Latest Posts by david-pasquinelli - Page 2

Punk Spirit

Punk is an aesthetic, a form of music, a style of dress, but it’s also a spirit, a spirit in two parts. It isn’t concerned with how things are supposed to be done. It doesn’t ask for anything. It doesn’t owe anyone. It does things its own way. That’s the first thing. Consequences aren’t important. There’s nothing worth compromising yourself for. That’s the beginning of punk spirit.

Well the park bench, door, and sleeping in the rain / Little kids sitting in the shooting gallery / Set yourself up from innocence to misery / Well this is what you want, not the way of what they fucking say. —Tim Armstrong of Rancid in the song “1998”, from the album “Life Won’t Wait”

There are consequences. You’ll never be on anyone’s short list, or long list. You’ll never get a record contract. You’ll never have a big budget, or any budget. After you’re dead, no one will do a retrospective of your work, no one will make a documentary about your life, your name won’t be used as an adjective. You’ll always need a day job. You’ll die in obscurity, and you’ll stay there.

These things might not turn out to be true—nothing's certain about the future—but you have to believe they will. You can be happy about it, or unhappy about it, but you have to believe it, and you have to persist.

I had nothing, I had nothing to lose, and all that I was doing I was doing straight, always driven by the motto, “Either this way or no way.” —Blixa Bargeld in the 2008 TV show “Mein Leben”, viewable on youtube, translated by Google and corrected by me

Pig-headedness is only half of it. The other half is solidarity with the other punks, the other people taking their own way and taking it to the end.

Further, ever since ancient times, the skeptical Indra, Lord of Heaven, has come to test the intentions of practitioners, as has Mara the Tempter come to disturb and obstruct the practitioner’s training in the Way. All instances of this have occurred when someone has not let go of hopes for fame and gain. When great compassion is deep within you, and your wish to spiritually aid sentient beings everywhere is well seasoned, there are no such obstructions. —Eihei Dōgen in “Keisei Sanshoku” of his “Shōbōgenzō” as translated by Hubert Nearman

Not Like a Caravaggio Painting

Guy was out to a business lunch, which was going quite well. He was going to be significantly richer after this deal. Richer. By normal people’s standards Guy was already rich. By the standards of the well-to-do, even. Still, if you were to ride in an elevator with Guy, you wouldn’t think he was that rich, a successful lawyer, maybe. Only if you knew what to look for would you get a sense of how rich Guy was. But, if you weren’t the sort of person who knew what to look for, you wouldn’t be riding in an elevator with Guy.

Guy had had a couple Kobe sliders and a couple whiskeys at lunch, and now he needed to pee. The restaurant was the necessary upscale affair required for such a business meeting, but it was dressed up like a dive, an exquisite hole in the wall, a greasy spoon, but one as painted by Caravaggio. The restroom was just the same, looking like a little shithole— except: cloth towels to dry your hands instead of paper ones, toilets that had never seen shit, wet wipes on offer in the stalls….

Guy did his business at the urinal and washed up at the sink, a standard cheap white porcelain sink like you’d find in any gas station bathroom— except the water came on when you turned it on, and went off when you turned it off, and you could actually get hot water out of it, too. He was drying off his hands and daydreaming of all the money he was about to make when a toilet flushed in a stall behind him. He had thought he was alone and wondered: He wasn’t talking to himself, was he, when he thought no one was there?

Guy tossed his towel in the hamper and made for the door, ready to get back out to the table and seal the deal, but the door stopped shut with a dense metal clack, and then the room spun around, and where he once stood on the floor facing the door, now he faced the floor and stood on nothing, the toes of his shoes frantically scraping across the clean, glossy bathroom tile. He reached out to catch himself with his hands, but only the tips of his middle fingers could just brush against the floor. He tried to kick off the door but couldn’t reach. He tried to crawl forward but the man’s legs straddling his either side blocked him. He had no leverage and no traction. He dangled helplessly, almost in a state of repose. He clawed at the rope, but if you don’t get your fingers in between the rope and your neck right at first, then you never will. He tried everything he could, but none of it helped… but it didn’t stop him from trying… but trying didn’t help. The man, his killer, had been waiting, had had the advantage of picking the moment to strike. His killer had the upper hand. Guy was used to being the one with the upper hand. He was so used to it that he mistook himself for something special— especially smart, especially cunning. But no, he had just always had the upper hand, and the one with the upper hand wins.

It didn’t take long for Guy to pass out. His life didn’t flash before his eyes, he didn’t think of his wife or his three children, he didn’t think of that ex-lover from years ago that he had been secretly still carrying a flame for up even until now. Those things only happen to survivors, memories spliced in after the danger has passed. For Guy there was just struggle, then struggle’s end.

The killer held Guy like that to a count of 300 Mississippi. Quite a workout. If you’ve been looking for a good body weight exercise for your lower back, this is it. At 255 Mississippi, Guy shit his pants. The killer was tempted to drop him then, but he persisted. When he finally made it to 300, he dragged Guy to the stall he’d been waiting in and put him on the toilet. He checked his pulse, and but god damn it if Guy wasn’t still ticking, if only weakly. The killer gripped Guy by the jaw—his index finger running across Guy’s lips—and pierced the arteries on either side of the throat in one thrust of his knife. He tipped Guy’s head to one side to keep himself from getting all bloddy as Guy drained from the neck. He then put his hand down the front of Guy’s $500 white linen button-up shirt— indistinguishable from a $5 white button-up shirt, unless you’re the right sort of person. He tested Guy’s pulse on his chest— he was terrible at finding a pulse on the wrist. A minute went by without a discernable heartbeat.

Guy had been his first hit. It was nothing like the movies. There was no drama. It was ugly and boring and gross. Shit, piss, blood, saliva, mucus. It was like taking apart a chicken, except heavier. It was uncomfortable, intimate. He had hoped he wouldn’t have to touch anyone, had taken great pains to not touch anyone, but on the other side of this thing he felt he might as well have blown Guy. In fact, if he could’ve done that instead for the same money, it would’ve been hands down a more pleasant experience for all conscerned. But he couldn’t. And as gross and cumbersome and awkward and risky as the work was, the money was better.

Breakfast with Grandma

I found my grandma standing in front of my open refrigerator door one morning, a gallon of milk tipped all the way back, guzzling it fast and not spilling a drop. It’s funny that that’s the thing that struck me most at the time, how she was just chugging this gallon of milk without losing any. My grandma had died going on ten years before, so you’d think seeing her there at all would be itself the big shocker that morning, but no, at least not at first.

When she was done with the milk she tossed the empty jug over her shoulder and started in on the eggs. It was Sunday morning; I go grocery shopping on Saturdays. She picked a good time to stop by if she was hungry. She ate each of the dozen eggs in one bite, shell and all, and tossed the carton over her shoulder. It landed next to the milk jug, in a little pile she was making, along with an emptied styrofoam tray of ground beef, an emptied jar of jam, and a wrapper for a brick of medium cheddar cheese. I have to imagine it took her some time to chew through all the cheese, it was a new one.

I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t notice me. I went back to my bedroom and paced around, forgetting for the moment that I’d long since kicked the nail biting habit. I didn’t believe it was really my grandma. My eyes told me it was my grandma, she had my grandma’s skin, my grandma’s hair, she wore my grandma’s clothes, her shoes, her pearls, her perfume. But some other sense, one I can’t name, was screaming at me with at least as much certainty that this was not my grandma, that my grandma was dead and even if she wasn’t, the thing in my kitchen wasn’t her. I’d gotten up that morning to find a spider in my kitchen the size of my dead grandmother, far too big to put outside without touching it, far too big to smash. When it was done with my fridge and my pantry, what would it eat next?

My phone was charging on my nightstand. My wallet was there with it, which was lucky since I normally keep it in a dish on the counter in the kitchen. I took them both and cut a hole in my bedroom window screen with the nail file end of a pair of clippers from my headboard. I jumped out the window. I guess this isn’t my house anymore, I thought. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of any way about leaving my house behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, my phone, and my wallet. I was a little irked about the groceries, since I’d just gone to the trouble of getting them. My car though… there was no way to get to the keys without going through the kitchen. I left it behind. It hurt, it really hurt to leave the car behind like that, like I was leaving a friend behind, or no, not a friend, a pet. Someone who needed me. And after a few days of walking everywhere, it hurt a lot more.

The Whole Point of the Cult

The whole point of the cult was to scratch together a little money, enough to stay afloat and give me the time to write, and then, hopefully, make a name for myself as a writer and, if I were lucky, get to a place where I could do it for a living. After that I’d tell my disciples that they’ve made it, that they didn’t need me anymore, that the faith was in their hands now. But almost from the start it took over my life, pushing everything else out. Now, even if I could find the time, I could never be a writer. The only people that would read anything I wrote would be my disciples, and to them it would be the infallible word of god. If anyone else even chanced upon my writing, the first thing they’d know about it is that it was written by that crazy cult leader they sort of recall hearing about once before. In either case, who wrote it overshadows what’s written.

You know, I never wanted a job. I never wanted to be employed, to be someone’s instrument, to be someone’s object. All I wanted was to carve out just a little space, a little time, where I could do what I pleased. Where I could write. That’s why I started the cult.

The Thousand Year Echo

Meryl was weeding in her garden when she heard the first voice. It spoke clearly, like it was the neighbor calling over the fence to her, but she didn’t understand the words. She looked around after the voice, but saw no one.

“Hello?”, she said, rising hesitantly to her feet. The voice was still speaking— had been speaking, uninterrupted since she first heard it. Meryl peeked over the fence. Maybe the neighbor had turned on the TV, or a radio. But when she got up on her tiptoes to see over the fence, she noticed the voice was gone. She made a sour face, then brushed it off and went back to weeding. No sooner had she knelt down to take up her trowel again than did the voice come back, along with several others, laughing.

“Who’s there?”, she demanded, stamping her foot as she stood up again and holding the trowel like a knife. No answer, just more of the same talking she couldn’t understand. She checked the other fence, and the other other, both with the same result. She returned to the spot she was weeding and listened. What language was that? Russian? Chinese? No, not quite. Was it just a bunch of babble? Was she having a stroke, or a seizure, and this was a symptom? She took out her phone and looked up “symptoms of a stroke”, and “symptoms of a seizure.” Neither seemed likely. Just making the search and reading the results was a strong indication, in and of itself, that she wasn’t having a stroke or a seizure. Then what was she hearing?

She stood there in her garden, completely baffled, listening to the voice carry on. Could somebody be playing a trick on her? How? Could the metal plate in her head be receiving radio signals? (She had no metal plate in her head, as far as she was aware.) Maybe it was time for a cup of tea, Meryl thought. She dropped her trowel where she stood, took off her work gloves and left them with the trowel, and walked to the back deck. When she stepped up to the deck, the voice cut out, like a radio losing reception. She stepped back down. The voice came back. She flossed the step, up and down: Up, no voice; down, voice.

Meryl skipped the tea. She went to the hardware store and bought a hundred orange marker flags. She systematically combed over each square foot of her back yard, row by row, like she was mowing the lawn. She’d take a step, listen for the voices, and, if she heard them, mark the spot with a flag. When she had covered the whole of her back yard there now appeared a swirl of markers, a spiral galaxy of orange flags with Meryl’s gloves situated in the center.

Over the next two weeks Meryl made a few more trips to the hardware store. She dug up her garden, digging along the contours she’d mapped out with the flags, then filled the area in with poured concrete, making herself a nice, if not oddly shaped and bizzarely placed, new patio. She put a wrought iron bench in the middle of it, and on either side of that, a flower box. It became her habit to spend much of her free time out on that bench, listening to the voices.

It had been a man’s voice the first time, but it wasn’t always. She’d hear, now a gang of children at play, now a young man and woman talking, and a baby crying. A whispering woman—and she could’ve been whispering right in Meryl’s ear—frantically muttering what sounded like a prayer was a recurring one. Always the voices came in that uninteligible, unplaceable language— apart from the baby’s.

Meryl looked for that language, scouring the internet for samples of any she’d never heard before. None of them were right. The more she listened to the voices on the patio, the more unlike anything else their language seemed. It was heavy, and solid like blocks of carved, polished stone. Every other language she could find was a twittering of birds by comparison.

One afternoon Meryl had friends over for dinner. She took the table from the back deck and set it up on her new patio, where they all dined that night. She was nearly as shocked as her friends were when they heard the voices. She’d been operating under the assumption this whole time that she’d gone discreetly and pleasantly insane, or something like it.

Jason—she’d had the biggest crush on him in high school, which no one ever knew about, and when he ended up marrying her sort-of friend, Dawn, Meryl drew closer to her out of some masochistic impulse—was particularly excited by the phenomenon and, after a few beers, announced to the dinner party that he was resolved to solve the riddle. Everyone laughed at this, except Jason. Conversation moved on. No one thought much of the announcement.

Meryl herself wasn’t very curious about the voices. Or, she was, just in the way that she wanted to listen to them, rather than in the way that she needed to have an explanation for them. It was troubling enough to know other people could even hear them. Finding out what the were, where they came from, what cuased them— to Meryl that would just be making matters worse. Jason started emailing her frequently, asking questions about the voices. She answered his questions. He was no trouble to her.

Until one day he showed up with a small crew of—were they scientists?—all duded up in hazmat suits like she had E.T. stowed away in her back yard. He promised her that it would only be two hours, tops, and then it’d be like they were never even there. They just needed to collect some data, he told her, that’s all. He pleaded with her, and flirted, like he always used to do in high school. He was old and ugly now, and the display was farsical, but in fairness she was old and ugly too, and anyway it worked. Meryl relented.

They were in and out in two hours, and they had left no trace, just like Jason said. Then, years passed, and Meryl never heard what came of it. Dawn and Jason had divorced not long after, (but unrelated to), the data collection episode, and their divorce had let the air out of her friendship with either of them. She fell out of contact with a lot of people, as it happened, and drew closer to the voices. She had, over the years, developed an understanding of their language, but she couldn’t articulate their meaning. To listen to a language for years, but never speak it… you get a sense of it, in your guts, like a dog must have for the way its human relatives speak. But a dog doesn’t have the equipment to talk back, and neither did Meryl.

In the same time, she had also developed lung cancer, which she fought and “won.” The sad truth is that one does not win against cancer. Meryl was down half a lung. Her life would be shorter than it otherwise would have been, because of that. And still, not a day would go by, from the first day she was diagnosed until her last, that wouldn’t be in the shadow of her cancer, or its returning. She didn’t think of herself as having won a battle.

Oh, and money. Not much of that was left, meaning the voices that had kept her company for so long now would be repossessed by the bank, along with everything else. This would happen, she was certain, save for a miracle. Then, a miracle.

Jason called her, out of the blue, to tell her that they’d found what the voices were. They were an echo. An echo from a long, long time ago. Using a lot of sciencey words that meant nothing to Meryl and that, truth be told, meant nothing to him either, Jason explained to her that any sound waves propagating through the space enclosing that little patch in what used to be her garden would be repropagated exactly, through that same space, some one thousand years later, by a process distinct from the one which causes familiar echos, but roughly analogous. Jason was very excited about all this. Meryl wasn’t. But along with this news, Jason had also called with a proposal: To make that special little patch of hers a destination. People would pay good money just to sit on her bench and listen to the idle chitchat of our distant ancestors, and even better—he said even better, but to Meryl it seemed even worse—they could leave a message of their own, to be heard by who knows who in a thousand years’ time. “Can you imagine it?”, he asked breathlessly.

Meryl hated the idea, but she did believe it would pay. Again, she relented to Jason. She kept the house, and raked in money besides. She even got to hear the voices still, on Sunday’s, when the house—not her house anymore, the house—was closed to the public.

She thought it was kind of sad, watching all these people come to leave their own personal messages for the next millennium. She understood, like she understood the voices, in her gut, not her head, that there simply wouldn’t be anyone to recieve them.

The Dangers of Sugar

The 911 Transcript

Dispatch: 911 emergency

Caller: Uh, hi, this is Mrs. Robert Cole calling on behalf of my husband. We’re at 1612 South Antoine Street.

Dispatch: What’s the emergency, Mrs. Cole?

Mrs. Cole: So… I don’t know— my husband thinks he got his head stuck in the dryer. He’s always doing this sort of thing though. We go to a lot of trouble and it turns out to be nothing. But we’ve tried about everything we can think of and— I don’t know.

Dispatch: You said his head is caught in a dryer?

Mrs. Cole: A clothes dryer, yes. It looks like the door slammed shut on his neck, uh, while he was pulling something out. Maybe? I didn’t see what happened; I just got back from the market. He’s standing in front of the dryer, kind of bent over, his head’s inside of it, and the door’s shut. i just— Robert, how did you even manage it?

Dispatch: He’s conscious then?

Mrs. Cole: Let me check. (passage of approx. eight words, indistinct)

Mrs. Cole: I can’t tell. I don’t think so.

Dispatch: Can you open the door?

Mrs. Cole: Let me check….

(Mrs. Cole can be heard putting down the phone. Approx. three seconds later she can be heard struggling to open the dryer door.)

Mrs. Cole: Oh God! (several words, indistinct)

Mrs. Cole (panting): There’s a lot of blood— He’s bleeding, from his neck.

Dispatch: Okay, an ambulance is on the way. You need to apply preassure to the wound, Mrs. Cole, and don’t disconnect. I’ll stay on the line.

The Coroner’s Report

IN THE MATTER RE THE DEATH OF:

I, HERMAN SYLVESTER, Sheriff-Coroner of the County of Washoe, State of Nevada, certify an inquiry and investigation was held in the death of ROBERT NICHOLAS COLE, a 42 years old male, born in New Mexico. The inquiry and investigation revealed that the decedent died on the 19th day of June, 1955 at 1612 South Antoine Street in Reno as follows:

MANNER OF DEATH: NATURAL CAUSES CAUSE OF DEATH: BLOOD LOSS due to PUNCTURE WOUNDS to the neck.

Sustained following INJURIES FROM EXCESS DIETARY SUGAR. The incident occurred at 1612 South Antoine Street in Reno at an unknown hour on June 19, 1955. I certify that death occurred from the cause and in the manner stated above in accordance with the written findings contained herein.

Signed this 15th day of March, 1955 HERMAN SYLVESTER, SHERIFF-CORONER

Recollection of Maurice Sinclair

When Bob died it wasn’t so much a shock, really. He was always getting into tight spots, something of a daredevil. He got himself out of ’em too, but, well, we all sort of knew, you know, that one day he wouldn’t. It was that daring that we loved about him. So when we finally learned what got him, that he died from eating too much sugar, I thought, you must be joking! Look at him, his head’s nearly ripped clean off. But now, looking back, you know he did have a sweet tooth? He must’ve drunk a half-dozen colas a day for as long as I knew him. My doctor— later on I asked my doctor about it, because I drank my share of cola too, and he explained how the sugar eats away at the lining of the throat, and if this goes on long enough your head’ll just come right off and all your juices’ll spill all over the floor, just like Bob’s did. Well, I hardly have to tell you I haven’t touched a soft drink since 1963. Not even once.

Workplace Anxiety

It was five minutes to eight on a Teusday morning, and he was up pacing nerveously around the bedroom, holding his stomach like he was about to vomit or have diarrhea. Typical behavior for him in the morning, at least on a work day. He really seemed to hate his job. I never learned what he did. There was a period of a few months during which he seemed much more relaxed, he slept better, he took care of himself, and during that time he never paced around the bedroom in the morning like that. He must’ve been out of work. Must’ve gone back to it when he went back to work.

He was doing especially bad on this particular morning. He always talked to himself, whenever he was alone, but always under his breath. On this morning he grew very agitated, talking to himself more and more loudly until he was almost yelling. Then he stopped, stopped pacing around and clutching his guts, and stopped talking to himself. He froze a moment, then hurried out of the bedroom. He must’ve gone to the kitchen, but I couldn’t see him. The kitchen was out of my field of view, and I was afraid that, if I turned the camera, he’d notice it. But he must’ve gone into the kitchen because he lived in this dinky little apartment where the kitchen and living room were on one side, and the bedroom and bathroom were on the other. He went through the doorway to the kitchen/living room area, and came back a few moments later with a pair of kitchen shears. He took them to the bathroom sink and stood there for a long while. I couldn’t see what he was doing; I could see him standing there at the sink, but he was in shadows and I couldn’t make out any details. It looked like he was cutting something— which, it turned out, he was.

He laughed to himself, a surprised little chuckle, and then came back into the bedroom. He’d cut off his left index finger and couldn’t have been happier about it. He tossed the scissors and his finger onto the bed, and called into work to tell his manager that he wouldn’t be able to come in, that there had been an accident in the kitchen and that he would be stuck at the emergency room all day. This seemed to go over fine. When he got off the phone he jumped onto the bed like a little kid and stared at the finger. It was moving, inching around his bed like an inchworm.

He cut off his left middle finger. He cut it off like he was snipping a corner off a piece of paper. He didn’t flinch, just, snip. There wasn’t any blood either. In quick succession, he cut off the other fingers of his left hand, snip, snip, snip. Five litle inchworms inched around his bed. He watched them all wriggling around there with a big grin on his face. He seemed satisfied… for a while. Then he took off his socks and snipped off his toes as matter-of-factly as if he were clipping his toenails: snip, snip, snip, snip, snip— snip, snip, snip, snip, snip.

Now he had fifteen little inchworms inching around his bed, and it looked like that would be all. He tried to cut his wrist, but it was too big a job for his kitchen shears. He couldn’t very well cut off the fingers of his right hand, because it was with his right hand that he cut. He pulled down his pants and seemed to contemplate cutting off his penis to make it sixteen little inchworms, but he pulled his pants back up without doing it. After that he seemed content to watch his new friends… for a while. Then he got the—frankly, brilliant, though also horrifying—idea to cut his face, opening his mouth wide and cutting off strips of cheekmeat and lips. These pieces added some variety to his menagerie: instead of inching around like inchworms, they stretched out long and pulled themselves forward, like earthworms.

He found he could use the same technique with any hole. He did his nostrils, making little maggot looking pieces, and his eyelids. Then he did his belly button, which turned out the be the mother lode. New creatures came pouring out of him. He didn’t have to cut them out anymore either, they cut themselves out, or each other. When it was all over, there wasn’t anything left of him, and all the pieces had scurried away to hide under the floorboards, down the drains, in dark corners and other places where no one looks and my camera can’t see.