Sorry

I’m sorry.
We hear these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. I am so sorry.
And we never know how to respond. We can’t say yes, you should be, even if it’s possible that you should.
How could we face that? The fact that we are people whom others feel sorry for? How could we walk tall, smile, laugh, be intelligent or strong or cheerful knowing  that everyone feels sorry for us? We would have to fit in with their expectations and be lost, heartbroken, and hopeless if we agreed that we should be the subjects of sympathy. 
We don’t ever say, yes, you should be. What we say is: “It’s ok.”

But it is not ok. It makes us feel very uncomfortable saying that it is. As if we are cold and uncaring, as if we never miss him, as if remembering his death does nothing to impair our high spirits.
Sometimes I laugh when I say it. Not always. It doesn’t even matter that laughter is the worst answer, nothing that I have ever said in response to “I’m so sorry” erases the strangeness that enters the other person's eyes when I say it‘s ok.
What is it? That they actually feel sorry? That they are afraid? That they don’t believe that I’m ok? That they think it’s horrible that I am ok? Maybe they’re just uncomfortable like me?

Inevitably, the next question is: how did he die?
My oldest daughter answers enigmatically. Her top responses are as follows:
“From a head wound.”
“From a gun wound.”
“A bullet.”
I believe that this works for her because she is young and quiet. Though they don’t know what they really wanted to know they dare not press the issue. Those brief and incomplete explanations send people scurrying as if a grenade has just landed at their feet. The wideness of their eyes parallels the unblinking roundness of a full moon.

I tend to half whisper:
“It was a suicide.”
I feel ashamed every time I am forced to admit this. After the first answer there is just a certain amount of darkness hovering around us, the general gloom of death. We might have been a nice happy family that suffered a tragedy. People might picture him as a war veteran, or the victim of a sudden car accident, or  as someone that succumbed to a terminal illness.
Then they learn that he wanted to die. Another question springs to their minds of course, but it is not the kind of question one asks.
Why? Why? Why? It is a much greater darkness, a sin, this particular death. And it implies that we were never a nice happy family, there was always something about us which could have commanded sympathy.

Frequently I wish that I would have thought of something else to say. A complete fabrication. A lie, Huckleberry style.

“He was a lion tamer, like his father before him. It was their final act, the famous 'jaws of death', a real crowd pleaser, but sadly, Cuddles, the lion, sneezed at a most inopportune moment claiming my darling husband's life. Cuddles also  had to be put down. Once a man eater, even if by accident, always a man eater.”
“He was walking down California St. and somebody dropped a piano on his head.”
“He was a stunt aviator. A seagull hit his windshield during a loop de loop and he spun wildly out of control.”
“He was a Sherpa. Just before retiring he led one last group into the Himalayas but none of them were ever seen again.”
“He and his party were eaten by cannibals during an anthropological study of indigenous Amazonian peoples.”
“We were at the zoo. An escaped elephant trampled him to death near the penguin exhibit. He ran in front of it actually. To push a baby stroller out of the way.”

I wish I would have chosen one of these and stuck with it until it was as good as true. But I forget that we are shrouded in great darkness and only remember it once the line of questioning brings me back to a half whisper.
We would prefer to be casual acquaintances forever, people you recognize by the way we smile and laugh. People you know who are good at crocheting and singing and giving hugs. People that read a lot and wear funny hats and talk too loudly.
But never people you are sorry for. Never  people who lost someone. That is really never ok.
We say these words often, whenever someone asks us about their father. It’s ok. We say them just as often as we hear these words:  I’m sorry. 
And despite the fact that it never really is, whenever we are asked,  it is always ok.
It’s Ok.

Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Finesse

Nothing good will come of this, I warn you. You go around reading blogs written by other crazed machines, cyborgs whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sit in their pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen. What do you hope to gain coming round here, snooping around a blog like this? Are you looking for the truth? Or some helpful suggestions for improving your animatronic lifestyle? Maybe you are here looking for tips on how to work?
We haven’t got the truth here. I’m sorry, but there are two angels living under my skull, one who always lies and the other who always tells the truth, but I never know which one is which and they both insist that they are the angel that speaks only truth. I haven’t learned the trick for deciphering which one is which, so as far as truth is concerned, I can offer you no assistance on that account.
When it comes to tips for improving your animatronic existence, I am again of two minds. One mind says the best solution for the problems of life is not to live. If you want my advice, swallow a lead bullet, I know some people this has worked wonders for. My other mind suggests that you buy some Avon, work out, dress to the nines and find someone that makes you feel sexy.
I really am a bitter old goat when it comes to improving one’s life, I haven’t improved mine, I don’t think that life as a cyborg is really something that can be improved. It’s like buying designer brand curtains to hang in your house made of straw. I tell you love, there’s no point.
So you can see that if advice for good living is what you seek, you’ve come to the wrong fountain. I only know about bad living. Now, now then, if you are looking for a way to work, congratulations! You have figured out what robots were made to do. Good for you for wanting to be the best bot that you can be. I have something to say on this topic and in the end it will be up to you to decide whether I’m of a mind that others should partake of.
First, lets make it clear, there are two things that must happen for work to be work in the way that I mean when I say work:

1. You have to do something, engage in an actual activity of some kind. Things that will not qualify include: sleeping, dreaming, reading, talking, or thinking great thoughts.

2. You have to do whatever you do with a great deal of finesse.

I know, number two seems a little silly to a robot. What’s the difference if I walk from stage left to stage right or skip from stage left to stage right whistling Sweet Adeline, so long as I get from stage left to stage right in the end? Well if you really just like to keep busy, there is always knitting with the old gals. Finesse is for cyborgs that are trying to do something special with themselves. Upon realizing that you were destined for the junk heap and that little feral cats would meow and crawl around in your rusted hulk long after the last electric impulse fired within your advanced operating system, you might have thrown your dirty fist up to the sky and cried:
“There must be something more! What is the meaning of this…this… this terrible joke!?”
Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but one idea that has made an impression on me is that if we do something a little different upon the cosmic stage, employ some parts that don’t usually get employed during a normal mechanical life time, then perhaps the results of such a life will be different than the results of the usual tired song and dance. Maybe something can be born of the ashes, a phoenix gestated within the robot husk and nurtured with finesse.
Remember, nothing good will come of this.
Nothing good, nothing bad.
You have been warned.
You may not enjoy it if you try it.
You might get used to it with time.
You will still die.
But perhaps something else will come of it all. Something might happen that would not have happened if you had gone through the usual motions while thinking and dreaming of something else. I am not saying that this would benefit you, with your gears that need greasing and your rusty cogs grinding away. I am saying that perhaps in living and doing and dying with a little finesse, one might at least be of benefit to something else and do more than feed the heap with one’s carnage.
You go around writing blogs, a crazed machine, a cyborg whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sits in pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen.

Dark Moon

Don’t you know? At the core, I’m still this little dual gendered blondie in short black dresses and you can see my panties when I bend over to help the little kids at the table. I’m still hot for girls that are hot for girls and hot for boys that wear dresses and swing on swings and girls that wear mustaches and men in tall black hats and anything tall and black in general with hair all over its body. I like things that want to go where they’re not supposed to go and go there anyway. Who says it’s not okay to crawl around the dark side of the moon with your panties off and a big black dog sniffing at your crack while the stars spin round and round singing "wheeeee!" and the fabric of the universe goes "crack!’ And the black man’s head splits open and wrigley green things come out and it isn’t clear whether they are many long separate wrigglies or all appendages of one hidden thing with wagging tentacles.
I still like the desert all hot and bare with broken Indians on the side of the road selling hot pink butterfly necklaces to people that pass by in white sedans on their way to some other place. I like cacti with their prickly hairs even though a little one bit me when I was just two years old. I said, "Can I pet you?" and it said "Yes." and I reached a soft trusting little finger down intending to be as gentle as possible, but it bit me anyway. My mother had warned me. Sadly I do so much that my mother would warn me against if only she knew there were such things to do. Luckily, for her peace of mind, she can’t imagine them, so she can’t worry about the things I do where no one can see, down in the cracks of all that gray matter tucked neatly under my scalp.
I’d like to be strangled to death some day. I know that I would be nice at first and then even though I want to be strangled, I’m sure that as my mechanical creation begins to realize that something must be done or its day is done, I imagine I’ll start to fight against my own will, wriggling and flopping like a long legged blonde fish.
I did have a boy once that one hot summer day come up into my bedroom where the curtains were drawn to keep out the sun. We were both a little wet so I dropped off my clothes right in front of him and I could see that he liked it and I put on something else while he watched and then I asked him if he would wear a soft pink dress I had in the closet and he did it. He wasn’t the kind of boy that I would have pictured doing it, not lithe with long hair and a penchant for wearing eye liner. No, he was husky and short haired with eyes that bulged out like those of a goldfish, and he had hair on his belly and on his back, but he put on that soft stretchy powder pink dress of mine and I liked it very, very much and no real boy has ever done that for me since.
There was a bearded lady though, that I used to fuck with a strap-on, and when I was away at work one day she took off all of her boy clothes, which she wore because she liked to fool everyone around her, and she put on my dress without asking me, and went into the bathroom and played with herself in front of the mirror and took pictures with her camera phone and then posted them on My Space for everyone to see. I checked my email at work and was pissed off when I saw those pictures posted since it was my dress and she hadn’t asked. The worst day ever with her was when she came home with her beard shaved off and her face all smooth and youthful and it scared me and I didn’t like it because she didn’t look like a devil anymore, but I tried not to freak out too much. However, I’m sure she thought that I acted funny and asked too many questions about it.
Nobody knows how I am exactly, and if you’re reading this, you might think that I’m some cool chic that wears lots of dark eye make-up and a lace up bodice, but I’m wearing a turtle neck sweater and a pink rabbit ear cap and even I forget most of the time just how queer I am while I try to make small talk with the soccer moms in front of the school. And I’m sure that if she read this, that soccer mom would feel all the skin on her body get all puckered up with goose pimples and a hot chill would run up through her middle and it would feel as if her heart were trying to fold in on itself and she would be afraid and wonder what kind of horrible person I am and what terrible things I might have done that I’m not mentioning.
But in reality, I’m probably one of the safest people she could be around, because everyone visits the dark side of the moon when they sleep, many sleep even as they walk, but they forget what goes on in the dark side or they pretend that they’ve never been. But I can see all of that junk in my trunk and run my fingers through it and watch it and pet it and then come back well informed about the dangers that lurk deep within, but some sleep walkers start to do things without noticing that they’re doing them, because the dark side wants to bubble over after they’ve kept a lid on it for so long.
Me, I just want to dance and sing and say crazy things and make crazy things in my own image and then disappear into the deep dank soil when my time is up and be remembered by the worms when they eat me and then fly through the void as a screeching streak of magenta. There may be more to it than I can imagine, but I won’t worry about it now.
For now, I tell you to listen up- if you are a boy you should try on a dress, and if you’re a girl you should stick your hand down another girls blouse, and if you’re a dog you should high tail it out of here before I think of something perverse for you to do (and stop reading blogs because it freaks people out when they come home and find their dog looking at porn on the internet and it’s even worse if they catch you researching metaphysics). I innocently stumbled upon some very dirty but harmless images on the web myself the other day, and now things occur to my imagination that never did before. So the same will start happening to you, (whether you’re a boy, a girl, or a dog) in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…