Nov. 16 There's a spot on my back upper middle near the center near the center a spot near the center mid-level right side left side a spot like the size of a quarter or the size of a mayonnaise jar with sharp ridges and grooves, a spot on my back a spot of pain a circle of pain the shape of a mayonnaise jar, heavy metal hot steel burning heat pads burning a hole in my back in the shape of an ashtray, in the shape of an army boot covered in mud covered with mud, pain that's hot blazing like fire breathing down my neck thru my skin scabbing up beneath the skin little points of pain in the center of my brain. In the center of my positive thinking, the middle of my sweaty back with the burning hole where optimism stinks and smells and dries up dead skin getting revenge ("the oldest motivation known to mankind" – Dirty Harry). In my optimistic delirium I hurt all day just to see the sun come up and in my pessimistic delirium I hurt all day just to see the sun go down. Either way, pain accompanied me in every glass and in every ice cube, and in every thought I had. It made the pain look and feel like ropes tied around my body yanking me from one end of the street to the other, kicking me in the side, breaking my ribs, bruising my body with boots of metal, or like a bungee cord pulling my body slamming my body banging my body in two directions at the same time, twisting my body in every direction, straining bending pulling hanging yanking screaming begging sickening pain, pleading pain, begging pain like a rubber band, like a rubber band of twisting pain, like a rubber band twisting in opposite directions twisting in the wind, hanging from the sky, dangling on an electrical cord from an electric light bulb, broken glass sharp cutting no sleeping, eyes blurry, seeing blurring painfully moaning dizzy dreaming sickening doping drugging, writing in the darkness, sleepless but not dreamless.
Nov. 20 Hallucinations are my companion in the dark in the bed in my head behind my eyes in the back of my eyelids. In front of my brain they walk around stalking every thought I have, stalking the wild thinkingness about the soft spot on the forehead of my painful body straining to breathe against the pain, the discomfort across my chest around my back a tightening, a squeezing, a twisting groaning depression, a moaning impression. Pain like a desert rock, a rock of ages, dry and hot like cactus scabs on my fingers, like cactus blisters on my toes, like cactus boils popping on my back from the middle of my back after 20 days of the color white and yellow spinning in a vicious circle spitting cactus juice in my face, blinding me throwing hot dusty gravel rocks, desert cactus spikes growing out of the center of my back right hand side, the color orange and yellow spinning around the cactus that is my spine from the bottom to the top, from the seat of the kundalini serpent to the home of the evil eye of a blind mule, and a wink is as good as a nod to a blind mule, a blind mule eating spikes on a cactus of pain, eating it away, spitting pain between its teeth.
Nov. 22 Day light with no pain: my back is a field of water flowing like a soft blue river on down to the bottom and back to the top of my shoulders and winding around like Little Bone Marrow Creek wrapped around my legs and the legs of a chair. The heat of pain is that hard spot on my back sort of in the center upper part to the left and right, killing pain with a morphine drip pretending unending defending aching reaching for nothingness. Noir shadows on my back down my body, my stomach, on my back down my body my stomach flattening empty and meaningless fasting like a zen monk. A Buddha cat slept between my feet curled up with one eye open and one ear twitching, not even a growling stomach making hungry noises. It's an empty bag, a suitcase lost, a wallet tossed in the San Francisco bay, a broken record, a plastic shopping bag, a homeless shopping cart, the trunk of a car, a bookcase, a gas tank, the back seat of a car, an empty bookshelf, a roll of film, a big bass drum, a roll of quarters, a broken fingernail, a piece of paper, an empty bottle of wine, a flat tire, dirty windows, bounced checks, broken promises, floating icebergs filled with pain, dripping melting tasteless wetness passing stones. I built a wall around my back about ten feet high painted black and blue with stripes and matching colors that match the blinds on the noir wall. The heat of my fever, the smoke from my skin, from my dried skin is an empty envelope, an empty bottle, an empty house, empty glasses, red roses black shoes black gloves white rice and a ripped shirt, shining boots, a pocket watch, an empty shoe, a torn pocket, an eye patch, a broken radio stuck on Christian talk, an empty bar stool, cut lip and a black eye, matter hair and an empty ash tray empty stomach yellow teeth brown paper bag a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, clean underwear and dirty socks.
Nov. 26 Noir shadows on my fingernails and b&w photos: fingerprints in smoke, smoky mystic pain rising like incense, smells like jazz downtown where I got a tattoo on my arm. My stomach: empty and meaningless, empty and forgotten, but peacefully calm like a box full of water full of air like a bubble floating in the air. It rises like a cloud hanging over a waitress walking home from the diner, walking down the sidewalk after closing time, the city growling hungry and thirsty in the early morning fog. A stomach growls, intimate intestines bloated extended stomachs. Dry throats scratchy knuckles and meaningless pain stretched across the Midwest from dawn to dusk, from the cradle to the grave, grasping for air, gasping for space, grasping for something that isn't there, that may never have been there in the first place but now is, and before it wasn't, and may not be again until the pain disappears.
Nov. 29 I think it's because my zen cat priest, my black cat black zen cat, my little black zen monk cat guards my bed between my feet and guards my night and my dark bed at night rolled into a ball waiting for me to return to my body without the color and smell of pain, or the smell of loss of consciousness, or the smell of passing out, or the smell of falling asleep, the smell of wet mail, the smell of dried leaves, the smell of herbal tea, the smell of dead mice, or the smell from the spot on my back smelling like drugs, smelling like the grinding gears burning from a cross-town city bus growling deep like the sound of a train wreck, the sound of a slumbering zen monk, growling mad dog, a mouth-foaming mad cow growling at the moon behind eyelids of emptiness and meaning and hunger like a Buddha cat zen monk priestly cat sleeping.
Nov. 31 Hotel Pain is on rural back-roads, the spot near the center straining under the load, under the hood, the table and floor the walls and ceiling of my back-roads hotel of pain painted yellowishly pale and white and burning dull, sleeping empty stomachs like fasting and meditating, sitting with eyes closed and hands folded touching fingertips together pressing against the empty stomach, growling lightly behind a curtain, shadows, bus shadows, noir curtains shadows, noir shadows, shadows on a wall at an angle layered across the walls behind the lights falling down like visions of a Buddha swaying in the wind from side to side, up and down. But when I wasn't sick I could still cough. I could close my eyes, I could touch my head, I could brush my teeth and my hair. I could scratch my hands and feet and finally brush my teeth and doze off sleeping with my eyes open, breathing slowly calmly peacefully, flying across the night sky. The pain moved from side to side and down my spine from top to bottom, the color of spinning red and white crashing colors screaming jazz beats jazz moaning jazz, passing stones on an empty wet street with cars parked bumper-to-bumper and back-to-back, like pain going down driving with ancient Buddha cat speeding thru my body like electricity racing thru the synapses' of my brain (start-change-stop) until I pass out or piss out stones of agony, delicate precious stones of bodily crystals crystallized with the sound of the dead underground.
Dec. 1 And my pain goes away with the sound of a midnight bus ride from the down town bus station. I wait in line with my bus ticket in my hand, sliding my feet on the dusty floor around the ashtrays, soda machines, candy machines, iron metal seats, newspapers and candy wrappers. My ticket in my hand passing it off to the Driver from Hell the driver of the bus driving away from Pain City, away from Hotel Pain just a block away from the Bar of Pain on the corner of Pain Alley and the Boulevard of Pain, next to the bus stop of One-Way Pain. I get on the bus to the middle of my back and curl up in a ball in the back of the bus, pull my jacket over me, close my eyes and try to sleep saying "goodbye" to the memory of pain and "goodbye" to the anguish of meaning of my empty stomach growling in the Buddha darkness, empty and meaningless with my zen meditation mantra, a mantra I use to stand to walk to sit to eat and sit and cross my legs, to sit on the toilet whenever I want and not die there.
Dec. 5 My mantra runs thru my mind and pain memories sink below the horizon and slowly drift away becoming like vapor, like a ghostly figure that has been haunting me like an entity, a creature surrounding me now, becoming like a mystic vapor smoky vapor ghostly vapor slowly disappearing, becoming invisible, the pain image becoming softer, invisible, less tangible translucent transcendental transformational. A ghostly creature who had been with me every day for three weeks, slept with me and beat me up and tortured me without end night and day now was, and is, slowly walking away already letting go of me not hanging onto me. Still its aura is here and near but vaporizing slowly disappearing. A creature letting go of me and its body slowly disappearing into nothingness. My legs are not so bad that I can't move them because I can and I will. I can bend them nicely under the covers, the blankets not too heavy, not too hot sort of comfortable and a little scared. The pain is gone and I feel almost normal, but I'm still in bed not wanting to kill muscles, listening really hard to what I don't know.
Dec. 10 And I saw a creature standing in the corner of the bedroom, standing behind the door in the corner of the wall where two walls come together. There's a door on hinges hanging there and that's where I saw the creature. It reached for me from across the room. It's a room of fog-mist like old Dracula movies, a dull figure of a creature in the shadows of the room, in the corner behind the door. I can see it thru the mirror because there's a light in the bathroom hitting the mirror, and I can see the creature's reflection in the mirror and in the reflection I can see it thru the crack where the door hangs on its hinges and swings against my back and bangs into it when I cough or talk or when I scream with my hands cupped around my mouth to make my voice louder. I can see this creature mocking me in the dark behind the door making faces, poking at me with a stick, ramming me with a truck, slapping me with the back of its grimy filthy hand, the hand with the long hairs growing around its wrist growing up its arm and weaving itself around its bony elbow in and out like a wool shawl and dangling at the end split hairs in the center of my back with its hairy hand watching me squirm, watching me cry, looking at my distorted face, my mouth tightening up my face muscles, watching me hurting myself gasping for air, looking at me, reaching for me blindly looking stupid, looking at me looking at it, watching it stretch out its arms. It can't touch me but its aura can reach me and spin around me and it touched my body. The creature's aura pulls back into itself pulling away stepping back away from me in the night, the middle of the night, behind the door running away during the day disappearing like misty vapor smoke and fog.
Dec. 17 The creature was banging his fist on my head, banging his knees on my spine, banging his arms on my head, banging his feet on my ribs, banging his elbows on my recovery, packing up my mind in a paper bag, blowing down the door to my head, flooding my legs with cement and water, crushing my bones in a bone-crusher, peeling away my skin and pasting it on the wall, biting my neck and sucking my blood, fighting me in my bed of pain like a shark eating my flesh with a fork and a spoon, pounding his shoulder blades against the bottom of my feet, scratching his fingernails across the center of a yellow sun spinning red and orange the size of an oil tanker, the smell of tar on a roof top, the taste of bitterness on my tongue, the look of stupidity on my face, a blank stare into an empty sky that sucks up all the stars in the universe turning me inside out. Garbage collectors from hotel rooms in Hotel Pain wake me at 2am to whisper words of pain in my ear, tempting me to pass out by swallowing stones, woke me at 2am from an OK sleep so he could knock me around, bang me up side my aching rib cage the right side of my back the last place and maybe the only place where I have any serious pain, to kick me when I'm sleeping, to hit me with an iron rod, with a baseball bat, with a tire iron, with a hot skillet just hard enough and often enough, deep enough, just enough to stop me from relaxing, from sleeping again, from going unconscious, just enough pain to keep me awake and hoping.
Overheard at a local bar: (FIRST DRUNK) "Clayton shot Johnny's head off with a shotgun. (SECOND DRUNK) "Why?" (FIRST DRUNK) "Johnny didn't say."
Final Thoughts
I have a new appreciation for the little things in life: brushing my teeth, bending over, getting up out of bed, dressing myself, fixing my own food, cleaning the house, driving a car. It's all about doing. Pain stopped me from doing. Stop a man from doing and you control who he can be. That's what prisons are all about. They control what a man can and cannot do. Control what a man can do and you control who and what he can be. Wittgenstein said it like this: "Its use is its meaning." I say it like this: "What it does is what its being." Its use, what we use it for, what we do with it, is what it's being. In other words, beingness is a function of, or a distinction of, what we do or don't do. Who we are for ourselves and others is given by what we do or don't do. Another philosopher said, "What you do to the least of men, you do to me; and what you do not do to the least of men, you do not do to me." Pain stopped me from doing; my quality of life was held hostage. Ability to do is the ability to be. Life is all about what we do with it.
Nov. 20 Hallucinations are my companion in the dark in the bed in my head behind my eyes in the back of my eyelids. In front of my brain they walk around stalking every thought I have, stalking the wild thinkingness about the soft spot on the forehead of my painful body straining to breathe against the pain, the discomfort across my chest around my back a tightening, a squeezing, a twisting groaning depression, a moaning impression. Pain like a desert rock, a rock of ages, dry and hot like cactus scabs on my fingers, like cactus blisters on my toes, like cactus boils popping on my back from the middle of my back after 20 days of the color white and yellow spinning in a vicious circle spitting cactus juice in my face, blinding me throwing hot dusty gravel rocks, desert cactus spikes growing out of the center of my back right hand side, the color orange and yellow spinning around the cactus that is my spine from the bottom to the top, from the seat of the kundalini serpent to the home of the evil eye of a blind mule, and a wink is as good as a nod to a blind mule, a blind mule eating spikes on a cactus of pain, eating it away, spitting pain between its teeth.
Nov. 22 Day light with no pain: my back is a field of water flowing like a soft blue river on down to the bottom and back to the top of my shoulders and winding around like Little Bone Marrow Creek wrapped around my legs and the legs of a chair. The heat of pain is that hard spot on my back sort of in the center upper part to the left and right, killing pain with a morphine drip pretending unending defending aching reaching for nothingness. Noir shadows on my back down my body, my stomach, on my back down my body my stomach flattening empty and meaningless fasting like a zen monk. A Buddha cat slept between my feet curled up with one eye open and one ear twitching, not even a growling stomach making hungry noises. It's an empty bag, a suitcase lost, a wallet tossed in the San Francisco bay, a broken record, a plastic shopping bag, a homeless shopping cart, the trunk of a car, a bookcase, a gas tank, the back seat of a car, an empty bookshelf, a roll of film, a big bass drum, a roll of quarters, a broken fingernail, a piece of paper, an empty bottle of wine, a flat tire, dirty windows, bounced checks, broken promises, floating icebergs filled with pain, dripping melting tasteless wetness passing stones. I built a wall around my back about ten feet high painted black and blue with stripes and matching colors that match the blinds on the noir wall. The heat of my fever, the smoke from my skin, from my dried skin is an empty envelope, an empty bottle, an empty house, empty glasses, red roses black shoes black gloves white rice and a ripped shirt, shining boots, a pocket watch, an empty shoe, a torn pocket, an eye patch, a broken radio stuck on Christian talk, an empty bar stool, cut lip and a black eye, matter hair and an empty ash tray empty stomach yellow teeth brown paper bag a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, clean underwear and dirty socks.
Nov. 26 Noir shadows on my fingernails and b&w photos: fingerprints in smoke, smoky mystic pain rising like incense, smells like jazz downtown where I got a tattoo on my arm. My stomach: empty and meaningless, empty and forgotten, but peacefully calm like a box full of water full of air like a bubble floating in the air. It rises like a cloud hanging over a waitress walking home from the diner, walking down the sidewalk after closing time, the city growling hungry and thirsty in the early morning fog. A stomach growls, intimate intestines bloated extended stomachs. Dry throats scratchy knuckles and meaningless pain stretched across the Midwest from dawn to dusk, from the cradle to the grave, grasping for air, gasping for space, grasping for something that isn't there, that may never have been there in the first place but now is, and before it wasn't, and may not be again until the pain disappears.
Nov. 29 I think it's because my zen cat priest, my black cat black zen cat, my little black zen monk cat guards my bed between my feet and guards my night and my dark bed at night rolled into a ball waiting for me to return to my body without the color and smell of pain, or the smell of loss of consciousness, or the smell of passing out, or the smell of falling asleep, the smell of wet mail, the smell of dried leaves, the smell of herbal tea, the smell of dead mice, or the smell from the spot on my back smelling like drugs, smelling like the grinding gears burning from a cross-town city bus growling deep like the sound of a train wreck, the sound of a slumbering zen monk, growling mad dog, a mouth-foaming mad cow growling at the moon behind eyelids of emptiness and meaning and hunger like a Buddha cat zen monk priestly cat sleeping.
Nov. 31 Hotel Pain is on rural back-roads, the spot near the center straining under the load, under the hood, the table and floor the walls and ceiling of my back-roads hotel of pain painted yellowishly pale and white and burning dull, sleeping empty stomachs like fasting and meditating, sitting with eyes closed and hands folded touching fingertips together pressing against the empty stomach, growling lightly behind a curtain, shadows, bus shadows, noir curtains shadows, noir shadows, shadows on a wall at an angle layered across the walls behind the lights falling down like visions of a Buddha swaying in the wind from side to side, up and down. But when I wasn't sick I could still cough. I could close my eyes, I could touch my head, I could brush my teeth and my hair. I could scratch my hands and feet and finally brush my teeth and doze off sleeping with my eyes open, breathing slowly calmly peacefully, flying across the night sky. The pain moved from side to side and down my spine from top to bottom, the color of spinning red and white crashing colors screaming jazz beats jazz moaning jazz, passing stones on an empty wet street with cars parked bumper-to-bumper and back-to-back, like pain going down driving with ancient Buddha cat speeding thru my body like electricity racing thru the synapses' of my brain (start-change-stop) until I pass out or piss out stones of agony, delicate precious stones of bodily crystals crystallized with the sound of the dead underground.
Dec. 1 And my pain goes away with the sound of a midnight bus ride from the down town bus station. I wait in line with my bus ticket in my hand, sliding my feet on the dusty floor around the ashtrays, soda machines, candy machines, iron metal seats, newspapers and candy wrappers. My ticket in my hand passing it off to the Driver from Hell the driver of the bus driving away from Pain City, away from Hotel Pain just a block away from the Bar of Pain on the corner of Pain Alley and the Boulevard of Pain, next to the bus stop of One-Way Pain. I get on the bus to the middle of my back and curl up in a ball in the back of the bus, pull my jacket over me, close my eyes and try to sleep saying "goodbye" to the memory of pain and "goodbye" to the anguish of meaning of my empty stomach growling in the Buddha darkness, empty and meaningless with my zen meditation mantra, a mantra I use to stand to walk to sit to eat and sit and cross my legs, to sit on the toilet whenever I want and not die there.
Dec. 5 My mantra runs thru my mind and pain memories sink below the horizon and slowly drift away becoming like vapor, like a ghostly figure that has been haunting me like an entity, a creature surrounding me now, becoming like a mystic vapor smoky vapor ghostly vapor slowly disappearing, becoming invisible, the pain image becoming softer, invisible, less tangible translucent transcendental transformational. A ghostly creature who had been with me every day for three weeks, slept with me and beat me up and tortured me without end night and day now was, and is, slowly walking away already letting go of me not hanging onto me. Still its aura is here and near but vaporizing slowly disappearing. A creature letting go of me and its body slowly disappearing into nothingness. My legs are not so bad that I can't move them because I can and I will. I can bend them nicely under the covers, the blankets not too heavy, not too hot sort of comfortable and a little scared. The pain is gone and I feel almost normal, but I'm still in bed not wanting to kill muscles, listening really hard to what I don't know.
Dec. 10 And I saw a creature standing in the corner of the bedroom, standing behind the door in the corner of the wall where two walls come together. There's a door on hinges hanging there and that's where I saw the creature. It reached for me from across the room. It's a room of fog-mist like old Dracula movies, a dull figure of a creature in the shadows of the room, in the corner behind the door. I can see it thru the mirror because there's a light in the bathroom hitting the mirror, and I can see the creature's reflection in the mirror and in the reflection I can see it thru the crack where the door hangs on its hinges and swings against my back and bangs into it when I cough or talk or when I scream with my hands cupped around my mouth to make my voice louder. I can see this creature mocking me in the dark behind the door making faces, poking at me with a stick, ramming me with a truck, slapping me with the back of its grimy filthy hand, the hand with the long hairs growing around its wrist growing up its arm and weaving itself around its bony elbow in and out like a wool shawl and dangling at the end split hairs in the center of my back with its hairy hand watching me squirm, watching me cry, looking at my distorted face, my mouth tightening up my face muscles, watching me hurting myself gasping for air, looking at me, reaching for me blindly looking stupid, looking at me looking at it, watching it stretch out its arms. It can't touch me but its aura can reach me and spin around me and it touched my body. The creature's aura pulls back into itself pulling away stepping back away from me in the night, the middle of the night, behind the door running away during the day disappearing like misty vapor smoke and fog.
Dec. 17 The creature was banging his fist on my head, banging his knees on my spine, banging his arms on my head, banging his feet on my ribs, banging his elbows on my recovery, packing up my mind in a paper bag, blowing down the door to my head, flooding my legs with cement and water, crushing my bones in a bone-crusher, peeling away my skin and pasting it on the wall, biting my neck and sucking my blood, fighting me in my bed of pain like a shark eating my flesh with a fork and a spoon, pounding his shoulder blades against the bottom of my feet, scratching his fingernails across the center of a yellow sun spinning red and orange the size of an oil tanker, the smell of tar on a roof top, the taste of bitterness on my tongue, the look of stupidity on my face, a blank stare into an empty sky that sucks up all the stars in the universe turning me inside out. Garbage collectors from hotel rooms in Hotel Pain wake me at 2am to whisper words of pain in my ear, tempting me to pass out by swallowing stones, woke me at 2am from an OK sleep so he could knock me around, bang me up side my aching rib cage the right side of my back the last place and maybe the only place where I have any serious pain, to kick me when I'm sleeping, to hit me with an iron rod, with a baseball bat, with a tire iron, with a hot skillet just hard enough and often enough, deep enough, just enough to stop me from relaxing, from sleeping again, from going unconscious, just enough pain to keep me awake and hoping.
Overheard at a local bar: (FIRST DRUNK) "Clayton shot Johnny's head off with a shotgun. (SECOND DRUNK) "Why?" (FIRST DRUNK) "Johnny didn't say."
Final Thoughts
I have a new appreciation for the little things in life: brushing my teeth, bending over, getting up out of bed, dressing myself, fixing my own food, cleaning the house, driving a car. It's all about doing. Pain stopped me from doing. Stop a man from doing and you control who he can be. That's what prisons are all about. They control what a man can and cannot do. Control what a man can do and you control who and what he can be. Wittgenstein said it like this: "Its use is its meaning." I say it like this: "What it does is what its being." Its use, what we use it for, what we do with it, is what it's being. In other words, beingness is a function of, or a distinction of, what we do or don't do. Who we are for ourselves and others is given by what we do or don't do. Another philosopher said, "What you do to the least of men, you do to me; and what you do not do to the least of men, you do not do to me." Pain stopped me from doing; my quality of life was held hostage. Ability to do is the ability to be. Life is all about what we do with it.
