The first thing you incoherent erogenous zones should understand is that there is no apocalypse. The apocalypse already happened, you pleasantly subdued psychologies. There will never be an apocalypse if you keep this up my half-whored verb friends, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare for it like you would prepare for one of your notorious cyclical weddings or any of the other great beginnings or endings of you. It is in this way that your brains become peopled with new and colorful crustaceans of the cartoon variety.
Prepare for the lies they say are true to indeed come true and for the people you once believed were long gone to return. And in general, prepare for all of your many beliefs to be upended, and for all your worst fears to procreate with your greatest hopes to generate a scenery you never could have imagined in any of your periodic imaginings—of the wildest drabness and the most mundane extravagance. Or perhaps it will all be horror all the time until it actually doesn’t seem so bad after all, even when you’re shitting in a bucket and have to drain your goiter every morning. People can get used to anything. But you already knew all that. You need to prepare for what you don’t know.
So, as usual, I’m giving advice about things I know little or nothing about myself. All I know is that I hate housework and scream the most Hulk-ian outcry when in the middle of mopping my floor in Beijing shirtless. I think, She also dirtied the floor. Why do I have to clean it? And mope like the balding adolescent I am, until finally I decide I am NOT going to mop the floor and instead sit down at my desk to write a pleasant little article I am sure is once again going to change everything.
Because you see recently I actually did indeed get married. It was a shock to everyone, but no one was more stunned than myself. That morning I woke up in the mountains of Sichuan and stumbled on down to what honestly looked like an empty car repair lot, where I stood around for some hours until they told me to get into one of the many shiny flower-strewned cars lining this aforementioned abandoned car repair lot, and I was driven to my future wife’s family estate, where I proceeded to get down on bended knee and she proceeded to punch me in the face. And when they asked me to shoot that arrow at my future bride, I found myself flashing back to the beginnings of our romance. And when we finally locked the padlock of love, I was weeping the sort of tears child actors weep after their childhood is long gone. This is how I began thinking of the apocalypse.
There could for example very seriously be a nuclear holocaust. This is still a possibility. It is also seriously possible that someone close to you is at this very moment whispering your name into the saliva-dampened corner of her pillow. You cannot know these things, but you can know that you do not know them, like the wise Donald Rumsfeld once said. You can know that wondrous possibilities and great terrors of unknown origin await you every time you bounce out of bed like a regular bouncing ball. But this is not enough, my fellow finger-peddlers. You must be retracting your soul back into itself, like an autoerotic psychic hermaphrodite, although really you don’t have to do anything, do you? Because you’re still waiting for the apocalypse when the apocalypse is never going to happen and also has already happened many many times to all sorts of people in a variety of positions throughout history.
Look at me. I’m nose-diving to my death. Ha. Ha. Hah. Like that.
How uninteresting it all is. The fantastical friends we keep informed concerning our every questionable accomplishment and dismissive bureaucrat. I understand you, we say to ourselves. Even if no one else does. Then the giant cartoon dog that’s been living in your forebrain has a nervous breakdown, and lobotomies start to seem like a way of life. Then what happens?
My penis grows wings. Your vagina is elected to a position of real significance. Our forefingers begin to request equal treatment under the law. Our brains secede from the union. Our thighs vanish in the night and we can no longer walk properly, but now mainly waddle down the street. And so life continues.
Because it is very possible that someone’s been twisting your strings all along, and if you could just open up that operating theater at the tip of your spine and the base of your brain then you’d be able to rewrite history for good, but these are the kinds of questions people ask themselves who are afraid to ask questions. For example. Am I the same person when I’m eating the ass of a pig, licking my girlfriend’s armpit, and clearing my throat aggressively in the direction of a very rude and arrogant person? Then it’s all shuffling on down the corridor collecting shiny wrappers while whistling your favorite pop masterpiece with that wonderful bittersweet chorus. You smack your lips and wink at your husband. You make a sound like a strangled bird and roll your eyes.
Apocalypses come in all shapes and sizes. From a very high-school-romance apocalypse to an anthill apocalypse to the apocalypse that will end each of our never-ending stories to those apocalypses that annihilate all sorts of stories—stories of love and stories that were just beginning… Wipes off the face of the earth whole families of stories and the many faces attached to them—and their many missing teeth—or balding with cheeks like breasts and with eyes that can never focus on anyone.
All of these apocalypses occur because of questions. Questions we never thought to ask and questions left unanswered because I don’t need to tell you anything, you saliva-starved ass plant. At least that’s what she said before she ran out of my life and left me standing at the window watching while she stepped over the horizon.
Did I mention that I’m about to get on a plane to return to the other side of the world, leaving my new bride behind back in Beijing?
Certain people never get around to asking the right questions and these people are instead easily led around by the noose by all the wrong questions. This happens because these people believe questions are made up of words. Which is untrue!
The questions I am talking about are first and foremost an emotional entity with an emotional answer. Both the question and the answer are attached to words as a plant has both a stem and roots, but it’s through the emotional roots of the thing that we know this question we are asking is the right question, and we also know this question’s answer in the same way. For example, Who am I?
Or when you put yourself in a situation you would never have thought you’d put yourself in just because. And then watch the terror sprout into new and unusual blossoms.
A few of these for me have been: the aforementioned wedding apocalypse, several China apocalypses in general, the fish-processing-in-Alaska apocalypse, the publishing-my-1,000-p.-tome-when-I-don’t-have-money-for-food apocalypse, the anarchist-compound-in-Oregon apocalypse, the wildland-firefighting apocalypse. And I’m still a huge blubbering mess who is desperate for just one or two more really epic apocalypses, so obviously that’s not the answer to my never-ending question.
We just want to see things in a true and real way, to be able to talk to animals like they are people and to clearly act like the best of men and the best of women at all times. All of which sounds like the silly games of naïve babies to you, but I can assure you that you CAN TALK TO ANIMALS!!! They speak in the simplified vocabulary of the moron.
I can also assure you that no apocalypse is complete that doesn’t lead to persons made into naïve babies. This is what the totalitarian regimes of the world claim to be striving for in respect to their citizenry. And many of us spend our lives bouncing back and forth between love apocalypses that make us into naïve babies, then back again into cynical adolescents, and back and forth and back and forth, until we settle into wedlock or settle into our solitude or just settle. But in general we all believe the age of naïve babies is either just behind us or just in front of us. In ancient times, naïve babies dug in the dirt and there will come a time when each and every one of us is a naïve baby struggling to put in our dentures. Where have those past times gone? How will that future come to be?
They say that you can’t know what will happen and that when it does, you’ll be as surprised as everyone else. I’m trying to accept this, but I find it hard. I want to believe I can’t tell the future even when I know that I so obviously can.
There is only the present, I tell myself. The present is everywhere and it’s alive, I say. The orgasm ends where we begin, I announce to the world. Does it help me to enjoy the orgasmic ending of me? No. Will I ever be able to stop spinning the story of my life? Perhaps not. But this is what this article is all about.
Imagine that the inchworm has a rich internal life, and that the sky is currently flowering invisible diamonds. Imagine that people can stroll into other people’s heads, and by people, I mean mountains, and turtles, and the everyday assholes who so love to kick you when you’re down. Imagine that the smallest infidelity could lead to a genocide of multi-dimensional proportions. Imagine that the universe is breathing down your neck, because it is.
When you slurp up your morning noodles and make peace with that everyday asshole neighbor of yours while he tongues his teeth obnoxiously, and in the background can be seen falling flames. Do you see this, you say to Mr. Obnoxious, but Mr. Obnoxious is already covering his face because his wife recently left him and he is too busy plugging the many holes in his heart to notice just how beautiful is the falling sky. Our on-going backdrop is always forever falling apart. This is what I mean when I say that the apocalypse which will never come to pass is always already happening to each and every one of us all the time. It’s like the world you’re walking through is always and perpetually burning up all around you.
Or. Let’s say there’s an opening in the conversation, and a five-fingered nebula appears above the twitching head of your conversation partner, because—you want to regain that intimate power of the near-schizophrenic. This is closer to how it is. You want to be able to see above the many precipices of the world and to instead look on all things with the same benign indifference, but you can’t, can you? Instead, it’s all huddling in corners and muttering again and again the same refrain about how honestly what is there to fear? A lot of things. And I’m running away from most of them.
So, you look one way and everything appears very definitely colored in the hues of roses. Then you look another way and everything’s more gray and mauve. But no matter how you look at it, I am running away. Specifically from my wedding, my life, my love, and my hopes for the future.
I am waiting for my flight back to America alone and it seems like so long ago I was in Sichuan, except that I am also still there, and the rivers are running red and there are clouds hiding in the nooks of the mountains. Shepherds crouch under umbrellas, and the train is full of a strange dialect. It is now three weeks ago since I was back in Sichuan and my family was all around me. This was two days after my marriage and knotty-grassed mountains were passing—and the many terraces of corn and rice and the damp houses popping up here and there like the tiled roofs of fairytales. The sheaves of rice in their paddies looked almost like a particularly spiky green water. The rows of corn were crisper, with their tousled tops, while the woman hunkering in a wicker basket full of plastic bags across the aisle from me was scratching at her bare toes.
But now I am at my desk in Beijing and my wife is at work and I am avoiding cleaning the house because I just don’t care, and my flight is tomorrow afternoon and I cannot think about that, even though I so obviously am, and so I am thinking many other wonderfully imaginative things that I simply must think right this very moment. About abstract apocalypses and the beauty of the passing Sichuan scenery. But if I think about my wife, I am going to cry—so instead it’s all giant cartoon dogs and frontal lobotomies as a way of life.
And overgrown terraces are like the twisting lines of an unknown language rotting in the side of a mountain, and the earth is a sticky red, but this fairytale of what went before is the fairytale of a wealthy outsider and in this fairytale, a dark man in the lady’s hat and stick-and-poke tattoos is leering down at this outsider from where he’s loitering in the aisle. This man was truly garish in my remembering of him. He had many teeth pointing in a variety of directions. He seemed sweet, even while my wife clutched at her bag and eyed him hatefully.
The missionary sees only God in these mountains and the gaming enthusiast just sees the potential D&D module he would create but try actually marrying into on one of these mountain families. It’s like a reversal of gravity. Like a porn in which a person’s ejaculating buddhas. Like a nightmare with a happy ending. Like a transmutation that changes nothing. Like love everywhere and always.
These things we imagine are real, and not just because we can make them real, but because they were always already real in the first place. Is this what people mean by the mind of God? Is light alive, and if so, where does it fit in the larger ecosystem of the living and the lifeless? So, you see clearly the sorts of assumptions I long to bring to the table.
But there are things that came to life in the light of this intentional obscurantism. These things were not absolute truths but ways of seeing the people and things around you. Like with eyes that aren’t there. And in corners that have never been. Trying to look through the darkened lenses of the devout skeptic is like trying to look out the back end of your brain. The more you attempt to turn your eyes in impossible directions, the more faces become like intestines and emotions start to look like organs, and the clearly elaborate is understood in a simplistic and obvious way.
For example, my brain is a hand clenching and unclenching spasmodically. Eyes are flowers. Eating is like drinking. Animals are people. The very small are very large. The universe isn’t the universe. Everything that happens to me has a special importance that only I can understand. If I think really really hard, I can easily become anything I want. Even an ouroboros tongue currently tonguing itself. This has always been my problem.
This is an apocalypse of multi-dimensional proportions. It is happening to everyone, but most of us are trying our best to ignore that it is happening. We see it in the faces of our parents when they look back at us with weeping eyes and a hard smile. And for a moment might feel like we got a grasp on it when she calls us the morning after to spend an hour explaining just how it is we changed her life last night. But it’s also there when you unleash your more unpleasant side because HR wants you to sign his obviously fabricated version of events. And all the while, your world is changing, but how is it changing?
Once I was on a train that was speeding through the night, in which the lights never shut off, and the family of four sitting across from me mostly slept, and the one man standing as if he might break into aerobics at any moment, and my stomach felt like it wants to explode, and my feet were itchy, burning, and semisolid in the low tops I really got to just throw out, but now I simply must get out of the house. I’m afraid, you see. Because I do actually love my wife—who bites me with great violence when I am trying to sleep—who calls me a “middle-age woman in that period” when I try to reason with her—who argues with me about everything—who follows me around with an evil smile when I am trying to clean up the house after we’ve had yet another argument.
There are places of great violence concealed in the softest portions of our hearts, and dreams of wondrous futures we conceal within the most violent portions of our minds, but you will probably never perform this great violence or enact that wondrous future, and this is what keeps you sane. The first step is to let go of sanity in the same way you let go of your first love, but of course the thing about first love is you never really get over it. This is what makes the world such a hard place to get out of alive.
Which. Of course you won’t get out alive. That’s the whole thing of it. But it’s nice to imagine someone could escape.
And in general, people say things are happening and I tend to agree with them, but what about the internal lives of your everyday finch? And how is the more mundane clicking language of finches related to the larger apocalypses of the average everyday walking around human variety? Or me specifically and all of my many problems? Is this an example of schemata unraveling along comprehensible lines?
People may come in all shapes and sizes, but if this is the case, then so does the manner in which consciousness manifests itself within or among them. For consciousness can and often does manifest itself as a group phenomenon. Those same finches when they play as crowd crystals in the sky for example. What does the face of a hive look like? Is there a place where all these many faces of ours are tied together?
This is something else I honestly believe.
But all the same, I ask these questions in a disingenuous manner—like a grifter in a monastery. But it’s not exactly lying. More like a belief you simultaneously don’t believe, but every day you believe these things-you-don’t-believe a little more.
Like everything’s going to be okay when the apocalypse is so obviously in all sincerity coming. Or that the many faces that live behind my eyes unfold into other faces that unfold out of other eyes in an ongoing infinity of eyes interlocked through faces and faces that blossom out of the eyes of other faces—from the furry hide of the bumblebee to the fantastical people we meet in the uneven corridors of our dreams.
Apocalypses come in many forms. They can be as everyday as a wrong turn and as monumental as the risen dead. They can come on us unnoticed and pass without comment or be a century in the making. But when you’re in the eye of the apocalypse, you know it, and if you survive it, your eyes will see different than they did.
But they’re not always such a terrible thing. These apocalypses. They can have all the contours of your average Disney flick. And if you’re willing to give the apocalypse a chance, you might just find that the world’s full of ropey trees doing the jitterbug or large-eyed owls rolling those eyes of theirs in rhythm to the same ragtime groove. That your destiny is currently singing back at you in the form of an impossibly-shaped woman, and that your decomposing body is full of the friendliest of cartoon worms.
This is the technicolor forest of hungry ghosts and multi-dimensional samantabhadras. A forest where the holes look like goiters. And the chipmunks pray. This is an example of lies turning true.
My teeth feel disgusting, like they got clumps of gelatinous glitter in them. The smell in here is the sweet smell of urinal pucks, and I am once again thinking of China’s possible eventual collapse into anarchy and the global mayhem it would cause. This is an apocalypse that may never happen, but if it did—this is what bothers me today. I honestly believe that whatever I imagine is going to happen will in truth not happen because I have imagined it, which is why I spend so much of my time playing at possible end-of-the-world scenarios.
Of course, there are many end of the world scenarios I have never seriously considered, which are more than likely how everything ends up ending in the end—like alien invasion. And I got married recently. And I am also still sitting at my desk and really truly honestly about to leave the house on this afternoon in mid-August.
And it really is true that at our wedding, I had to fire an arrow toward the sky, an arrow toward the ground, and an arrow at the curtain behind which my wife waited. Luckily, I’m a terrible shot. And the ceremony did in fact end with the two of us locking a gold-plated heart-shaped padlock. And I am about to get on a plane to go back to America and leave the love of my life all over again.
Yanjiao, China, 2014
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
