– youknow– En-theos… god within, yeah?

“I mean, here we have hipocrisy, your run-of-the-mill spi­ral veil, your typ­i­cal vor­tex machine loosely cou­pled to any hang­ing sex­ual appendage in suck­ling fel­la­tio action. Now I don’t mean like sex and in real sex but sex as in what-you’re-not-supposed-to-say-or-do type sex.

“We can expose it, we can shed light on it, we tickle it into the light, make it laugh, jig­gle, unseat it from plea­sure giv­ing, from its insul­tated embrace…

“and what do we get? What do we find?

“Intox­i­cated by the call of truth we are lead only to another machine. It’s the tape that’s speaking.:

.: so it comes down to moments: small cap­sules of deci­sion, lit­tle micro­cosms of life, all minia­tur­ized, all bear­ing the pro­found depths of rev­e­la­tion. When these moments, like dense space-time bub­bles, float around you in chaotic inver­sions of grav­ity, you’ve got to be care­ful! You are enter­ing a poten­tial feed­back loop, and the effects of your actions can quickly– expo­nen­tially– mount and drown you in your own eter­nal return; ever-weightier echoes of your own deci­sion. Sit­ting in bed yes­ter­day morn­ing, lis­ten­ing to South Park’s mix­ture of bird­song and concrete-saws, watch­ing the shafts of golden light stream through the euca­lyp­tus and banana-trees, I had to decide– do I get up and put all my com­plain­ing into action and go run­ning? Or do I sink into the pil­low and sleep­ing bag nest I have made and aban­don myself to early-morning reverie?

The weight of the thing– of the lack of the deci­sion to just do it, as Nike has told me over and over– is appar­ent to me. I have been an avid doer for most my life, but these peri­ods of rel­a­tive inac­tiv­ity have left me with an iner­tia nearly impos­si­ble to over­come. The less I choose to leave my cozy, canyon-home’s lux­u­ri­ous sanc­tu­ary at a sweat-breaking run, the less pos­si­ble the entire enter­prise even remotely seems. Angel, from Cages, says in his spoken-word-jazz-act that it is easy to become a potato, to lie on the ground and grow roots and become fixed in posi­tion and result. That courage comes from light­ing a can­dle and going to explore the areas of dark­ness; and most peo­ple will never do that, as light­ing the can­dle means, almost inevitably, that wax will fall and burn your hand.

So yes­ter­day morn­ing, my moment of truth, comes– and I actu­ally, for 2-and-a-half min­utes, sunk back into my nest and closed my eyes. But two dif­fer­ent mantras stung me (as mantras aren’t usu­ally wont to do). One was from the afore-mentioned Angel– “Pain is part of the process of rev­e­la­tion.” And the other from a source far more pro­fane, a quote from Matthew McConaughey that graced the cover-story of my trial issue of Men’s Health: “Just tie your shoes”.

Body creak­ing, grav­ity pulling me down, I was out the door in a minute and inhal­ing the scent of jas­mine in painful gulps.

.: So we all know that I have lost more than a sin­gle day, with­ered as they have become in the shad­ows of the vast and unsightly MMW. I have been busier since so-called “grad­u­a­tion” than I was ever before, and I pro­fess I do not fully under­stand it. How­ever, with the excep­tion of a few blind­ing moments of insan­ity, I have man­aged to keep my shit together, and things are inex­orably rolling towards their con­clu­sion. Out of touch and off-track, I sink into the canyon and try to find the fur-and-bone remains of the poor squir­rels, hunted as they are by our res­i­dent hawk. There is a muddy wash at the base of the canyon, filled with the most unimag­in­able junk, washed there in all the mad rains of the sea­son– it makes me think of my friend Gabriel’s new plan to become a UCSD ascetic and sleep in the canyons behind the Geisel library. In the midst of the cam­pus, his canyon will be no more wild than mine, and I hope he real­izes that instead of the hares and hawks he will be most fre­quently accom­pa­nied by rot­ting paper cups and bil­low­ing plas­tic bags. So it goes.

I drink now the broth of a Thai soup (cour­tesy of a ramen-like brick of noo­dles and a safety-pack of spices and oils… how I feel that some­one out there is look­ing out for me, antic­i­pates my needs) and shovel some cous-cous into my mouth and chuckle at the faux-finish of my multi-cultural meal. As an impor­tant voice whis­pers to me, I reflect on my own capac­ity for self-delusion, and must con­clude that it either is nil or so great as to be com­pletely suc­cess­ful, and there­fore imper­vi­ous to the prod­ding of my mea­ger mind. Then I sip some more broth and dis­miss the whole thing any­way, because I think that if my body changes with­out my active con­trol (as I speak I am get­ting fat­ter and I breathe hard when I run too far), so too must my mind. Where’s the mir­ror for my soul?

My great­est enemy is tedium.

In con­clu­sion, I have been re-reading one of my favorite comics Cages by Dave Mck­ean; it is hard, I want my work to look so much like his, and that isn’t com­mon for me. But it puts me on the right track… I got to step out­side. I mean it, I know it, I have been reminded of it, and I will do it.

I know this makes lit­tle sense. That’s not writ­ing, that’s typ­ing, as Mr. Capote might say; so be it. I am the mon­key, pound­ing on the keys, and I promise you I will do it until Shake­speare emerges.

Good­night.