A Riddle Wrapped

The unwrapping of which is my current task, to crack the nut and find perhaps in the kernal an enigmatic way to live.

We are here to kill war. We are here to drink beer. We are here to live so well Death will tremble to take us.
— Charles Bukowski

My literary heroes acted out by impulses beyond their control the myth of the drunkenly suffering artist. Bukowski, John Berryman, Everette Maddox, all but the last dead too young and by their own hand (Berryman’s bridge, Maddox’s “Drinking Glass“).

If I have a credo in my life it is Bukowsi’s. How, then, to live a moderately happy life and honor it? Politics drives me to the brink of a stroke, Klonopin drowning in adreneline, and regrets that I tossed my copy of the Anarchist Cookbook. Not a good place, but when I first came home I managed to channel the anger into words and civil action. Beer we may take to understand what the Irish call good craic:companionship of friends, out of the house and having fun. It need not end in a hangover.

The last is the most difficult. I am bound in chains of my own forging to a life, no, a job that is an exchange of soul for money, but at the moment money is what I need. It robs me of so many hours, leaves me drained and empty eyed, all in service to a system I loath.

Moloch, whose soul is electricity and banks.
— Allen Ginsburg, “Howl”

When my careful online code name for my employers of the last several years is an idol into whose furnace innocent children were thrown, a dark god which represented for Ginsburg everything that was wrong with America: what more can I say than that except thank you Mr. Ginsburg for the apt shorthand.

I have just finished making some notes after my therapy session, a process I have just undertaken. It is clear from the flow of questions that my psychologer is still figuring out why I am there, as I am. And if I am serious about the process. Am I?

I tell myself I am in her office to solve the conundrum above, but am I really? Would freedom from the Pill Doctor put me in a place of less dependence, closer to the staticially happy, within six sigma of the Minnesota Multiphasic mean?

I was born to peddle roses down the avenue of the dead.
— Bukowski

Perhaps I am, in this city where the dead all have an address and history uproots the sidewalks in the form of oak roots. If I manage to decode my life into its constituent parts and reassemble it will those parts still be me? It is one thing to take the clock apart. It is another to put it back together. If I am anything at this point in my life am my words. Going to a therapist to try and get off the Klonopin, the molecules unable to distinguish between an unhealthy anxiety attack and the urge at the edge of sleep to rise up and write down that fragment of an idea, to sacrifice sleep to follow that thought wherever it may go, is a gamble. Perhaps I do not wish to be fixed in any conventional sense, but rather to manage the madness without resort to well scotch or a tall bridge. Or the Klonopin, to which I exhibit symptoms of tolerance and possibly dependence.

Perhaps I was borne to suffer at times, to relish irrational exuberance, and in my spare time to peddle my flowers down the avenues of the dead.