The Origin of Number 9

If you notice, #6 and #9 look a lot alike. You could say that one of those numbers, or both of those numbers are "upside-down"....of course, you'ld be wrong to say that because they're not upside-down. There is a big difference, a huge difference between taking a photograph, a "normal" photograph that is taken and that is seen right-side-up in the mind (the way most photos are taken and seen in the mind) and then flipping that photo over to appear upside-down.....on the other hand all of these photos were photographed by taking the photo upside-down in the mind, in other words, seeing it upside-down in the mind, seeing it upside-down, experiencing it upside-down in the mind, in the experience of the environment. These photos were taken upside-down to begin with. In my mind, in my relationship to the environment, they were taken actually physically upside-down mentally and holding the camera upside-down. They were all taken with a camera phone, which helps the process.

There's a huge difference between a photo that was turned upside down (flipped upside-down) and a photo that was taken upside-down to begin with, in the mind, in the experience to begin with. There is more than one way to see an environment, or to see/experience an atmosphere, or an environmental area, or a subject than simply one way, one straight up-and-down way. Seeing a subject straight up-and-down, the "normal" way we relate to something we photograph is only one way to view it, or experience it. We can also see it upside-down, like seeing #6 and #9. There is a huge difference between the Hanged Man (6) and The Hermit (9). It helps to have a knowledge of Tarot Cards, but only slightly.

The important point is, the photos in this collection were not flipped over upside-down. The photos in this collection were taken upside-down, photographed upside-down to start with, they were seen upside-down, they were experienced upside-down to start with before I took the photos with the camera. They were not turned upside-down. It has to do with the Number 6 and the Number 9 in the Tarot Card deck, using the Hanged Man (#6) and the Hermit (#9) and I could see a connection between 6 and 9 and how they looked like they were upside-down, but they're really not. Neither one of those numbers is upside-down, in the same way that these photos are not upside-down.

Don't take all this "occult" language too seriously. It's meant to help bring out the conversation re: upside-down photos, which, in my mind, are not correctly called "upside-down" photos. In the process of working on this, I found something I had written a few years ago concerning Tarot Cards and divination and so I posted it up here to bring clarity to my "upside-down" photos.

Background:
6 of Wands Jupiter in Leo. 9 of Wands Moon in Sag.
6 of Pentacles Moon exalted in Taurus. 9 of Pentacles Venus in Virgo.
6 of Swords Mercury in Aquarius. 9 of Swords Mars in Gemini.
6 of Cups Sun in Scorpio. 9 of Cups Jupiter rules Pisces.

The Hanged Man and the Hermit. This is a baptism unto death symbolized by water signs and cups: the trinity of illusion and delusion represented by Neptune and the twelfth house. The Hanged Man represents man's inititation into the lowest order of the Rosy Cross, and his transformation as the serpent and the Dying God become the Ascended master of his death, with divination and powers of transformation of life itself. Nine is the number of "Redeemed" man ascended. He is the same man as the Hanged Man, only now he is the Lord of the Earth signified by Virgo with all dominion and power. Mercury is exalted in Virgo and Virgo is the crust of earth over Hades. The photos are the same photos, one is not "upside-down", but rather like Six and Nine there is an energy of transformation that occurs.

The Lamp of the Hermit is the light of the King of Fire, the Secret Fire of the Father, which is the transformation of six into nine. This is where the idea of the upside-down photo starts to become a conversation, because it's not upside-down, but rather it's a visual transformation of spiritual energy; the photos represent this as a movement of energy; turning something upside-down is a movement of energy, a movement of magick.

Man (Number Six) hangs on the Rosy Cross in the Light of inferior darkness, and is baptized unto death, a symbolism. But the Hanged Man, as the hidden serpent, is raised from death to new life (Number Nine), emerging from his initiation to the occult wisdom of the prophet's secrets: The Hermit, or a conversation known as Number Nine.

The origin of the Number Nine is the turning point when death of the Hanged Man is transformed into the life of The Hermit (it helps to look at the Tarot Cards and see the images, the "photographs" of the cards themselves). This is the transformation of the past becoming complete and no longer in the future. The Tarot Card no longer is a future-oriented experience, but instead is a past-based experience after the time of baptism, which is The Hanged Man (Number Six). The image of returning life is the photograph of life returning, which is what I was trying to say with this collection. The initiation of man's spiritual energy is not forced, but is natural, arising spontaneously. This is the transformation of the past. The past is complete in which the future is a space of possibility.

The Hanged Man becoming The Hermit (symbolically) represents a transformation in six stages, or six days: on the seventh day the Hanged Man returns from death, symbolizing the descent of the light energy and man's decline into darkness. It is the symbolism of the return of the light of the Lamp of the Hermit as Number Nine, ascended in the seventh double hour after his baptism and death. The Hanged Man represents winter chi, symbolized by thunder which is still unmanifest, unconscious and hidden in the depths of illusion and delusion's trinity of water signs and cups. As this chi (energy) is stirred, the Hanged Man is redeemed as The Hermit. The photographs are not "flipped" over upside-down, but instead they are a conversation of redemption.

Six becoming Nine, or a photograph appearing upside-down is the natural and inevitable origin of that which "comes back" or "returns" in a cyclic motion of completion and communication. The appearance of a photo being upside-down is the returning or the coming back of the image. The Lamp (symbolizing the Sun, or positive and negative light of photography, contrast, brightness etc) returns with fertility and exhaltation upon the earth.

This transformation from Hanged Man to Hermit leads to, and is led by, self-knowledge, sybmolized by the light of the Lamp from within, from inside consciousness, from awareness of awareness of everything/nothing, as a creation of word to world manifesting. From the depths of the Lamp (light), the Hanged Man sees the "Divine One" - he sees himself in the mirror of his own shadow. The Hanged Man (Number Six) changes to Nine, distinguishing shadows in relation to cosmic forces. The number Nine is, therefore, the ascending foce of life itself in all of nature and in the baptism of fire in the burning man, Number Six.

Number Six becoming Number Nine is a movement upward from below, from hell to heaven. Light energy is the creative principle of life itself. The Hanged Man and the Hermit represents the eternal cyclic movement between the two polarities of yin and yang, from which life itself emerges just at the moment when it appears to collapse.

The Missing Answers

(Girl at Tosca Party) It was three o'clock on a Sunday morning. It was hot and he couldn't sleep even with the windows open. Something's missing", he thought, "something's always missing." So he took off his t-shirt and his underwear and wrapped his left leg around the wet sheet, tugged at it, pulled at it and held it tight against his chest like a little kid afraid of the dark. He laid there staring at the ceiling and the chipped paint. Then he looked at the doors and the walls and the carpet and started counting things he saw in the garbage can. The light was still on in the room; he guessed he left the light on when he went to bed and the TV, too....that was still on, but running quietly. He didn't know where the TV remote control was; it was missing, too. He thought it might be under the bed, or in the bed lost in the sheets, or inside the pillows. In fact, things were deliberately made to appear to be missing, appearing to be seldom sufficient, hardly adequate and never enough. So he sat up in bed and got drunk and scribbled "WANT" on his chest with a black magick marker so that no matter what else was missing, no one could doubt his sincerity. (Untitled)

(Paint on a Wall) Conceited and cynical, he ignored criticism accusing him of exaggerating his importance. Personal ambition was just another thing missing. To escape his fantasies, he withdrew to an isolated point of view and made demands on the privileged few who never showed respect for everyday things; deceit was concealed from him by his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. He looked at the TV and watched the show for a few minutes. It was some kind of religious fund raiser (aren't they all?) It was a advertisement for gym equipment for Jesus, like "get in shape for Jesus", "the lord is returning for his bride and he wants his church to be in shape", and "be hot and look good!" This made him want to be a writer in the worst way, so he called in to make a pledge for some money so he could learn the Christian poet's mystical language whose mathematical ideologies, like his own, were stolen from jazz musicians playing out of tune, struggling to keep up with drummers on speed always one or two songs ahead of everyone else. Jazz was missing from the bad side of his mind, missing more or less the same today as it was the day before. On weekends we'd watch him perform; we'd hang around and drink. His condition got worse as time went on, spitting out stupid words, spitting out of control. (Breadshop in Chinatown)

(Breadshop with Reflections) He decided he had to go to the bathroom but he forgot where he put the room key. He had to piss really bad and almost used the sink but at the last minute he saw the key on the floor under the bed next to the remote. He grabbed both of them, slipped on his robe, put the remote in one of the pockets and opened, unlocked and locked the door behind him. It was so very quiet out in the hallway, dark, gloomy, cold and empty it reminded him how he once produced an artsy noir film about a transsexual circus clown cleaning bathroom floors with only a toothbrush. According to the "true" story, a Christian cult popular among marines outside a base near San Diego, California, called the Guardians of the Missing Order of the Thorny Rose, apparently descended from heaven and made hell on earth their home. On their way from there to here, they left something missing, something tasteless, colorless, and odorless and this was known as the Crypt of the Missing Broken Straw Man, Indian chief of all the Dead Eagles. But memories or not, it didn't matter; he still had to go to the bathroom really bad now, even worse than before, so he opened the door to the final sacrifice and became the first man to burn the sign of the cross on the frozen earth! (Mail)

(Untitled) In a hurry to piss, he tip-toed to the bathroom down the hallway and while he hurried he heard noises from the rooms. He heard the TV, people talking, the radio, snoring and he heard a man and woman doing something sexual. It sounded like one of them was slapping the other one with a belt, playing sex games. It must not have been going too well because he heard the woman ask the guy to take a break. By now he was finally in the bathroom. He opened the door and felt the cold air coming in from the other side of the building, ripping through the holes in his robe. He opened his robe just enough to get a grip and he took a long hot satisfying steamy piss. When he was done he turned off the light, opened and closed the door and started down the hall. The couple was at it again, but this time she was hitting him, at least that's what it sounded like. He was whimpering like a baby, she was laughing. He stopped and stood by their door for a few minutes, looking up and down to make sure nobody else came down the hall. He was getting bored and nervous so he hurried to his room, unlocked the door, opened it, closed it, put the key on the desk and threw the TV remote on the bed. (North Beach Hotel)

(Old Phone Booth) There was a TV show on. It was some interview with a kid hooked on speed. The message of the show was unclear, but its meaning was unavoidable. He sat up on the edge of the bed to listen and play with his toes. His cell phone was plugged in to get the battery charged up but the timing on the clock was all wrong. It was between four and four-thirty AM. He sat there on the edge of the bed with his robe opened, pulled down over his shoulders, slowly falling off his shoulders and falling to the bed and then sliding off the bed onto the floor. It was still too hot to sleep and since he had been swallowing copious amounts of hard drugs for the last several hours, he had severely and irrevocably damaged his capacity for pleasure, including sex. He decided to go next door and get some hot coffee. All he needed was $1.60 so he counted his change and found about $4.00, got dressed, put on his coat and scarf and boots and got his key and went down the hallway for something to eat and the coffee. Unfortunately, his brain had been so badly compromised on his way to the elevator, to the downstairs lobby and to the sidewalk outside, that he went from one flirtatious meaningless love-game to another ten times worse than the one before. He opened the elevator and said "hi" to the girl receptionist downstairs at the front desk and she said "hi" back to him and smiled. He put his hands in his pockets anticipating a cold wind to hit him. He knew his bank account was empty, but he hoped that later on, in a few minutes, when he came back with the coffee – one for him and one for her – he was hoping that he could make up for the sleepless nights when nothing mattered. But the missing things he left in his room could not explain to her why he lived in a dumpster, and why he registered at her hotel with the last few dollars he had. He didn't have any answers. (The Garden of Eden)

Narcissism

I think it's got a bad reputation. I don't even know what it is. But I have an idea that nihilism, narcissism and Nietzsche's will to power -- they're all connected, linked up, lined up, hooked up tight as a drunken triangle, like a machine that drives and pushes something or everything or nothing all the time. (Emotional)

For three weeks I slept alone in a hotel room with a desk, a sink, a closet, a rug, a door and a bed with two pillows. I watched TV most of the time when I stayed in there and I watched myself in the mirror. I'd put one eye on the TV and the other eye on the mirror. I'd watch my body move this way and that. Narcissism is one thing, but nihilism is like a different idea that there isnt any truth to anything, no values, nothing that means anything, no meaning...and I'm ok with that. That's all fine and dandy with me. I've thought that way for a long time. In fact, I once started writing this story, a theory really that the so-called "original sin was MEANING. Meaning or making things mean something was the original sin that cursed the world. (Mind of a Shadow)

So in my story we had this garden and in the middle of it was the fruit tree of good and evil. Of course, good and evil is what something means. The great liberator of knowledge had the finality of a poisonous spider and so I wrote the story of how the garden of eden was the beginning of narcissism and nihilism: "I slept with the egyptian only twice -- once on her stomach biting the back of her neck and once on a planet so immoral it's impossible to even think about it." Narcissism was as mysterious as a lighthouse: no longer the effect of constipation (because I drank so much coffee in the morning before I took a hot shower) it gave me hemmorrhoids that felt like a wall of bricks around the tree in the middle of the garden protecting the unfaithful servant because it had no moving parts in her body anymore. (Room of Shadows)

Adam's real name was Adagio and Eve was called Evil. They ran for days and never slept, crashed hard, nobody could wake them, they wouldnt answer phones, read mail or pay rent. They picked blisters off their faces. They loved to look at their own legs and they would touch themselves, touch their smooth skin. They pulled things out of their skin, things that itched, pulled out of their body pieces of things from Planet Zero. Once she blew her nose so hard and loud in the car she was driving, she lost a blood clot on the mirror. Her face turned red and her hair was covered in beautiful dark red and purple blood; she even threatened to stab people with forks if they didnt pay her for the work she did and they seemed to love it. I'd sleep on the bed in the hotel room before I'd get up and I'd hear the sound of sex in another room. I'd try to guess which rooms they were in. (Tattooed Arm)

In my story, they were brother and sister, or two lovers, or two schizophrenics having hallucinations, or two strangers at a bar. Nihilism and Narcissism slept on scratchy woolen blankets laid out next to each other on hard wood floors with entire families picking out their laundry, standing waiting for the mail, for their government checks, drinking hot coffee, smoking cigarettes. They heard voices from inside their headphones, voices without bodies, shadows within and without. They hated the slow dance because it usually spun out of control and then there was no key, no chords, no meter and no purpose to it, which is nihilism. (Untitled)

My hotel room was too small for all of us to fit in and narcissism made me sweat. I couldn't remember my name and I didnt know for sure if my name was really even important. But the girl in the room next door, down the hall a few feet, the girl with the swollen right red eye and the left green eye said there was a space, or there might be a space between imagination and intution, between trust and love, between a to z and back again, on another floor of the hotel, where the elevator didnt go. She said it might be the dark moon shining against the window, hitting the stone towers with black lightning, starring at blue eyes and a red sky. Whatever it was, I didnt care. I was always hungry, but I never ate. And I never drank. But I finally apologized for hiding behind the screen and watching her eyes roll up into the back of her head. I wrote a poem dedicated to nihilism and narcissism: "backward collars of the church hide crosses in their pockets/adolescents paint pimples with cream to hide their imperfections." She seemed to like it. I thought about it every morning before I took a hot shower. The water was so hot and so wet, and the window was open and the wind was cold. I'd get out of the shower and the cold air would blow into the shower stall and turn me on.

There were a few couples in the hotel who wore leather belts that held up the baggy pants of men who in the hotel, which was also called Eden. Women fell into the crack and got lost eternally entangled in the testicles of fat men. They made it mean something that religious delusions were supposed to be good and men could hear voices and make up stories. The fruit tree was able to talk and grow scabs. It pealed off my skin during the night when I slept, when I was taking photos of my legs outside the bed covers, when the sores got really bad and dirty, and turned beautiful and sexy and that was the end of the game. It gave suicide a bad name, like narcissism had a bad name. The problem with narcissism and myth as truth was that they became a belief in a universe selected for extinction. This was the cost of evolution and there was always a little change coming back.

I began to doubt my own mind and panic over everything, especially getting to the bus stop or taking a ride across town at rush hour. I started taking clonazepam and trazodone and lexapro and flomax and lisinopril and hydrocodone and codine and morphine and other stuff several times a day until I was hooked on all of it. I didnt live in present time anymore. I was in a future time, but my body was in one spot and I went exterior and far away from it in another spot, outside and far from it. I shoved myself back into my body, rolled myself backwards in the rain, slammed myself down on the wet street in my underwear soaking wet, but I was beautiful to look at and took lots of photos, narcissistic photos and nihilistic nothingness of my body. In my dreams, sleeping in the hotel, or sitting at the computer downstairs at 3 or 4am, I dreamt I was buried in a bed with a soft cable wrapped around my neck with a scarf when it got cold. I liked to wear leather wrist restraints and a metal ring in public places just to embarrass myself. This made it impossible to remember the color of my own hair.

My bed in the hotel was on a platform off the ground on stilts and there was a wooden ladder that I had to climb every night. I had soft lights built just for me so I could see the soft shadows against my body, to make shadows on the wall outlining my body against the wall when I floated around the room. I could smell polished oak walls, waxed wood floors, stained wood beams, the ceiling and a stone fireplace and flowers from the kitchen garden. The winter snow fell silently on the full moon coming thru the window in my hotel room, and I had sex with myself but I never woke up. I enjoyed it anyway. It wouldve been OK........all this wouldve been OK, but sadly it was over by the time excitement turned into resentment. My name was on my lips like spit, and my body was at its lowest point of ecstacy: self-love smelled like an outhouse in Montana.

Even after therapy, I still wanted to abuse myself because I still had nightmares and my arms had one thing in common: I was ashamed to move to a cheap slum because the laundry rooms were pieces of art. I was becoming extinct: a secluded beat, worse than a sacrificial angel. I had no inspiration after three nights in vegas. An old woman blocked her phone because I had no money, no way to stay away from lonely, no therapy, nobody got crucified, no prophets and no little drops of glass on a mirror. There was so much confusion about the Tao. The ivory addiction kept me bleeding and narcissism became extinct.

Escape from a San Francisco Hospital

Jack Kerouac would have never hung out at Vesuvio's. Lenny Bruce would've never have worked in San Francisco. None of the jazz clubs would have opened if the city was like it is now. The great jam sessions would never happen. Nobody would have listened. "Howl" would have never been read, never been published. It just would have been doodling on a legal pad in an oriental alley, and would have never been any good; it would have sucked. (Escape #1)

(Escape #2) "San Francisco 2009" is a phantom souvenir. It's an apparition of mental and emotional defiance. It's a city of cheap melodramatic memorabilia. It's a piece of costume jewelry. It's an over-sized, over-blown, over-hyped, over-populated, over-charged postcard. It's an amusement park with no amusement, appealing to asexual bored and boring new-agers, an entertainment centerpiece for phony adult sex with a hypnotic-induced, IV-infused memory that was never a memory, but only an experiment. (Escape #3)

(Escape #4) San Francisco today is a wafer-thin skin-and-bones male priest smoking in the confessional trying to decide between masturbating against his obsessions, or sleeping alongside a visiting fat man from the Vatican: an ugly, balding useless used car salesman with a telemarketing con who lived everywhere below Market and 3rd as an addicted poltergeist impersonator. The priest was a murderer with a thin shadow that hid in doorways, making out with a disembodied love-goddess resembling facsimiles of dead artists, dead writers, poets, dead jazz trumpet players who sang, "My Funny Valentine" and photographers, publishers, drunks, drug addicts, comedians, and dead rock stars who moved out long ago. (Escape #5)

(Escape #6) They said goodbye to the hypertension power lines and turned their backs against the wind constipated from eating crack. They washed their face to hide black rings around their eyes listening to Harry James get sucked into the sentimental mid-western, non-black middle class suburban lifestyle. San Francisco 2009 is a Warfare-not-Welfare summer retreat sleeping with a vagina, pressed down, shaken together and running over every female whore and slut who spreads excitement for Jesus, lapping her sucking spit, face-sucking pimples right off the blackheads of her plastic face, grinding her teeth thru the night, grinding them into the shape of a crucifix with aluminum-plated braces pumping oral gratifiers down her long, narrow, virgin sperm-free firm, shapely, long, slender, tan throat. (Escape #7)

(Escape #8) I used to love the fog and would have stayed for that slippery dampness if it would have been authentic fog instead of a tourist con; even wet grey and white clouds stopped coming around; even jazz singer, jazz crooner Tony Bennett promised never to sing about the heart he left behind, because it was the heart that made all the noise and it was the last heart with a rosy hue, and it was replaced by the sound of a solar clock from a microwave oven. San Francisco doesn't have a heart anyway; apparently it can live without one. It hasn't had a heart for years and nobody ever noticed. The big tourist attraction was a fake heart fitted with a peculiarly large pace-maker programmed to skip beats then stop, reboot, restart, stop again and restart. This was a favorite tourist con. (Escape #9)

(Escape #10) The city has no passion. Intestinal cement and steel glue was poured into old places. It has no real-life pulse that can be felt. All it is now is just a tikity-tokity-tokity-tikity irregular beating almost a whisper, almost as soft as softly as in a morning sunrise with that make-believe west coast sunset beach that puts me to sleep after I'd been awake for a several days; but not anymore, because that's part of the lost memorabilia.

People who work here don't really work here, not like Salt Lake or Detroit. In San Francisco, they play a con game dressed up in a discount party-atmosphere. They wear a cultural "garb" period-costume pieces, like old-time leathery-hippy outfits, or slick hipster mirror-image dirty faces, head shot photographs carried under one arm with creatures and voices nobody else can hear, sarcastic and cynical HIV-positive hip cats zoot suit Chinamen skeletons wearing colorless necklaces, colorless shapeless hairpieces, knee high boots, rip torn temptation-driven miniskirts and those sexy long black eye lashes matching the color of shoe strings tied around their ankles and their necks. (Room #72, North Beach Hotel)

Streets have the same names as before but the real essentials of the city aren't the street names but whatever it was that made San Francisco a place to be from. The essences have been replaced degraded disgraced with Spanish-American motif essentials common to other dull places like San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Burbank, Santa Fe, Reno. San Jose....anyplace that could be any other place without trying. I never know where I am; it's like going to a Safeway, a Wal-Greens, a Wal-Mart, a K-Mart in any city, twenty-four hours a day, any day of the week, in any part of the country at any time and you can't tell the difference between one place and another. When you go to pay your potato chips and beer, you wouldn't know if you're in Boulder City, Needles, or Las Vegas; you'd be in San Francisco and never know it, because there are no essentials anymore that make San Francisco a space. It's a space but it's not a spaceship. It's an empty black hole space, a white noise space, a crowded bus space, a crowded elevator space. Crowded. Cramped. Hungry. Paranoid space built on cheap illegal counterfeit US Navy landfill space that can't hold up a strong earthquake.

The San Francisco Bay harbor and beautiful brightly lit skyline, even scary old Alcatraz are famous landmarks and points of interest but they're nothing really but used canvases dug up from an alley somewhere. It's a loose fitting canvas of sticky dry paint, semi-abstract commercial wallpaper scraped off the walls from a cheap hotel, mediocre replicas vaguely vulgar renditions of art, but instead of fifteen minutes of fame it's a bus pass that'll take you to a dead prostitute, a dead hooker, or a toothless-rotted-out-mouth-cum-sucking-vitamin-destroyed sex-giver, not a care-giver, who's banged and sucked her way to be a poster child for a poster city. San Francisco is nothing but a souvenir hunter, a type of Mexican-Indian-Jew, a type of middle-class evangelical-charismatic revivalist, a type of credit-card-pinching-lying-tax-dodging-patriotic-rightwing-extremist and proud centrist soccer-mom, a type of secret alcoholic flag-waving member of her most faithful church on a mission to stop adultery. They hate Kerouac and Ginsberg; idiot nerdy-America was ahead of its time out there on the farm. They knew it when they heard it and they heard it all and hated it all and killed them all: the jazz musicians, the drug dealers, the pot smokers.

They hated Lenny Bruce, Steve Allen, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti and Coltrane. They hated black Miles, black Max Roach, black Monk, black Basie, black Ornette, Bill Evans. San Francisco is a trinket to collect like matchbook covers and stamps, like fake bus stops, like fake trolley cars, like gangland slant-eyed Chinatown-mafia hit celebrations for the year of the "whatever". San Francisco is the best fake backboard, best fake book store, best fake coffee house and best fake windy ocean breeze. The steep hills and sidewalks are being leveled out and flattened like a swollen bulging stomach to make it easier for fat Americans fat beans-and-rice, arrogant slant-eyed biased, prejudiced, obnoxious, selfish, self-righteous, superiority-complexed Asians, and the mumbling whiny insincere complaining guilt-ridden, tear-stained old testament buried beneath a Judaism-mindset walking down the hills to Coit Tower which already stinks of religion.

Vesuvio's Cafe is a place where the tourists are too scared to go inside or stand outside and sit down, or go upstairs, use the toilet, drink the water, watch TV, order something to drink or eat peanuts. Homosexual sluts, transgender female impersonators and male castrated Grand Masters of the Dungeon tell wild sex stories about the bad old days and the dope addict jazz muicians who raped daughters and wives and got away with it while their husbands watched drunk. They snap their phony photos with their wide smiles plastered across their clean-shaven face like sterile toothpaste. They grin and show their white teeth for thirty seconds and then get the hell out of there, walk away fast and don't look back, walk in the opposite direction, get away and never come back. San Francisco has become that kind of place: a speechless town. Not even language is spoken here.

San Francisco was intellectually buried in a black hole, a black-pot-hole in a vacant lot cars buses, taxis with their radio's broadcasting pick-ups in the Fillmore, trucks diving off the road around the Cliff House. It's not even an empty scenic town. Once the music is gone the sax stands on its head and starts a nose bleed, or a brain bleed because of the bruises on his body, bruises all over his body because his blood platelets fell to less than 2000 and he almost died; but once the soul is gone, what's the point? The thing is gone, and I do mean "thing" and it's not there.

San Francisco is a small man with big plans. It's a small man's world with a fat man wearing big pants. It's a small minded man with a big city idea. It's a small man caught lying about a big circus clown's big top-big town. It's a big man wearing big black small man's underwear. It's a big town eating a small man's thongs. San Francisco is a big tall man walking taller and wearing little man pants crawling slowly away on his knees like a small man's large. It's a skinny town filled with fat men. It's a big man's balls who wear a large small athletic cup on his small man's penis. It's a small man's bad breath blowing a large man's big and large ding-dong woody. It's a small man wearing a tall small and big fat. But the small man is still out there and he's trying to find the large man where he can hear the big fat man talk big fat and louder at the smaller fat clown when the fat man screams at the small man and they look at each other and pay no attention because that's what kind of a city San Francisco is, where nobody pays attention, because nothing goes on there that isn't a vague disguise, a phony con, a fake con, useless, worthless cold and wet con.

I stopped to listen to late night jazz in a hole on Green and didn't drink and didn't want to drink because there wasn't any jazz and I didn't want to be there. Old jazz used to play there. The sax talked a story with his horn. The snare drum hit the brushes like a washer and dryer inside a machine. What am I doing here? Someone asked me. It's a small fake world a small fake business to get my stomach flattened and tight and sexy brown skin Indian color. I love taking hot showers on every floor in the hotel being naked and wet taking photographs of myself running up the hallways outside the window and fall onto the sidewalk. There's no point to it; not to anything. The whole earth is ready to explode ready to say goodbye Mexican Rose, you can't keep the Ring. I'm wearing the Ring you're not getting it back. I'm wearing it forever because the Black Rose Ring is what I want.

The nurses said they were sorry. There's nothing they can do except send squads of cops. That nurse gave me a real sick feeling with a dirty needle trying to get some blood where there wasn't a vein. "You said something you didn't mean!" What? "A sixty year old gentleman is a musician and he is very anxious!" I had a piece of string tied around my neck, hanging from the ceiling. It was their bad behavior that provoked me. Everything upset me and made matters worse.

All great revolutionary music turns into simple commercial jingles at some point, short catchy melodies commercial tunes; it's all a con. San Francisco is a con, a big con, a scam, a scheme, a laundromat gallery of dirty wet clothes, a carnival ride that breaks down, costs too much, ends too soon, never starts fast enough. The essence of intellectual viciousness is about the a big con dressed in a suit speaking prophecies with a full metal jacket of mental disease with fat pudgy fingers standing in a fat pudgy gesture of pudgy love of pedophilia.

San Francisco is the leather gun, a strap-on dildo concealed weapon under the shoulder between the legs, worn in the belt, worn under the belt buckle walking in the Tenderloin's final goodbye, like reaching for it to squeeze it to touch the package, that was his final "goodbye"! I'm still not drinking, still not drunk, still not stoned, still sitting here at the bar Kerouac probably wouldn't even sit in, wouldn't even walk in.

I sit in this bar paying for water and I a cloud of darkness comes over me, my emotions, demanding more than I have. San Francisco has had a "alteration de la personalite" among the sick, the feeling of loss of power and confinement is enough to inspire belief in God. The city is cluttered with parking lots, cluttered with bars: all I see is cheap nick-knack clutter, dust attracting clutter sexual mutilation compelled to taste fresh blood, like the vampire he's always wanted to be.

Mediocrity swept thru the city in an invasion of religious believers, the most naive and backwards of the species of man today. What we need is more rituals to pound out a beat, a little con with sickening mind-bugging moral values that reek debasement of man so bad and horrifically stale and dry that the moral values of western religion has castrated mankind's intimate personhood, castrated San Francisco's intimacy making it a pocketbook guide to interesting places nobody cares about, ever heard of and ever thinks about.

I used to think my photos were a function of being creative; I thought maybe I was compelled; cause and effect were split up backwards and upside down, like the old rugged crucifixion cross: it ought to be turned right side up, head on the bottom, feet on the top, arms and hands out to the side, blood flowing up, not down. An anti-gravity miracle of God, performed as an act of will. I was anxiety-driven not creativity-driven. Music was depression-driven. Anxiety-driven behaviors might be constructive and produce "good works", according to St. Paul, that great infamous Catholic Jew, who, if he had a digital camera, would've taken commercial photos of great mementos of Christ, pretentious and fake!!

San Francisco is a mutilation of paper. It's a holy lie. It's compared to the weakest and most subhuman afterlife possible. Before San Francisco turn into an afterlife, it's a grave site for the deaf, a sanctuary for the blind, a dog house for the lame, a barbershop for the cripple, a beauty parlor for those people with bad breath, who should sleep in a straight jacket, street sweepers. And now it's all quiet. Nobody is talking. All there is left is the lobby and the sidewalk shadows and phantoms wandering in and out of the Chinese herb stores tapping the fat American beast on the shoulder asking for money. San Francisco has turned into an injection. It's turned into an anxious infection eating away at the bone marrow. San Francisco used to be a "used to be", but now it's a "time to leave, time to go". It's become what it was always meant to be: an after-birth by the bay, a still life, an abortion burning at the edges, a cancer victim, a wheel-chair bound handicap person racing down one of the steep hills without a break.

My body was and is a chemical plant and it's killing flowers where ever I walk if there's flowers around me, and I stand near the flowers, they die at least they die mentally in my mind or my idea of my mind; they probably don't really die. I just kill them with the stench of the smell of the chemicals coming out of my skin; but that's not true either. I've got bad breath, too and even my dad can smell it all the way from the grave. His grave is in Montana and I don't have a grave but if I did it wouldn't be in San Francisco because he could smell my bad breath all the way from there to here. No, it'd be in Nashville and it would be an ash can, not a grave. It mustn't be too deep either to put the ash can in. I never stuck my feet in my dad's grave. I wonder how loud the rock music really is when you're buried in the dirt.

Self-hatred and Ambiguity

I'm finally beginning to get Nietzsche: it's as if he was standing next to me in that blackness, in that space photographed around me; See the photo as if Nietzsche's mind is able to be photographed as space, as darkness, as black space surrounding the mind of those with whom he's having conversations. There's a conversation going on between Nietzsche and me right at that moment I snapped this photo; more like a dialog with me doing the listening and Nietzsche doing the talking. I can see him standing next to me, right behind me to my left talking into my left ear and if you look into that space you'll see it, too.... He's talking to me about self-hatered as the highest form of power, will and strength there is; because "self" is the will itself. He's saying self-hatered is an illusion and as a false conflict with something "bad", like a con game (ambiguity) it originates from the suppressive religious icon of evil competing with "self" for its share of god-worship as another form of a con.

This is the beginning of a study of my experience with physical pain, the development of turning anger into a form of self-hatred and depression, but then eventually letting self-hatred express itself as a positive and powerful force for creativity. By accepting what-was, what-is, what's-so and what's-possible within the limitations and insecurities of physical and psychological uncertainities, I'm able to acknowledge new relationships, new forms of communication and new conversations with new language between me and my environment, both internal and external. This generates, as in causing, a fresh relatedness with life itself that I can photograph from new perspectives. Some of it is filled with emotion, some of it with no emotion at all; some of it is clear, other parts of it is unfolding, or even closing up.


Part Two: Self-Hatred and the Con PART ONE: SELF-HATRED AND AMBIGUITY

(Study of a Hand in Motion) The pain he suffered completely zapped him of any sense of power of choice. He had no self-determination, no self-discipline, self-control, self-actualization, no self-reliance. He was in decline of self. He was a diminished insult of self. He was the disillusionment of a powerful, healthy self. He was an out-of-control loss of self-will, self-love, self-identity, personality, self-direction, self-affirmation and self-proclamation. Anything and everything having to do with him, with self, with his sense of communication with self-as-environment, self-as-atmosphere, self-as-space, self-as-power; anything having to do with him and his conversation with himself, with self-as-dialog, self-as-interactive mind, self-as-motivation, self-as-attraction, self-as-thought; anything that had to do with communication in thought-forms, thought-patterns, thought-as-security, thought-as-power, thought-as-virtual-intellect, thought-as-mental-processes communicating as electronic brain signals which gave him the advantages of a powerfully strong ambitious life were cut off and he was left like a dismembered carcass alongside a dirt road unceremoniously incoherent and isolated. (Jazz Improvization)

(Corner of Columbus and Kearny) Physical pain and weakness, psychological infertility and fear magnified are characteristics of Christianity, which restrained his humanity and denied "personhood". Without self-ambition, he had no will to crush the brutality of sanctimonious evil: self-sacrifice! Self-reliance, self-support, self-magnification of human love, fulfillment of self-love and the affirmative expression of self-hatred were helpless fatalities in a con game to which he became an unwilling victim, shattering his integrity. Self-degradation became "astigmatism in the eyes of an invalid" as his infection mimicked the Christian's herd instinct with distress and failure in a saintly reformatory of self-propitiation. Occupying the centerpiece of mindless blind faith, he had no weapons against priestly sadists using hope to perform dramatic ceremonies against him as life was in dissent against itself! (Untitled)

(Second Floor) Mind couldn't confront brutality and life-destroying misery and atrophy: "the suffering" was unbearable beyond unbearable belief. Body was defeated by pain. The most horrific pain conceivable was a form of malicious mental pain demanding stupidity and duty to a trust in intelligent design, destiny, reason; none of which had any value. He was barely able to survive "the suffering's" repeated evil penalties for injustice and dishonesty, failing to escape from which he almost callously surrendered to a con artist. (Reflections in a Hallway)

(Old Phone Booth) The Christian con artist is the servant of the con game for our sad and pitiful life: it's a pathetic wretched beneficence. That's the key word: "Beneficence": beneficial, the benefited one, benign beneficence, also known as the supreme being, not just "being", not just one who be's or is, but the one who only is. Beneficence is considered supreme and the benefits charisma too brilliant for weak-minded, poor-hearted, pitifully shallow, selflessly useless masochists to pay attention to their unending suffering, disease, hate, pain, distress, anguish, agony, death, blindness, war, famine, false imprisonment, bigotry, prejudice, murder, despair, mental hopelessness, addiction and enough curses for every man, woman and child. Christianity kills human life and suppresses excellence. It makes a mockery of beauty and calls it beastly. It takes a beast and calls it "but beautiful". (Stairway)


(Window) The Christian con artist loved him so profoundly it dropped an eye lash from its bloodshot third eye and let it fall to the floor with a thump. By enduring "the suffering", it promised him he would have a star on the sidewalk next to the virtuous and worthy. The con gave him a disease and packed him up with high doses of intolerance, but the "frail desolation" (i.e., pain killers) was the holy lie that made him suffer the most by seducing him to lock himself in the bathroom of a neighborhood bar and drink so much liquor he couldn't eat anymore; he drank so much his skin turned yellow; he drank until diarrhea flushed the rest of his liver down the toilet mixed with blood without platelets. The Christian con was made with throbbing delusion and tormenting unhappiness. Enough sadness and distress went around the room cursing him with counterfeit kindness, destroying him with fake self-love, deliberately causing melancholia dementia to set in. This was the origin of the "I-want-to-help-them", the "I-want-to-save-them", the "I-want- to-care-for-them", the "I-want-to-baptize-them"! This is the story of the sickly-giver who built a stairway with death and offered its twisted arthritic hand of salvation, buried six feet under ground where it won't smell so badly. This is the ultimate con game: if he doesn't accept the helping hand of christ, it kills him with it; and if he accepts it, both ways, it's a con and it kills him. It's a pious, hypocritical con that kills him if he doesn't and kills him if he does.

Self-hatred and the Con

I'm finally beginning to get Nietzsche: it's as if he was standing next to me in that blackness, in that space photographed around me; See the photo as if Nietzsche's mind is able to be photographed as space, as darkness, as black space surrounding the mind of those with whom he's having conversations. There's a conversation going on between Nietzsche and me right at that moment I snapped this photo; more like a dialog with me doing the listening and Nietzsche doing the talking. I can see him standing next to me, right behind me to my left talking into my left ear and if you look into that space you'll see it, too.... He's talking to me about self-hatered as the highest form of power, will and strength there is; because "self" is the will itself. He's saying self-hatered is an illusion and as a false conflict with something "bad", like a con game (ambiguity) it originates from the suppressive religious icon of evil competing with "self" for its share of god-worship as another form of a con.

This is the beginning of a study of my experience with physical pain, the development of turning anger into a form of self-hatred and depression, but then eventually letting self-hatred express itself as a positive and powerful force for creativity. By accepting what-was, what-is, what's-so and what's-possible within the limitations and insecurities of physical and psychological uncertainities, I'm able to acknowledge new relationships, new forms of communication and new conversations with new language between me and my environment, both internal and external. This generates, as in causing, a fresh relatedness with life itself that I can photograph from new perspectives. Some of it is filled with emotion, some of it with no emotion at all; some of it is clear, other parts of it is unfolding, or even closing up.


Part One: Self-hatred and Ambiguity PART TWO: SELF-HATRED AND THE CON

(The Hotel Room) Control pain and those who receive pain can be controlled as well. His lack of self-importance was really emptiness-without-power made flesh. His mental and emotional organization collapsed in agonizing embarrassment; cruelty came only after the insurance was approved. "The suffering" was a compulsion of physical, sexual, emotional and psychological occurrences secretly known only by serpents, mental aberrations and apparitions. Naturally, he began to hate his body, convinced his thoughts were eating him alive like antibodies. He thought medical options were exhausted and spiritual opinions were simply more infectious holy lies, reproducing the con game by controlling him through suffering. The muscle-of-the-pulpit (i.e., "the stalker") made him believe leeches were a necessary treatment to suck blood from his hands out through an IV-needle, first a mouth sucker, then tail, then mouth again and so on, robbing his blood platelets by piercing the skin and bruising him while he slept at night. Half naked, covered only in a thin white hospital blanket rolled up past his knees, the edges stapled together like pieces of rough sandpaper above his thighs, his feet carefully hanging gently over either side of the bed as if he was modeling: 300mls of morphine taking slow effect made the ordeal not so bad. (Vesuvio's)

(Chinatown) But there was no sleep and there was no escape: hateful, horrific rage was constructed like a skyscraper inside his mind, disguised as drowsiness, inertia induced by love. Indifferent to fatigue-deadening narcotics which neither increased his metabolism nor did he sleep through the winter. He turned against himself like a razor blade. He blamed himself for guilt, self-humiliation and womanly meekness inheriting nothing but hurtful scandal. Isolated in his hospital room, he was afraid of fanaticism, and like bad food, he had plenty of it. Afraid of being reported as pathetic, a gang of med students watched him having sex with females dressed in male drag, students who depended on him remaining powerless as a junkie so they could stalk and harass him. Dressed like starving jazz musicians wet from standing in the rain all night, they'd come to his room passing through the door without opening it leaving no trace, bringing strangers to tag along to give him attention he didn't want or need. Unwanted phone calls in the middle of the night made him anxious of noises, yelling and being hit when he walked in his sleep. The only visualization exercise he could get away with secretly was to suffer in silence by memorizing the sequence of the holy lie: self-hate, ambiguity and sacrifice; the sequence and then the explosion. (On the Bus)

(Upside Down) When he wasn't medicated, he had long conversations using language of self-hate and ambiguity: Eight Principles of the Painless Tao (1) Running the con (power and control) is based on intimidation; (2) Pain is a con of emotional abuse and is often used to steal money; (3) Pain and the loss of control isolate body and mind from themselves and from other people; (4) Pain minimizes its effects and makes excuses for anti-social, socio-pathological warnings against mental illness due to constipation; (5) Suffering is used to con people, to scare and threaten them with the evil of disobedience; (6) The control of power and pain is a con rooted in male-dominant, male-superior, male-societal hierarchies and dysfunction; (7) Pain killers are expensive con games and destroys bank accounts; (8) Pain and control manipulates fear of never-ending pain and suffering, an agonizing con without end; not even death can relieve the burden of eternal expectation. (The White Hand)

Selfishness and interdependence became an issue for affixing blame on himself. Blame was fulfilled in one word; love your neighbor as yourself, but that's more than one word. Without medical insurance or a driver's license, schizophrenia began to spy on him, wouldn't let him go home, found ways to hurt him and bragged about pain in reoccurring nightmares of pre-mental sex. He was afraid to say "no" to virtual-sex. He was afraid to say "no" to imaginary drinking binges but he was always ready for morphine. (Upside Down)

(Hand in Motion) With his arms swinging from side to side, his body bleeding like a slice of lemon freshly squeezed from a tree, Piano Man and Drummer Man swapped fours like lovers swapped spit. They began to get a sense of his new powerful will-to-self. He scratched at the door of his hospital room and his hotel room where he stood for hours and knocked trying to open the Tao. His arms turned elastic in some kind of weird reenactment of the American Indian holocaust. But instead of a trail of tears he read about in books, real tears filled his eyes! His voice trembled. His feet were bound with bungee cord. His thin, bruised arms stretched out from left to right as wide as outer space itself making a black silhouette on the wall; a shadow of a fat ballerina. From across the room, a wheel chair with a Chinese woman tied up in it rolled downstairs and smashed against a window; he visualized himself as the source of power and choice. (Cocktail Bar)

(Face) His parched dry lips, forever scared with a scowl and swinging from a dead fig tree, kept company with two commandments of the holy lie hanging upside down like a tarot card with the law and the prophets. He spent most of the time in his hospital room or his hotel room, and the sidewalk cafe where he stayed out late every night. He drank coffee at the neighborhood grill and waited to take the bus down-town. Late-night, after-hours he went to the Jazz Bistro on Ellis, played drums and ate goat cheese. This was his self-encouragement for the story "Fig Tree for a Lynching": the story of the great con game hanging from a tree with the law and the prophets, being executed and dangling in the wind with the rest of the scriptures until they were dead little beads for his collection, until small drops of frustration made angles cry orchids. (Body Hair)

Conclusion

I'm finally beginning to get Nietzsche: it's as if he was standing next to me in that blackness, Click Here for Photo in that space photographed around me; as if Nietzsche's mind is able to be photographed as space, as darkness, as black space surrounding the mind of those with whom he's having conversations. There's a conversation going on between Nietzsche and me right at that moment I snapped this photo; more like a dialog with me doing the listening and Nietzsche doing the talking. I can see him standing next to me, right behind me to my left talking into my left ear and if you look into that space you'll see it, too.... He's talking to me about self-hatred as the highest form of power, will and strength there is; because "self" is the will itself. He's saying self-hatred is an illusion and as a false conflict with something "bad", like a con game (ambiguity) it originates from the suppressive religious icon of evil competing with "self" for its share of god-worship as another form of a con. There's more to come .....and I'll write it up and publishes it as a photo essay shortly. So I wrote the ending first.

This was the beginning of a study of my experience with physical pain, the development of turning anger into a form of self-hatred and depression, but then eventually letting self-hatred express itself as a positive and powerful force for creativity. By accepting what-was, what-is, what's-so and what's-possible within the limitations and insecurities of physical and psychological uncertainities, I'm able to acknowledge new relationships, new forms of communication and new conversations with new language between me and my environment, both internal and external. This generates, as in causing, a fresh relatedness with life itself that I can photograph from new perspectives. Some of it is filled with emotion, some of it with no emotion at all; some of it is clear, other parts of it is unfolding, or even closing up. (Me and the Darkness)


(The Wall of Jazz) Pain and the loss of power and choice went out through the top of my head out the top and out my ears through my pores in my skin out through my fingernails and the wrinkles in my hands and the lines on my face the dark circles under my eyes the black marks around the edges of my face the jaw, the teeth, gums, my tongue and salvia and all the power over who I am, who I was being, or able to be and who I wanted to be, or thought I could be as being, or to be this or that. I thought it had to do with identity of personality as with a photograph, but that wasn't it and never was it, not even a mirror, not even a picture, not even an image, not even an expression of someone or something I thought I knew; but didn't. (A Black Boot)

(North Beach Hotel) Power = self vitality and strength. Performance. Determination. Choice and choices. Struggle-struggling, fighting-attraction, physical-attractiveness. Physical counter-balance, physical difficulty. Intrigue and ability. (The Ring Belongs To Her)

(Waiting for the Cops) This is power to me: The will to life, to live to survive the will. To over-come the will, over-whelm the will. To charm the will, to enlist the will to invite and recruit the will. To elect the will to expand the will. To increase to grow and manipulate the will. To emanate the will by expanding the will to build: to capture, dominate, defeat and conquer the will. To reclaim the will to speak language. To generate, to buy, to own, read and write about the will to produce to fail. To succeed to disbelieve the will. To live to eat to die. To love the will to come and to go. The power of the will to be born to endure. Power to confront the will. Power is everything Christianity is not. Power as the enemy of Christianity. (Hand at Rest)

Essay on Photography Scrawled on a Bathroom Wall

(Directions to Lonely Town) Predictability is based on the past and the probability of the past repeating itself. Coincidence is based on the past repeating itself less often. While probability is based on the past being repeated more often than not, photography, on the other hand, is not a Wheel of Fortune: when we take photographs it's always now. (Crossing the Steet)

(Desolation Angel) Before matter, energy, space and time there was (and is) now. Now wasn't created by anyone; nobody "put" it here. We can't touch it, but we can experience it. We can't photograph the invisible, but we can be present to it since the only space where photographs are made is the space of now. In fact, every photograph that is, was or ever shall be is only created now as a context distinguishing photography from history or mere memory. (Washington Square)

(Dharma Bum)Photography is the experience of "what's-so" and "what-is". Its imagery is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, the first and last fabric of experience. Because it's empty and meaningless, it distinguishes location, language and purpose seamlessly. In other words, a photograph documents transformation of our "existensystems" by letting us experience a unified field of magick, imagination, everything and nothingness. (Woman Cleaning her Nails)

(Man on a Motorcycle) A photograph doesn't have to be something hoped for, waiting to happen in the future someday, maybe. A photograph occurs outside of meaning, outside of any difference it does or doesn't make, outside of any purpose or worth it may or may not have. A photograph (as a possibility) is a functions of resistance, and whatever we resist, persists. Existence persists as photographs of ultimate nothingness where there is neither genesis nor origin. Photography persists in the tao of all things, in which nothing is true, everything is possible, nothing is forbidden and everything is permitted. (Ignored and Forgotten)

That #1

That Saturday morning I got lost in clouds of white wet and rainy and grey. The black and white image was deeply grey. You know, that image of an old man pretending to be empty when he brought the gift of pain that he carried and personally laid it at the feet of the statue. You remember, that old silver-haired zen man who aged a hundred years after spending one night in the Hospital of Darkness and who, pretending to need and want only his share of nothingness, said that, with steady and meaningless injections under the tongue, liquid morphine (roxanol) made suffering almost painless; it made life itself a sleeping deep perfection.

And so, I had a vision that God's lungs were filled with dreaming dementia, a mystic gas, that He screamed - all night and every night - and spit mouthfulls and throatfulls of infectious spit! He sat and waved to me from His wheelchair warning me to keep away, telling me that my mind was gone, that time was short and days were long. And so, I recorded every word that He spoke to me. I wrote it down and made a list of all His insults:

1. That my lips were glossed with motor oil and my body was paralyzed by thinking.

2. That my money was stolen and my checks were cashed by people deceased who were still on welfare.

3. That my rented car smashed up on Highway 61 Revisited and was closed for repairs.

4. That I had an absessed toothache and a run away runny nose dripping with oxycotin.

5. That my soul was neither black nor white and none of my phone calls would ever be returned.

6. That my writing hardly ever made sense.

7. That my photos distorted reality and never cleared things up.

8. That my camera phone was as sharp as a flat tire and my ideas were as useful as a bounced check.

9. That my hands had an annoying, embarrassing twitch and it made things drop out of my grasp; it made my arms snap their way out of their sockets and fall to the floor.

Of course, God knew that photo I took, the one I mentioned earlier, was a picture of walls and corners, ceilings, doors, curtains, hospital beds, and guitar strings that were really drum sticks, and piano keys that were really guitar picks.

But that sick and twisted God, the same one who created hepatitus ABC and all the other hellish, deadly infections that live and breathe in the holy temples of the body, bruised and damaged the vital organs I use for speaking Words of Spirit into life for making love and seeing visions of Nico.

But that sick and twisted elderly childish and dysfunctionally unholy, that eternally useless and irritating bitch, God Damme, (that's His full name, by the way: "God Damme"), had those discolored black and blue veins that were really punctured blood vessels taped together tight like red rubber tubing, the same color as the white parts of the eyes of meth users after a five-day binge, that makes blood move faster thru the brain, pounding like drum beats that rock that rhythm, that makes the jungle beat run wild and hot thru the steamy night. I wrote down the Word He spoke to me. Like a magical curse, He laid His hands on me, dirty hands - dirty in the sense that He had just finished strangling someone in an alley. And so, God spoke the Words written here:

1. His Word made my skin crawl. My skin got dry and pealed away like dead skin blisters with a vancomyican cocktail with too much salt and saline mixed in my IV. My eyes started to fall heavy and then they got dreamy shut tightly closed and then I was nodding out.

2. His Word made my body drag along and drop off from itself, separating from my spine, tearing apart from the vertebrae, from swollen bruised nerve endings and collapsed blood vessels. Like a broken, dried up wooden telephone pole, it snapped in two.

3. His Word slowly rolled up the medical hill, with the telephone pole; and round and round and round it went and where it stopped we dont really know, nor do we care too much about it.

4. His Word said there's no escape from pain or hospital; there's no relief. The hospital is not going away; it is the spinal cord; it has no body. It provides only illusion of efficiency. There is no peace with pain meds: "I'll take a little of this, let's try a little of that!"

5. His Word said that Ms. Oxycodone knocked on my door at 10pm to take me to the dance and dropped me back home at 10am and in between I had sex with dilaudid.

6. His Word said that Mother Sedation hit her head on the grill of a Greyhound bus, a country gospel tour bus, and had her lips flattened with a gift she couldn't refuse: a greasy unemployed kiss. Her lips tasted like shoe polish painted over a pair of wax lips made out of leftover feces cooking in a BMW with the windows rolled up for too long in the heat and it smelled like gasoline.

7. His Word was assigned to me, assigned to me as if for spite, as if karma had something to do with anything. It made me nod out at the Table of the Bored.

8. His Word said that my handwritting was worsening because I was taking larger doses of oxycotin, ms contin, dilaudid, roxanol, oxycodon, vycodin and zanex.

9. His Word of prophesy was posted in the public Day Room for all to get a good laugh.

That #2

So that bitter and hateful, spiteful and revengeful God-head; that self-preoccupied, unqualified therapist; that unGod-like creature; that fradulent "God Damme" -- it is He who proudly carried the burden, like the Beast that He is, of the spirit of "the end of life", staging an obscene musical comedy called "An Honor for Death and the Dying": wherever and whenever He goes, He speaks fluent Lies and Deception: that's His language, the language of God!!

It's only to worship that ancient idol and religious terrorist -- humanities self-serving abusive father-figure - "God", for whom the entire history of the human race was invented - that humanity shall, and has, indeed, become His personal servants, His personal destroyers and manipulative denyers (after working the graveyard shift) as His personal, eternal death-wish-forced-laborers, His personal sex slaves and mental hospital patients just for Him to beat up on, to ridicule, to discriminate and kill their hope and optimism with that Word He spoke to me that I wrote down and copied:

"Context is God. Whatever is not God must be content. Whatever is content must not be God and must, therefore, be evil. The end." (An absurdity from the cryptic, unhinged mind of a schizophrenic.)

But that "God" of which He spits, that is, the context He reserves only for Himself, must be all evil since all that IS must be content, and therefore, evil. Context and content, like God and evil, are mixed-up words, interchangeable ideas, words and concepts we substitute for each other at our risk, our expense and convenience. Psychotic traitorous antibodies attach themselves like tentacles and electrons split themselves like independent multiple warheads to form bloody blisters of blood, water and puss resembling cancerous skin abrasions from radiation exposure.

To prove my point which doesn't need any proof: in another room, an old witch is ripping out her IV needles screaming obsenities at care workers who are trying to keep her radiation bandages from breaking apart. In the mist and vapor that filled my room with a soft blanket of smoke and gas from incense rising up to heaven, which is really a locked medicine cabinet in the hallway outside the door to her hospital room, I wrote the words down whether it was a dream, or an hallucination, or a dream:

I was walking alone on a street. It was dark, gloomy, wet and slippery; it was dirty, too. Sort of like sex. I dreamt I was walking on the street. Then it turned into a place where a friend of mine lived. He was someone I used to know. I was sort of like him. The street was where we scored junk and crystal. Could've been any street in Oakland, just a big city street that he and I lived on, I mean, if we could call that living. There were taxi's, bus stops, book stores and underground subways. I dreamt that all streets became one-way, dead-end, over-crowded, no-parking strees, torn-up streets good for taking detours and avoiding cops: law enforcement using extra pot-holes for a eulogy to abandoned memorials.

So, I was at a oxycodon cocktail party. I can't call it sleep. I can't call it dreaming. I was hooked on vancomycin drips and my nurse was flushing ports. Suddenly there was an emergency and the ports weren't flushing; they were blocked. The head nurse stopped the procedure because there was a dangerous air bubble blocking the antibiotic getting thru the plastic tubing. I could hear concern and urgency in their voices. I could see it on their faces. They stopped the procedure because of the threat of this giant air bubble on its way to my heart and my brain. They took me off the vancomycin and unplugged the med packs. I waited there, laying in bed, and waited for them to come back and continue. I waited but I nodded out and fell asleep. I woke up three hours later. I wanted the procedure to start over again, where we left off. I was talking to my nurses about the experience I had, I was a little upset, naturally................but then I found out that none of it had happened. I imagined the whole thing. The procedure went exactly perfectly without any problems at all. My "experience" was all in my head. None of it had been "real". None of it was real. None of it happened.

I used to go to the streets just so I could listen to black mass bible prophecies spitting out hot accusations from starving, angry underground baptist spin-off hipcats. I'd sleep walk in the thick mysticism of a deep somnambulism to relieve my bowels by stalking the forbidden streets of boredom.

I didn't want to know what was going on in the country but I still dreamt for America. I still dreamt hopeless premonitions. Instead of sleep, I dreamt that heavy black shadows covered my eyes and weighed them down like gold plated money. Wild hungry dogs wouldn't even try to dig bones out of the ground. It got so bad the earth was declared officially cursed. (LOL)

Visitation Rights

It had slipped my mind like a slapstick comedian falling on a loose banana peel. It slipped through the crack of my attention span the way a plumber shows himself off by bending over, letting his baggy "old-man" trousers fall below his attention span; the hairy white crack had no appeal to me. It dropped through the holes in my pockets, ripping out the threads of self-interest with the sounds of gagging, chocking, snoring, heavy breathing, uncontrolled and painful coughing, spitting. belching, screaming and moaning....(there were also some really disgusting and bad noises! And some gut-wrenching smells from the pits in the worst neighborhoods in hell!)... so much so that after two weeks of repetitive, non-stop, pain-gasping, life-ceasing self-resignation even I began to get used to it; it sounded normal, all-too-normal, peaceful and boring. It made me ask, "if it's like this in here, what's it like out there?"

The answer, of course, stared back at me through bland lifeless eyes: a right and a left eye on the same face, like a normal face, but clearly two separate eyes belonging to two separate people looking back at me not the least bit interested in my question; made me forget the question. I'd grown so accustomed to this nut house, I experienced less and less difference between the madness in here and the madness out there. Eventually, I experienced a type of zen tooth-extraction by mixing my yogurt with fresh cold watermelon, starring out the window, listening to cool west coast jazz (like the Art Pepper Trio with Elvin Jones), looking out upon the sunny side of Pine St. near Polk, drinking decaf coffee almost convinced that one's just the same as the other. And in the distance, the uncanny peaceful sound, the calming, peaceful mantra like temple bells being played by the institution's "COW" (Crazy Old Woman) screaming her head off, yelling at the top of her lungs, spitting at the walls, begging anyone stupid enough to listen as she perfects her performance of "Dependently Dysfunctional". And then, finally, just when I think I can't take anymore, my nurse comes around with my meds and narcotics (100mls of morphine: once, twice a day), and suddenly all is well. Hmmmmmmm. The sad part is that even that started to drop off little by little; the one thing I looked forward to each day, besides talking to Nico, taking walks and taking photos, was beginning to taper off so that I wouldn't leave the rehab facility needing to be admitted to a detox facility!

I told my nurse that my pain level, 1-to-10, 10 being the worse, was at a high five -- just to get morphine. I lied; so what. The lieing doesn't make it right; it just makes it lieing. I did it here everyday and so do the nurses when they write up their reports, and so do the doctors when they lie to the administrators, and the admin lies to the insurance carriers, and they lie to the auditors, who lies to Congress on television, and then they lie to The People (who are really gullible.) The People, if they're lucky enough to get a room in this healthcare circus, lie to everyone, everyday, all day just to get their share of tax relief (LOL!). The fact is, the people who will change the healthcare system, and fix the economy and stop the wars: they haven't even been born yet! The pain meds are much better and more reliable than tax breaks! They're faster acting and they make me feel a hell of a lot better for longer time! It's a vicious circle, or maybe it's not as vicious as we've been led to believe. I dont care one way or the other because now -- at least for the next ten hours or more -- I'll be on a morphine high spiked with oxycodon; that'll hit me in the afternoon. As for right now, right this minute, if I close my eyes I'll probably nod out for a bit, which is why it's so hard to write.

My problem is that it's almost impossible to write when I haven't got a clue what to write about or what to say. It reminds me of those irritating obnoxious sounds low-income men make when they eat their food deliberately and ignorantly clinking and clanking their forks, spoons and knives on their plate, loudly scopping up their pathetic imitation food, cutting it up, chopping it up, mixing it as noisely as they can bang their forks on the plate, shoving it all together, the eggs mixed with the butter mixed with apple sauce mixed with jelly mixed with bread, potatoes, soup and the salad get scooped up onto a big spoon gripped by a fist wrapped around the eating utensil like a hammer, clinking, clanking, blink-blank-blinkity-blankity-clankity-clanking its food into their gas-swollen, gas-protruding stomachs!

It reminds me of b&w movies I've seen of farmers, miners, truck drivers, school teachers, car salesmen and rural sheriff's as they lean over their food as if they had hunted, killed and dragged it away for safe keeping; as if they were protecting their meal by keeping it for themselves until later when it would taste better; as if they had won a lottery ticket and were dressed for the Last Supper; clinking, clanking and scooping up their wet mix, slopping it as fast as they could shove it into their mouth, making noises half-animal/half-human so furiously their jaws fell off.

(After my initial morphine rush, a few hours later.......) OK, back to photography: what is it, exactly, I want to say? Maybe I dont have anything to say, or, if I do, maybe it doesnt need to be said. I can't let myself believe that for Christ sake! So, why is it taking me so long to write it? It must have something to do with pretense; a lot of what I write sounds pretentious and contrived. I dont think there's anything pretentious about an empty white porclean coffee cup placed on a brown wooden table that's lopsided and rocks back and forth. The cup sits on top of a white table napkin and the table's next to an open window facing street traffic and feet traffic and you can almost see the outline of the shadows of people walking. There's nothing pretentious about that is there? Or, finally, how about a toilet bowl full of feces after I take an intestinal vacation for three to five days with no bowel movements; there's nothing pretentious about that is there?

On the other hand, we've got an old grey-haired witch staying in one of the insured beds, in one of the insured rooms, down one of the halls in this insured rehab facility. She spends most of her waking hours imagining she's tripping and falling, or at least threatening to imagine she's going to trip and fall and brake her other arm. One thing is real: in the middle of the night she screams in her witchy spell-binding voice that either she needs to pee or that she's already peed all over the floor - even though it's completely dry. She wants the nurses to drop what they're doing and discharge her so she can pee in her own home. Is she pretentious? Is every mental case who's locked up in this physical rehab facility pretentious?

I don't know. but it still sounds pretentious when I write the following: "As a photographer, what am I willing to promise, if anything, about the work that I do? And what really is the "work" that I do? Are they just pictures or are they something else? What right does anyone have to expect something more out of the work I do other than just what I feel like doing, what I like to do?"

I'll answer the second part first. People have the right to expect my photos to be authentic and to have integrity. That's it; period. This means, people have the right to expect me to raise the bar on myself when it comes to self-exploration, examination, re-evaluation and self-confrontation. They have the right to see my photos as a visual, pictoral conversation that they're having with me as we interact and converse together inside a new domain, a new realm of possibility that we explore together, not simply to look at pictures with the background or the foreground as an easy prop.

Now I'll answer the first part of the question: What am I willing to promise? Let's be clear about what I'm not willing to promise: I don't care how great the camera is or even if I understand how to work all the bells and whistles on the cameras I have. I don't promise to study photography and try to master the interesting principles of composition, structure, lighting, shutter speed, computer processing or whatever else there is.....and when it comes to actually knowing anything about photography, I promise to live by the code, "If you know the difference between a bus stop and an f/stop, you already know too much."

I promise to ask questions -- mostly not questions about photography, but about life itself -- and not questions to get answers, but questions to get more questions. I promise to re-evaluate the opinions and viewpoints that have acquired me like tics on a dog, and to acknowledge my fixations with aberrations and let go of them, give them up, re-invent and transform an opinionated bias into an open space of acceptance and clarity. I promise to remake and rebuild points of view, such that processing is experienced by others who look at my photos as an on-going conversation they're invited to be involved with, conversations and inquiries we share about distinctions of life, not necessarily about photography at all. Finally, I promise that my photos will be a function of this collective conversation; that integrity will come at a high premium of personal transparency of states of mind and ways of being, relationships, vulnerabilities, insecurities, strengths and mental, emotional and spiritual internal confrontations.

That's my promise and that's what you can expect. How this will all turn out, only time will tell. Now, what could be more pretentious than that??!

Coffee House Confessions

"This is not the most poetic and venting vile extremity, or even an interesting piece I've written, but it's important to me to write it, as if to close this period of my social development. Hopefully, you'll find something worthwhile in it."

(Coffee House Confessions 1) When I was in San Francisco earlier this month at the rehab institution, as soon as I was able to go out on my own and walk around the city I started hanging out at this local coffee house on Polk Street called the Royal Ground Coffee. I really liked the atmosphere, mostly a gay and lesbian crowd, especially attracted older lesbian woman who sort of had an informal offical (or a formal unoffical) dress code: heavy black or blue long woolen coats with oversized collars, or fur/fake fur preferred with a portion of unkept burly stringy hair like a scouring pad jutting out from their head and down around their face pushed down even further by varities of large hats worn like a crown of royalty, usually wearing a pair of jeans, dark discolored slippers or ratty sandles, no socks. I photographed several women there who looked eactly the same. (CHC 2)

(CHC 3) The women like to sit outside usually on the round wooden sidewalk tables and hard-back chairs that never sat level, drink their coffee -- the cheaper "regular" brand that came in a bigger cup, lasted longer, stayed hot longer and let them talk more. They smoked as many cigarettes as they could in the period of time I was there with them, sometimes passing around almost barely burning butts to share the light so the other's could get their smoke burning; I guess they were out of matches. It was always windy and so they did that thing where they shield the wind from the cigarette, distort their face and body to block the wind and puff and blow to get a little lightning happening, and then you see the puff of white smoke rising from their cupped hands.. (CHC 4)

(CHC 5) These women always seemed to know everybody and everything that was going on within a small but enlarging network of locals. They knew who was in town, who left, who got divorced, married, hooked up, busted, sick, pregnant; who was doing a tour, a show, or who was selling a car. Their information and the flurries of their little anecdotes were the center of attention and daily attraction for the Russian owner of the store for whom it was almost like free entertainment to pull in the older balding, salt and pepper haired, crisp, clipped mustached, semi-fit-with-a-slight-protruding-gut on the gay men. (CHC 6)

(CHC 7) I would sit indoors near the open window by the front door and drink a cup or two of espresso and take photos. I must've look like I belonged there; I felt like it did, as far as nuance is concerned. It was comfortable, had that dissenting student intellectual artist feel to it; quiet, with lots of wood floors, tables and chairs, the smell of rich coffee, classical music or jazz in the background, people against the walls lined up with their laptops, WiFi's and classroom curriculum literature. And the best thing - it was never crowded. A double cup of espresso was only $2.00 served in a white porcelain cup. There was never any pressue to buy more, or to leave after you finished. I sat there for a long time, almost every day and listened to the conversations, the gossiping, the political specualtion, philosophy, and store-front-pull-up-a-table-and-chair free psychoanalysis sessions. When I had to go eat dinner, I went back to the madhouse institution for another night of sweaty hell, bed chills, and lonliness. (CHC 8)

Special Acknowledgment: Niki Conolly

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: NIKI CONOLLY

I've had a four-month long experience with a near-death killer-infection eating away at the bones in the center of my back. In mid-January I was suddenly without warning Learjet-air-lifted hastily arranged and flown out of Nashville racing towards Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Hospital under extreme narcotic sedation. For two months I had physical and mental therapy, antibiotics that would kill a horse, 24-hour rehab programs and narco pain meds that could put Dracula to sleep. Except for a small handful of professional medical experts and miracle workers, who, luckily for me, specialized in excellence, integrity and compassion, my experience at this facility located on the border of San Francisco's Tenderloin district could only be described as an urban nightmare exceeding its incompetence and cowardice only by its corruption.

However, there was a silver-lining. What was good about this was that it compelled me to grasp hold of, to cherish, to dream and to treasure my relationship, my infinite life-times of a continuing love affair with my girlfriend, Nico - Niki Conolly. "Girlfriend" is too weak of a word. Maybe "Angel" or "Saint" would be stronger. The fact is, she's been my eternal source of physical and spiritual strength every time I quit, and believe me, I quit many times. But now, after it's over, I'm happy to admit that I can't think about her, or talk about her, or write a sentence about her without crying rivers of sobbing tears of thankfulness and tenderness!

Since this ordeal started 60 days ago, after hundreds of photos I've taken in San Francisco, eventually realizing that essentially I've been taking the same photographs of the same people, in the same conditions, talking the same conversations, going about their usual business which is really the same boring business, running off as fast as they can in any direction, ignoring each other as significantly and as meaningfully as they possibly can: Niki Conolly is the one thing, the one person, the one woman, the one human, the one essence, the one existence that stands out for me as a brightly lit star, truly and clearly unique, radically individualistic, intensely generous and unlike anyone I've ever known, who has a deeper purpose of character than I'll ever have.

In sharp contrast to the same-old humanism I saw in the images of my photos, Niki is totally different from everyone and everything. Her conversations are like no other. Her interests are wide and varied. Her ability to love unconditionally and especially her willingness to love me seems to be boundless. She's the one element in my experience since November 2008, when this killer infection began trying to kill me, that she was then and she is now, the one single element that has never been like everyone else, never been the same as anything or anyone else. When I see a photo of Niki, and I see a photo I took of another woman reading a book in Union Square, San Francisco, they are clearly two separate and distinct women. There's a woman like every other woman, reading a book; and then there's Niki Conolly.

I can't even thank her! That's supposed to be a joke: "Thanks" is something I say to someone who reaches across a table and passes the salt and pepper; it's not what I say to someone who took a stand for my life, who took an unwavering stand that I would live no matter what, and she stood and withstood all the obstacles and she saw it thru to a happy ending. As I complete this modest tribute to her, and as I dedicate to her all the photos published here, I hope I've made it abundantly clear to anyone reading exactly who it is I consider to be responsible for my renewed recovery, health, fitness and well-being. If it hadn't been for Niki Conolly, I wouldn't be here today. I love her and I am devoted to her happiness.