So here’s a person without cares within the larger care-riddled world, and this person then takes on certain responsibilities. This person is known to have a very irresponsible outlook on life, and this person readily accepts a situation in which being careful and watchful are necessary requirements. This person moves a person they care most about in the world from her familiar environment and off to another less familiar environment. This person has the best of intentions, and we know how those can be paved to build roads that lead to places far from heaven. This is where we are now. It’s called Boston.
I grew up in Boston. In my memories of the place, it’s home to sadistic choir boys and seedy sports bars, pizza and Mrs. Pacman the arcade game, arguments over the existence of God at the dinner table that are full of pregnant silences and occasionally erupt unpleasantly, late night drives and all-nite stints on college radio playing cuts from the LPs of yesteryear while we bicker to no one but the occasional trucker on his way up 93, and plays in bedrooms, and performances in the living room, and bands everywhere you look. But we arrived to find none of these things.
And there is so much I still want to believe even long after these beliefs would commonly be set aside—such as for example that there is no such thing as force and falling is the same as flying—and even as I am now approaching 40 and can barely make rent, still I am poking myself in the chest repeatedly as if perhaps I can poke my way all the way on through—and into places I only suspected to be there before—on and through to places made of paper—where paper hand-in-puppet persons can really get their thing going on—where the upside and the downside come together on the inside—where a laugh is cut short by the weeping of this most provocative of cardboard cut-out cloud cover backdrops, and a sigh easily unfolds into the many sighs of the more hypothetical lifeforms we all keep in the hamstrings of our thoughts. This is my thing now, you know. To once again be blatantly nonsensical in the more sensical realms of the everyday species we occasionally bump into while storming our favorite outlets on Black Friday. This is life for the other 99%.
There’s a way of thinking that’s always uncertain, and an understanding that understands nothing, and maybe we got to maneuver it with our hands tied backwards, and maybe it’s a prickly field and we’re just trying to make it from one side to the other without getting stung too many times, but sometimes we don’t learn from our mistakes, and we all got our own fantastical landscape to navigate with our sock puppet hands like a regular Lewis & Clarke of the mind—but this Lewis & Clarke do not make it to their popsicle stick fort in the Pacific Northwest or the seran wrap waves of the pacific lapping against a construction paper beach but rather drown in rivers of yarn spilling over and through their colorful knitted features—and we all have got our own tribes of doppelgangers we’re dragging along with us, but we’re also all off to the same caves of moving images. This is where our uncertain thinking leads us.
But regardless of how clear your thinking is, we’re still all going to fall into the maw of the same infinite leviathan and all of us will expire with a similar mundane wheeze as our teeth turn black in the afterlife. As in, Beware the Jabberwock, my son—and other fairytales come calling at the end of our days as everything gets wrapped up all over again as it always does. From the endless imaginings of our afternoons to the eventual decay of our evenings.
So, it’s the same old story we’ve been hearing from our parents and they heard from theirs, and people are telling to their elders, and their elders are whispering into the stones—and what are stones but pieces of stagecraft on the larger stage of history? (Not unlike our many fantastical landscapes but on a speciate scale and this is a landscape that’s largely 2-dimensional and very much in need of a paint job.) Have you ever seen a piece of stagecraft get up and leave the stage?
Or give a soliloquy?
The players are all knotted up in their own marionette strings these days and the chairs got the most interesting dinner conversation in the room. Point being, we’re drowning in signs and sigils, and we got tongues in our mouths, but we don’t know how to use them. Or to put it another way. There’s someone over there, but I am suffering from the endless uncertainty of the stylistically, emotionally, and morally inept.
There is a time when we lie selflessly, but who has got the time to selflessly lie anymore? We’re too busy lying for convenience or to ourselves, or simply not saying some true little thing. Because up is up and down is down and when something’s inside it’s inside and inside is not just a more prettily drawn version of outside but a wholly different universe here is what I’m trying to tell you—you know, I have become the sort of person who weeps openly while reading picture books while one of the older children laughs his Beevis-and-Butthead laugh and says, Look at Gabe. He’s crying. Look at Gabe cry—and I have also recently learned that a broken lock will remain a broken lock no matter how many ugly faces of the childman-trying-to-appear-to-be-about-to-weep you throw at it—but all the same, our imaginations DO unravel into other imaginations. And people the imaginations of others.
But what happens to a person when their imagination stops unraveling and seems to have ceased all manner and sorts of operations altogether? Was there ever an imagination unraveling in the first place?
I used to believe that my imagination was a real place that existed nowhere, but it never occurred to me to think of myself as a real place that does not exist. I worked jobs that were pointless and wrote books that were also pointless. I made friends I didn’t know and had conversations I couldn’t understand. This is because there was no one having these conversations or making these friends. Or maybe it’s because I used to think that I was only awake when I am sleeping and was always sleeping when I’m awake.
(In case you haven’t noticed, this entire essay is filled with tautologies, redundancies, and contradictions. Consider that this is how we manufacture the framework of the bureaucratic lifeform we call, “global civilization,” when in truth it’s a shadow biosphere living among us—and that we are less than electricity-breathing microbes within this larger warehouse—and also not much more than a thing to make money circulate in the larger neo-totalitarian world of interest rates, inflation, and other games of value, chance, and divination—and helpless in the face of fanaticism, and watching as this bureaucratic lifeform writhes comically on the world stage. But that the aforementioned bureaucratic lifeform is made up entirely of self-aware organisms with their own hopes and dreams is a remarkable fact—which for some reason gets me to thinking about Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, and the issue of making the cuckoo tweet, and how Nobunaga was a cruel man who lost power as a result of his cruelty—he could have saved the hostage mother of one of his vassals, but chose not to, and the aforementioned vassal rose up and surrounded the shrine where he was currently spending the night only to be forced to perform hari kiri rather than be beheaded by such a betrayer as this—and Hideyoshi was kind and did not kill the child of his enemy only to have this child, Ieyasu, rise up and take control of Japan shortly after his death, and instigate the Edo period, a bureaucratic lifeform if I ever saw one. But—)
Originally, this issue of the uncertain human turning uncertainty into his own private cult had to do with this silly idea that we’re all dreaming the most entangled of dreams. And then I got tangled up in my own dreams and so of course this made sense. Later on, I found these dreams easy to disentangle and stepped away from them. Then, I looked back and thought, But whatever happened to everyone else’s entangling dreams?
We are alive, are we not? We are moving in directions. Sometimes we collide.
There is a place we are coming from and usually we believe we are also going to some other place. We are the limb-bud progenitor cells of the larger bureaucratic organism and we are going to regrow her missing limbs. We are the bull in a china shop of hypothetical species—a place that exists in no specific place—and we are going to smash all these hypothetical species into newer and more interesting species. But it doesn’t work out that way. We want to teach the world how to re-grow its arms and it uses our technology to grow tentacles instead. We want to create something new, but the new thing we’ve created is Oobleck. (Like I said, I’ve been spending a lot of my time reading to children.)
And now? we’re still in that same china shop. It still exists in no place. It’s still full of broken shards but now these are also the porcelain shards that make up what’s left of our very fragile minds.
And along the way from there to here, we met other similarly-minded persons as well as the various imagined versions of ourselves, and these are mirrors within mirrors, and cliques of the many different versions of shadow and light, with a variety of masculine and feminine shadings, appearing in a variety of speciate form from grasshopper to octopus and everywhere in between. Point being is, the further in you go, the more confusing it all gets, and all of these different kinds of people are striving to find a place deeper than what we can clearly see on the surface of our aforementioned dreams. This is how we word the world.
But why? In what way is the surface of the dream inferior to the substrata? How is the pinnacle of the aspiration any different than the low-lying hills you are currently struggling to at least find while stumbling through the dark of an abyss so rudimentary that it has yet to differentiate itself into directions?
I have spent the past year riding bicycles, correcting grammar, and studying puppetry. In case you hadn’t noticed. I have spent this last year moving from the broke-down lofts of yesteryear to the housing complexes of tomorrow and I have lost touch with my friends in a city full of my friends because time is changing, but is it changing for everyone? There is a fairytale being told here on Camelot Ct, but what is its purpose, and why were fairytales invented in the first place? For you see, for me, way back when, it was about always digging deeper to find the underbelly of the universe, because, obviously the universe has both a belly and an underbelly, and who wouldn’t want to occupy both of them?
But this is just the point. I got married, and now this blatantly adolescent mysticism is even more alluring—because she depends on you, dude. And all you want to do is pray selfishly in private? My wife is the wisest person in the room, and I still have not accepted this fact.
This person she is is a stand-in for every person, and this vision you see is a stand-in for every moment that has been or will be, and when you look back on those crevices you so eagerly fell into back when you were the falling-down type and before you started making plans to purchase property and procreate and send your offspring to the best of schools to then be educated to live the best of lives, something happens wherein this moment right here becomes so present in the past that it’s like everything that ever happened happened so as I could be sitting here now in my pajamas and just a few feet from the wife, and the past is now gone past what it once was to become a kind of landscape of the most irresponsible permutations of a person, and you are laughing good-naturedly at these earlier versions of you and giggling eerily as the hours of your day become full—with minor tasks and the woman you love—who grips your hand with a greater fervor—and everything is better and everything is worse than you ever could have imagined possible.
This is what it’s like to be alive. But why is it? Good question.
Boston, MA, 2015
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.
