Chapter 1 

A certain outrage kicks in when you realize the world you despise cares not a bit about you and it wins out.

"Ah, you damn factories, railroads, jets, ships, fast-food restaurants, houses, apartment’s mobile homes, cars, service stations, general stores, busses, glass buildings, trucks, street lights, avenues, freeways! Be gone! Vanish from my sight! Every day I get up, eat something, go to work, eat, leave and watch them either try to screw someone other or make a million dollars during the day. In the case of bureaucrats, making sure things move as roughly as possible.

Buildings! Phalluses stuffed with bindu but the seed is sterile."

"It isn't dear friend, science against religion," Ull was telling me. "That argument is a dead one. It is the creative power of human beings against the management/organization of modern states." He wasinterested in where I was working now and looked at me while smoking a cigarette, his legs crossed on a ratty chair some relative had given me.

I told him about the hospital and how it was a looming concrete non-profit that survived off of pregnant women and recovering drug and alcohol addicts. "There are, hidden as it were, fascinating conversations in the bowels of the Hospital or, as we call it, the Hotel. In the business office of the Hotel are proud fundamentalists like James who calls himself a preacher of the Baptist Church and claims he has great powers of his own including speed reading, mind reading and other powers conferred on him by his faith in the Holy Spirit. He speaks of Jesus and claims that Jesus, before he taught, collected the apostles around him to protect Him from what James calls, "the interference." Ull seemed non-plussed about it. I always figured a smart layabout like Ull was culling out stories from me for his own use, to cover the fact he had no context and so was open to anyone's vicitimization. I didn't care one way or the other.

I always tried talking philosophy with Ull but he would brush me off either because he was trying to make it a profession and my opinion didn't count or he was studying me and to talk about philosophy would crack the illusion that he was better than I was. And, when I thought about, philosophy was a lonely practice, done in empty rooms, in brains that wanted to build things without resistance. I knew the condition well and tried to signal to Ull that, I too, was a head-monk.

I did notice women were kept out of the conversation. "Oh, of course she should be free, why not? What's the big problem?" And then he'd veer off into some gossip about a person we knew.

I had met a woman at work though I didn't mention it to him. She was gentler in her religion than James the Baptist. She heard voices in the back of her mind, conscience, which was God telling her what to do as a 7th Day Adventist. The woman, Tanya, read the Iliad and asked me "Have you read this book?" "Yes." She is very disparaging about the gods. She is fascinated about the oral story telling aspects of the Iliad, amazed at how one could hold all that information in their head at one time. She says she once went to plays but not too often now. "One play, Caesar and Cleopatra, made me laugh."

I started thinking about the Greeks. Despite the apparent foolishness of their gods, they certainly had several advantages the present world lacked. Their gods were not ideals but patterns one could extend if a guy had the courage to do so; even though his fate would, eventually, defeat him. "Perhaps," I thought, at my desk late at night listening to the whir of the copy-machine, "there was more freedom under such patterns." Several days later I heard myself say down the bright-lit street roaring with cars, "push through form the shared complain of the world and the shared joy of the world."

I renewed interest in women at the Hospital. There was the attractive and sweet Tanya half black, half Filipina. The women loved to talk to each other. Anne, too, the long haired, long-legged daughter of a famous chemist who had been on the run for two years from the East Coast but he didn't know why. I felt close to her but something held me back. And then the Parisian entered the picture and I fell apart and agreed to show her all around San Francisco. I studied French in a two-day session to say something to her. She peed in the bushes behind Coit Tower.

Ignorance of passion teaches best what it is!

A new woman. There was always one and she was before me, a shy, awkward guy who didn't know what this woman wants, not knowing the secrets she contains; living in a state of exquisite psychology.

Oh chain of disastrous women: little conversations in little cafes in lost little curls of smoke. New York woman. Pregnant, six months. Boyfriend is thinking of leaving her. Ah, the beautiful philosophy student who didn't want to talk about philosophy or Heraclitus or any of them. Ah, the one with the butterfly tattoo. The useless excursions with women. Nil. They were reminders of the state of my writing; they were in correspondence somehow. The expressive eyes of the woman, how she would attempt to coax information out of me, always a bit alienated as though she knew she would never quite be accepted the way she wanted to be and her imagination working furiously to ether cover up this fact or to figure out why this was so. And I would know this and make a remark of some kind which they probably took the wrong way. Yes, how one sees women is how one sees the work. This is why I've sometimes been harsh on women I've known and the same time feel rejected by them.

David Eide
January 24, 2014