Food, Shelter

It's been a while...


In a Christian hostel in Amsterdam, rather outside on the street in front of it, stark and wet grey dawns come and go... my hands, sheathed in red rubber, pick up trash, cigarette butts and chewed-up chicken wings from the cold brick, depositing into the black garbage bag.. my eyes scan the ground for gum, receipts, spliff filters, discarded cans and bottles..

i work with a mother and son from Hungary, but i dont know work the way that they know work... although we all work to survive.. they work to exist

they have no home to return to

Tomas, as we smoked Golden Gate cigarettes in the small courtyard, explained that he had some other prospects coming up

"On twenty-nine, i try for work at.. Burger King?" strong features, clear eyes that spoke dignity and lucid hardship, caught between memory and the approaching future..

"My father, says be send money. But no money." He took a drag and looked up at the rooftops and trees.

The topic changes. "You like action movie? Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Stallone?"

"Yes, I like them very much. Good movies." I forgot to say that i started talking to Tomas because he was whistling the Terminator 2 theme as he worked down the hall from me. I was elated.

"You like rock music? Scorpions, Guns and Roses, Pink Floyd?"

"Yeah man, awesome rock music. Very cool."

He looked up to the rooftops, clear, vigilant. "Yes. Rock music."

He suddenly turned to me with a need to communicate in his eyes:

"Them, the girl... they are... Prisoner of God!" His eyes strained to explain to me, but i understood.

"Ha ha. Yes, prisoners of God. It is very strange." I smiled.

He laughed heartily. "I believe in mother, father... for them, father is God!" He threw up his hands, uncomprehending.

How could you love an abstract concept more than your family? I could relate to his confusion.


4 days earlier, I had checked out of Bob's Youth Hostel in the heart of Amsterdam's red light district.

I ate the egg and bread breakfast, savored the tea. And asked a question of the New Zealander manning the desk.

"If you had to spend a few nights on the streets, where would you do it?"

He eyed me. "You are out of money?"

"Yeah. 4 days til my flight home. Any ideas?"

"Well, if teh weather was good I would say just make it to the westerpark, but its gonna be shit rain for days mate. Might try this homeless shelter." He marked it on a tourist map.


* * *

to be continued... so many tales to tell

Scenes from Thunder Bay, ON

frozen grey dawn, greyhound bus depot.... 'blow at high dough' on the radio

followed by the Doors - 'people are strange'

and then another song, maybe steve miller, 'you can only drive down main street so many times'


got a whole bunch of new songs forming, soon soon

moving fast under brilliant star skies, death hurtles by inches away

slept through kenora, thought of rmrm

winnipeg was amazing, banff was chilled, skipped regina, vancouver was the best of all

left sleeping bag, useless clothes, bag of cinnamon sticks in a frozen-slop city bus shelter on Garry Street, in the Peg... dead weight


love

Tiny Tour 2010

Tomorrow kicks off the first Small Wars tour.. here is a breakdown of dates.

sidney - folk society meeting (church)
victoria - folk society meeting (heritage house)
nanaimo - open mic (converted bank)
vancouver - open mic (coffee house)
banff - open mic (community center)
regina - busk (rcmp church)
winnipeg - full set (bike repair co-op)
toronto - open mic (hostel)
peterborough - support set (club)
ottawa - busk (eternal flame)
montreal - full set (club)
amsterdam - busk (squat)
the hague - busk (international court of justice)
antwerp - busk (hidden ancient street)
ghent - full set (anarchist community center)
bruxelles - full set (club)
paris - support set (club)
toulouse - support set (club)
barcelona - busk (ancient cemetary)
zaragoza - busk (3rd century roman tower)
rouen - busk (monument where joan of arc was burned at the stake)
lille - busk (palais des beaux-arts)
new york city - support set (club)
san francisco - support set (club)

All details and dates are here.

Single Cell

Lymphocytes, Natural Killer cells, granulocytes... Protein envelopes, microphages, and advanced, self-replicating machinery...

Sounds like the Future but in fact, is the Past... Going all the way back from the Great Birth that probably happened at some point...

Studying the universe of the biological Body is fascinating, enlightening, and stupifyingly complex.

I have a cool book about the known processes of the human immune system that is my go-to text when I am sick of the lightstream that is the Net. It is written for the layperson (me), with enough technical language to keep things scientifically accurate.

The most interesting thing about the book is that, unlike most texts, it happily admits that very little is known about anything.

Finally, some honesty.

It is understood that there are groups of cells that swoop down to the site of any damaged tissue - microphages - and get to work cleaning out the area and destroying any bacteria or pollutants... There are the next-level guys (big eaters = macrophages) that do the same, there are antibodies (produced by the body to deactivate antigens, foreign substances in the body)...

They have their soldiers, and they engage in typical, chemical, and asymmetrical warfare - some cells can shoot others (granulocytes), some cause chemical reactions that blow-up tumor cells (NK cells.. awesome)... There is a mysterious substance called Interferon that cells deploy to fuck with the machinery of virus-inhabited cells, inhibiting their ability to replicate... There is an elaborate system of chemical communication between the brain, the limbic system and untold other regions using messages called Cytokines... little emails between varied regions that say "Got it", "Send more weapons to this region", or "We are fucking up"

Amazing, isn't it?

I mean - Why?

Good and bad, good and bad.... In the human world everything is grey, relative, and fluid according to norms and such...

In the natural world, devoid of morality, there is only the Threat and the Killer.

The cockiest of animals know that Death is everywhere...

And they take huge pleasure in destroying their enemies, in bringing Death to what they hate.

Is it wrong to feel the same way? To want to murder - ideas, paradigms, structures that threaten?

To feel a programmed, natural desire to Kill those who would enslave?

Wrong or not, I've always known that my purpose Here is to fight - conceptually and rationally, not with violence - the rotten scum who get off as they assault you... Who try to control our minds and bodies...

That's why this blog is called Born Free - because we were. I dont think anyone on this planet has authority to tell any other human what to do - Period.

That being said, I believe in co-operative government, sustainable communities, and equality for all. I believe that if someone is threatening your safety, you have the right to defend yourself.

All of these ideas will be important to keep in mind over the next decade or so.

Love

We fear what we don't understand; it follows that if you don't understand yourself, you will become very fearful of yourself.

Isn't it confounding when you do something that makes no sense? One time I had a couple whiskeys in me and I walked out of a bar wearing someone else's jacket.

It was totally on purpose; I just felt like stealing. I had plenty of money so there was no motive beyond stupidity.

Luckily, that night I was spared a punching (dude tore the jacket off my frame, stared at me hard, and went back inside). But that was just one of a hundred thousand fuck-ups that have defined the majority of my life.

I'm sure you can relate - no need for an AA meeting here.

Could it be that fucking up, over and over and over again, is in fact our crossed-wires reaction to impulses that we don't understand?

Do we attempt to destroy what we fear - what we cannot understand?

Ourselves?

The short answer, for me at least, is yes.

Once this uncomfortable truth was identified, it was clear what had to be done: I had to start the process of making peace with myself.

Only, I wasn't ready. It took a couple more years of suffering before I finally injured myself so badly that there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide any longer.

It took until I had literally no other options, until I was confined to a bed, flush with agony and stricken with narcotic emptiness, before I finally stopped... started to breathe... and raised my eyes to face my aggressor, my tormentor - myself.

Sorry, I know this is coming across a bit self-involved (a bit? ;) - Ed.), but it's a personal topic after all, not to mention I'm only starting to get this myself...

I hope that anyone who reads this understands that I need this for me too - I don't only write for people to read.

The journey to the center of my own existence was prompted by need...

I had been steadily taking 2 x 2mg Dilaudid pills, three times a day, to dull the pain of a severe injury.

Like any heroin, it didn't take long before the little pink bastards were no longer up to the task of fighting off the waves of deep, crushing pain that accompany a broken-and-reassembled femur.

In the basement, alone in darkness, I writhed like an animal...

I pleaded in desperation to an unknown God... I tried to sleep the remainder of my life away...

But there was no way out.

When I awoke from a 14 hour heroin-sleep, mentally and physically shattered...

When I awoke to find the beginnings of bedsores on my elbows, legs, back...

I fucking lost it.

In this moment, I realized the true, fundamental, nature of Human Existence:

Fight - or Die.

Adrenalin surged, my mind snapped taut. One thought overwhelmed: NO.

I surged upward, reached for my crutches, and maneuvered my way up to a hobbling stature, breathing through clenched and dirty teeth.

I stood, naked and broken, but not dead. I felt my heart pumping fluid and my brain calculating my balance. I felt my eyes sharpen to razors and my balls fill with blood.

No fucking way. Not like this.

I wanted to scream, to twist the steel crutches into wire, to rip my flesh off with my bare hands.

I hadn't known that I wanted to live - ever. Having never been faced with the rotting of my own facilities, the test had never been put to my Will to Live.

And when I had finally sunk myself so low, after years of pushing and pushing - I ran face-first into Nature's first command, wound deep and simple, hidden in a little box on a strand of DNA:

Live.

I stood, sweat-soaked and emaciated - and I Saw, for the first time.

I could see the knot in my bone, the one being carefully knitted by the army of benevolence that was - Is - my Body. I could see the crackling of the energy deep within the structure I inhabit, could feel the warm and assured hum of Healing - working, working.

I saw, finally, that it Loved me.

It had been with me since I was conceived, had spent untold kilowatts of cosmic power to design and grow me... to protect me from Death, ever in the wings... it had subverted callous bacteria and cunning viruses, led great armies, had fought and would continue to fight - to the very end - because it Loves me... Believes in me and my ability to do good, not bad...

And that was when I realized that I had never, ever loved myself.

Schooling Cokeheads

There is a strange and vast body of knowledge to be navigated...

It is coded deep within the elusive currents that wind between relatively sturdy islands of study: immune system function, emotional states, drugs, spirituality, the quantum level of reality...

Actually, none of those are sturdy fields of study.. But they are better-explored than the new creeks and rivers I'm stepping into..

Learning to like yourself is Step One for those of us with issues - standard, North American-issue issues like self-loathing, perpetual illness, impotent anger... issues that are often compounded by intangible factors like uncertainty and uncomfortability (new word).

When your body is the enemy, the failed state, the lurking terrorist - external hardships are rendered black-and-white, muted by the constant hum of internal Threat.

In this state - when occupying this particular range of bandwidth - Pain is a Master, Love is like a bad touch from an uncle, and Fear is a well-worn, springy, black-as-night couch that is impossibly uncomfortable but consistently reassuring in it's familiarity.

When we live this Reality, it is unavoidable: We Are It.

It isn't a mindset that can be cheered-up, nor a mood that can be swept aside by distraction.

Not a reaction to a set of circumstances; It is the circumstance, You are the circumstance -

I am the circumstance, and I cannot be avoided.

I have come to discover, however, that I can be negotiated with.

I talk to myself a lot. This could of course be considered unhealthy, but I think offhand dismissals of curious human behavior as 'crazy' is as myopic as believing anything that the revered psychoanalyst, cocaine-addict Freud had to say...

And his theories have formed the basis of our entire social philosophy in the 20th century...

So whats really crazy - basing your world-view on the rantings of an incest-obsessed cokehead, or having a dialogue with yourself?

Moving right along...

Talking to ones' self is an exercise in Rationality, not lunacy. It is an attempt to externalize the continuous internal dialogue that we as people carry with us - an attempt to shed the light of the world on the dark corners of our own psyche... The idea being that things make more sense once examined in reality than they do trapped in our heads.

Without ever having touched a therapeutic text in regards to how one might heal insatiable wounds of the spirit, I've come to realize that building up a dialogue with yourself is one of the keys to negotiating a ceasefire.

It is after all your Self that you are at war with - it makes sense that the Self must be invited to the bargaining table.

Some psychoanalysis is strictly focused on the determination of the trigger - what happened to make you this way? - but after some paddling about in that river of filth, I find it to be entirely unhelpful.

You could liken it to being stuck in a dirt-pit, and deciding that the best way to get out would be to sit down and think about that first shovel-bite that got you there...

It doesn't work - not for me, not for anybody. All it does is start (or reinforce) the process of defining yourself by your problems, your issues, your nightmares.

The closer you hold them - your precious trauma - the more confidently they own you.

Going the opposite route - pretending that everything is fine, that you are happy and well-adjusted and, no, you don't want to drag a razor across your own tongue - invariably leads to the complete ownership of your soul by your trauma. Every second you evade it, deny it, it cackles with steel teeth and a forever smile of hate... Laughing at your pitiful, scrounging, transparent (to everyone) attempt to pretend to be Normal.

Normal - which doesn't exist on Planet Earth, except as a false concept in some of our minds.

So - pretending it's not there won't work. Gingerly stepping in to the hot shit-bath of trauma analysis - also, won't work.

Just like in any war, the only way to start to bring a rational, workable solution to the table...

Is to Talk.

One of the things I noticed about myself, after many years, is that when I talk to myself, I always say 'we'.

As in: "Ok. We have to make it to the dentist this week, and ideally, we should refrain from smoking weed for a couple days after they rip that tooth out."

This is common - you could even say it's Normal :)

This nearly-universal commonality in the self-conversation shows how there is an inherent divide within most of us - I think it's fair to say that the divide is what separates our Higher and Lower selves.

The Higher self conspires to control and contain the irrational Lower self - the side that succumbs to self-abuse, disregard for harmony, the side that says "yeaaahrreaggghh" and sniffs up piles of coke like old Sigmund.

Conscience, Morality, Reason - these are the traits of the language used by the Higher Self.

So when we speak with ourselves, we are attempting to reason with an unreasonable beast - the caged-rhino inside who would rather just wreck the place, pump one out and collapse in slumber.

Remember the song, "God help the beast in me?"

Remember how earlier this week, I wrote about how God is actually our higher nature?

Now I'm talking to myself again... hold up.

So talking to yourself, according to me, is in fact very healthy, especially for someone who doesn't like themselves.

Humans don't like to be confused; we are really fucking smart (and stupid, in other ways).

When you are as smart as we are, anything that cannot be understood is immediately classified as Threat.

This is why... if you don't Understand yourself... you Fear yourself.

Part II next.

Untitled

When things fall apart - bodies, minds, connections - Life is in motion

There is no real Reason... but there is Pain, and there is Suffering

The end of Life is an end to Pain, a release of gravity

The weight is lift, the Suffering is broken

By the gentle lap of the saline sea

Only the greatest Love can be satisfied

By choosing to leave the world behind

And to go home

Signs

Got a good sign from the Google Ad gods today, while using the booking account:

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: apposite (adj.): of striking appropriateness or relevance

I think the Net is getting smarter! ;)

Jesus, age-play, and the Human Temple

Once you've bounced off the bottom a few times, you acquire a sort of metaphysical altimeter that beeps red when you start to drop again. These beeps often show up as thought patterns - meaning when certain thoughts arrive, your survival instinct recognizes them as dangerous and tells you so - but not always. Sometimes the alarm is external, a 'sign' to you to change your current path, and quickly.

It's funny how guilt and subconscious desires work... Some theorize that our actions are just a product of varied internal pressures, that free will is not free at all but at the whim of our biochemistry. Others think the opposite, that too much attention is paid to the details of action and thought, and not enough paid to the grand cosmic force that is our ability to Choose.

As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in between.

One thing I am sure of is that when my altimeter starts to spin and whine with mechanical stress, I need to stop and examine what I am doing - physically, mentally, spiritually.

Caving to your worst desires is a death of sorts. Paradoxically, being a paragon of virtue and continuously denying your own twisted ideas is a kind of death as well.

The French call the orgasm petit mort, meaning 'the small death'. It's an apt description, since any and all of Life's rich array of emotions can be found in this window to eternity, depending on the situation...

One of the more overlooked concepts in religious texts, specifically the Bible, is the concept of the temple of worship. Jesus said something to the effect that external houses of worship are unnecessary to see God; that, in fact, God resides within us all.

Actually, a lot of what Jesus 'said' (flip through one of those Bibles that has all Jesus' actual words in red) was awesome: don't kill, don't steal, don't try to nail your friend's wife, etc.

Solid advice... and He hates interest charges too.

I think the bit about no temples of worship is one of the most revealing and important ideas in the Bibes. And since I think that the Bible is an amalgamation of a whole bunch of different allegories, tales, truths, distortions, and fiction - I think it is fair to say that some of it's strongest messages need not only apply to Christian thinkers. If you are critical and selective, you will discover that there is something to be learned in every text... Even the National Enquirer.

Knowing that there need be no mediator between us and God is a giant fucking relief. To know that speaking with God is means simply opening your mind and connecting with the infinite energy source that Is All Things is empowering, humbling, and eternally refreshing.

Priests, Imams, and Rabbis are people who have somehow been convinced that they are closer to God than you or I; that they have his ear and his blessing.

This is one hundred percent bullshit, wrapped in a costume and housed in a mansion of suffering.

God, simply, is our Higher Nature. It is the spark of divinity that humans are blessed with.

It is your conscience, your inspiration, your compassion and your reflection.

It is your shame, your mistake, and your remorse.

It is not your cleverness, your intelligence, or your cynicism. It is not your ability to manipulate; it is your ability to inspire. Not your ability to kill, but your choice to show mercy.

When we Choose Well, we harness the power of the true God that resides within us.

The root of all Choice is Morality - a human construct, necessary to our survival as a species.

Morality - an intangible manifestation of our inherent sympathy towards ourselves and our fellow life forms - is what keeps the majority of us from killing, raping, stealing and torturing - ourselves, as well as others.

When we subvert morality, pretend it doesn't exist or dismiss it as an archaic, intangible concept... We enter the gates of the real Hell, the Hell that exists just a few minutes from you..

The Hell found in a crack rock, or a hate-fuck, or a nuclear explosion..

Debasing morality is what 'progressive' culture is about - whether it be through porn or corrupted environmentalism, the idea is to scrub away any notion of human divinity... To reduce us to no more than the lizards and moths - eating, fucking, killing, dying - and to keep us seeing ourselves that way...

Because then, we can do anything.

Once we allow ourselves to believe that we are simple animals, all is lost. Why would we care to help each other? In Nature, its survival of the fittest. That means if I can kill you, there be no consequence - it was mandated by the divinity of Nature.

That means you can have sex with your daughter - why not? Animals do it. To do otherwise would be 'unnatural'...

Extreme? Yes. But how about a concept a little less insane - role-play.

We have been slowly conditioned to believe that if it happens in a role-play setting, then it's 'not real' - that we are just pretending, and by extension anything that happens within the scenario has no consequences.

Rape role-play, pedophilia role-play, even animal-play and pretend-incest - this garbage behaviour has been gradually introduced to the sexual mainstream under the guise of 'being free' and 'ending discrimination'.

The idea that these kinds of behaviours have no impact on the moral and social fabric of reality is absurd. To believe so is to employ the same logic that calls the invasion and occupation of a country by armed soldiers a 'peacekeeping mission'.

A rose, by any other name, is still a rose.

Culturally, this is where we are being steered - overtly and covertly.

The way to defeat this sick philosophy is through cultivation of morality - through treating each other well.

Furthering this concept, since there is no middleman needed to speak to God, the true house of worship is in fact our own body.

This castle of flesh is our Temple, within which we reside.

When we treat ourselves or others with impunity, we are disrespecting the homes that we live within, the construct that we cannot escape for the duration of this lifetime...

Every person is at war with him or herself, and the experience is relative - For me, to not drink for a week is no feat at all; for the alcoholic, such a challenge is a matter of life and death.

Keeping this concept in mind, it is our own weaknesses and flaws that we must challenge. To truly live, we have to reject our base animalistic desires in favour of reflection, calm, and deliberate actions.

And on the days that we fuck up - the days that we smoke crack rocks, get hookers, or drop bombs on strangers...

Those days must be followed by days of remorse and regret.

Boys and Girls

One certainty about homosexuality is that gay sex is inconsequential in nature; it is a biologically meaningless act. The experience is simply a repeated firing of electrochemical circuits during orgasm - followed by nothing.

Sex with a female, however, is entirely different. One kiss from a beautiful woman can send a man reeling for days. Real, uninhibited sex between a man and woman feels like a trip to another universe. There are measurable physical changes in members of opposite sexes when they interact, even just during a conversation.

I think that the reason sex with a woman leaves you feeling physically and spiritually invigorated and sex with a man leaves you feeling unfazed is both metaphysical and biological in nature.

My guess is, the intoxication associated with heterosexual sex is due to the fact that the Potential for the creation of new life is permeating the entire experience.

When a man and a woman have sex, ancient enzymes in our saliva are mixing and transforming… hormone and pheromone exchanges are taking place… biological organs with the express purpose of breeding new life are interacting.

Between two males, however, there is no 'chemistry'. Nature knows there is no possibility of new life being created from the encounter, and so it provides none of the electrochemical magic normally used to entice you into breeding with a woman.

Nature, in essence, is dismissing the sex as a non-event - in the hopes that you will miss the experiential reward of hetero sex, and next time use your seed in a more 'productive' manner.

I think that gay people can love each other with the same depth of affection that heterosexual couples do, but I don’t think the actual intoxication of creation can be experienced in gay sex, even in the most extreme of stimulating situations.

The physical reaction from the body is there, there is a blast of 'pleasure' - but it is one-dimensional and icy, a shock of release that quickly fades to grey.

Among primates, homosexuality and incest is a part of daily life. But primates do not possess the spark of divinity that we do; primates cannot conceptualize, design and create vast works of architecture, engineering and art.

Among humans, unique with our (necessary) concept of moral relativity and our conceptual brilliance, homosexuality is rooted in the dark side of lust, found in the wiring of natures emotional and chemical black markets…

Tiny Tour

It is almost that time again, although this time will be the first time...

The first Small Wars tour is wide and disparate, long and unwound, and the on-ramp is coming up soon. This is the first time I will tour alone. I have a feeling that it will make perfect sense.

This blog will become a repository for tour thoughts, just like when I was out with the RMRM crew last summer.. Pics, dreams, all that shit.

I wont have a computer though, so we'll see how often I manage to post...

Much love, and keep yer eyes on the skies... all dates will be posted before I go.

more Frontiers of Reality

The rain was unrelenting.

I walked down Douglas at a clip, dark grey sidewalk soaked through beneath my feet, black Deer Stags work shoes gripping the concrete. Lunch was only half an hour, and I had already blown half of it cashing my check at the Money Mart.

My hands were shoved in the pockets of black work pants, one hovering above cold, damp keys, the other with six hundred or so dollars in a firm grip.

I ducked into the entrance to the Shoppers Drug Mart and the automatic door groaned itself open. I rounded the corner onto the polished floors with a squeak, flipping back my hood to set the security guard at ease. The light filled my eyes as I scanned the aisles.

Ranitidine.

Now that the Nexium samples were finished, I needed a couple of these per day to treat the ulcer. When it had woken me up in the middle of the night six weeks ago, I honestly thought it was a heart attack. Like a knife plunged into your most vital part, an ulcer will scare the shit out of you if you let it. Once established, it and only it can decide what you eat, when you eat, what you do and how much pain you can expect as a result.

I had staggered to the bathroom, clutching my chest. I thought for a moment, turned around and rapped on the bedroom door.

Startled awake, his voice came back. "Huh? What's going on?"

"Hey, sorry to wake you guys. I think I need to go to the hospital, this fucking pain is erupting like crazy. It feels like I'm getting stabbed."

He was already in the hall, dressed and grabbing his jacket. "Let's go straight to emergency. Then we'll figure out just what it is."

My mom swept out of the dark room into the hallway, looked into my face, worried, and then gave me a hug. "Don't worry, sweetie. They'll figure it out and get it all fixed up."

"Sure thing ma, back in a bit."

I had been attempting to self-diagnose on the internet - one of the stupider things you can engage in. Research is only worth doing when your judgement isn’t compromised by pain and fear.

Pleurisy? Infection?

Inflammation of the heart sac - pericarditis - that was my wager so far.

They triaged me quick and went through all the usual motions. After a thorough once-over, the kindly doctor announced "no sign of anything" - a diagnosis I had grown very accustomed to in my twenty-nine years….

The intercom went off overhead: "Checkout two is now open." I zoned back in to the shelf in front of me, picking the box of generic ranitidine, 10mg. 5.99

The next day I had gone to a walk-in clinic, and met Dr. Green.

I was wound up when he stepped into the examination room where I was sitting. We shook hands.

"So why are you here?"

I sighed. "I keep getting a really sharp, stabbing pain under my heart, and sometimes in my other side… smoking seems to set it off, but even if I don’t smoke, it still wakes me up an night…"

He interrupted me. "It's worse at night? It wakes you up?"

"Yes. I went to the emergency room last night it was so bad; they didn’t find anything. I thought it may be pleurisy or pericarditis, but apparently not." I took a breath. "So I think that maybe it's an infection, and I'm hoping to get some antibiotics, if you think that would help."

Our eyes met - mine fearful and glassy with pain, his assured and professional.

He spoke. "Hold on a minute." He paused and clicked his pen open over my file.

He locked eyes with me again. "We're going to figure out what's wrong with you, and how we're going to do that is by looking at all the different factors that could be affecting your health. Once I get some information about you, then I can start looking at what is causing the problem."

"Ok, sure." I felt like a deer in headlights, confronted with knowledge and confidence vastly greater than mine at present.

He took notes as he asked the questions.

"Smoker?"

"Yeah, but very little, like one every couple days. I just quit smoking pot too."

"Drink a lot?"

"No, 2 or 3 beers a week, tops."

"Eating habits?"

"Normal, I guess." I thought briefly. "I was poor for a long time, and didn’t eat well then."

"You say the pain is worse at night. Does eating help?"

I hadn't thought about it. Now that I did, I remembered how a granola bar had staved off the worst of the pain several nights.

"Yeah, I think it does, a bit anyway."

"Take any medication?"

"Just Advil."

"Any other pain? Symptoms? Going to the bathroom ok?"

"Well, my back hurts a lot these days… Other than that, no. Bathroom is fine."

He scribbled a few moments longer and then sat back and looked at me with a hint of a smile.

"I think you have an ulcer - or at the very least, the beginnings of one."

An ulcer? I was shocked. Didn't ulcers happen to stressed old businessmen? I had an uncle get an ulcer from drinking too much, but that was the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

"An ulcer happens when the stomach starts eating itself. You said you were poor and not eating well for a long time, that could have certainly helped create the problem."

"Smoking always sets off an ulcer - it stimulates digestive juices, irritating the stomach. That's why the food helps - it fills the stomach, keeping the acid off of the wound."

He continued. "Alcohol and caffeine don’t help, and anti-inflammatories like Advil are hell on the stomach. Ulcers also often cause back pain, as well."

I thought about the endless nights of empty stomachs, or the days where I was happy with a few bagels and some candy. Endless shitty coffee, spiked with white sugar, whitebread McDonalds muffins. Booze, drugs and cigarettes for the nights; Advil liquigels for the mornings. Suddenly I felt very stupid and destructive. I had poisoned my body - in a way I had never intended.

I thought back to my uncle - experiencing unbearable pain in his stomach, he had decided to keep drinking beer until it went away. A few days later, he called my dad to come take him to the hospital. It turns out he had an ulcer that perforated, flooding his bloodstream with toxic poison; he lost 40 pounds during his month in the hospital, and endured two operations to have his rotten gut fixed up.

Soon I was on Nexium, which would define the first six weeks of my recovery. I found out that ulcers have a 100 percent relapse rate, and can take years to heal correctly.

Much later, I would discover that the most potent cure for ulcers is raw cabbage juice - that a few cups a day can heal an ulcer in a few weeks…

I stopped at the magazine rack. The new Wired was out. I had a minute to kill - and the headline of one of the features had caught my eye.

* * *

Excerpt from Recipe for Disaster: The formula that killed Wall Street (Wired, 2.23.09)

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates. If a company—say, IBM—borrows money by issuing a bond, investors will look very closely over its accounts to make sure it has the wherewithal to repay them. The higher the perceived risk—and there's always some risk—the higher the interest rate the bond must carry.

Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability. If there's a 1 percent chance of default but they get an extra two percentage points in interest, they're ahead of the game overall—like a casino, which is happy to lose big sums every so often in return for profits most of the time.

Bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The potential sums involved are staggering: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes. But mortgage pools are messier than most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times—for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default.

Wall Street solved many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

* * *

I put the magazine back on the rack. I would have to read the rest online.

As I stood in line, I couldn't help noticing little fireworks of activity in my mind - vague ideas about the power of language to define reality, and how math is like any other language, in that it describes concepts… defines parameters…

"Just this today?" The cashier eyed me, her figure lit from above by the harsh fluorescent.

Excerpt from Frontiers of Reality

Here is an excerpt from a new project, Frontiers of Reality. It will be all over the place.

***********************************

The dude sitting in front of me had C.R.E.A.M. tattooed on the back of his neck.

As he violated persons unknown over the phone with his collections skills, I shivered.

I had to get the fuck out of here.

I was on my fourth day back on the phones, a collections agent for a long-standing criminal enterprise in Montreal. Like most long-term spots, it's offered services included the typical "Yellow Pages" subscription, paper rolls for debit machines, and counterfeit money detectors; they had also branched into first-aid kits in recent years, since several states had now passed laws mandating their presence in the workplace. This meant banner sales for our outbound team.

The company also had an in-house collections agency, where I was posted. As soon as an invoice went unpaid for 30 days, the gap-toothed little minx from AR would bounce the file down to us, the Collections Team, and we would follow up with the 'customer'.

In terms of who you wanted to get stuck on the phone with, I was your best bet. That's because I had no intention of actually trying to get payment for anything. I was there to acquire as many paychecks as I could before getting fired to pay for my ticket to Amsterdam, where we were booked at the end of the month. We had killer shows lined up in Brussels and Rotterdam too. I salivated at the thought of crushing Euro stages, of enrapturing strange young women of old-world bloodlines.

Our record had gotten some critical praise, and we had just played our biggest show yet, an opening slot for a big-name electronic act. We played to a packed house of 1000, live voodoo wreckage onsite…The only review I had seen so far said our set was 'ridiculous', and that from a Frenchman yet.

The phone picked up. "Hello?"

I pressed the release button and the line went dead. Oops.

I sighed and scrolled through the call log screens, selecting the client file for an Update.

Under 'Notes', I typed the following:

Do you ever think about getting a different job? This shit is borderline criminal. The poor fuckers we are calling are just hardworking people trying to run their businesses, and we conspire to rip them off. How sweet. Seriously, quit this fucking job now. La la la.

I tapped 'Save' and smiled. I had acted as a subverting interest within call centers for quite some time, but never to such a blatant extent. Before this one, my most recent position had generously allowed me to book many shows on company time by not clueing in that I had 15 browser windows open during my shifts, all dedicated to personal interests.

They were a new operation; I knew they had no workstation monitoring in effect yet.

As with most things in life, timing is everything.

Feeling righteous at that job, I had gotten ballsy, whispering to clients over the phone to "Just say that you will call the Attorney General," I would advise. "Once they hear those words, they will delete the invoice. It's the only way to beat them."

The gratitude from the client would be overwhelming. "I cant thank you enough. We pay all our bills on time, but this one - I mean, it's just a scam, and my husband is ill…"

"I know, yes it is a scam. Just mention the AG and you will be ok. All right?"

That one, at least, I had managed to keep for a couple months. I had caught them at a good time, just getting set-up, meaning the workload wouldn’t be significant for a few months yet. And the no-monitoring was perfect for my ghost-in-the-machine act, which could very realistically have gotten me a severe beating or worse had I been found out.

Actively sabotaging the revenue stream of an organized criminal enterprise? Stupid - and I would like to think, noble.

This one, my collections gig, I knew I would be gone in a week or so. I had progressed to a level of zero respect for these slimeballs and could no longer hide my contempt for the industry that had sustained me financially for so long. Every morning, as we smoked in the bitter grey cold, the big boss would arrive in his Lamborghini, made out of other people's suffering and stupidity and his own vile interest, scattering plebes like pigeons as he wheeled in to man the top tiers of this corrupt enterprise.

I would look at his push-button convertible and his vanity plates and smolder inwardly. "A real fucking tough guy eh? A real class act… One more pathetic fucking criminal with a taste for innocence and a hard-on for money… A bag of shit who will get what he deserves some day - hopefully a mugging and a quick stab with a dirty syringe."

I didn't think I was any better - we're all fuck-ups after all - but at least I wasn't proud of my faults, wasn't actively nurturing them, wasn't bragging with a Lamborghini about how many people I had ripped off.

I wanted to stab him in the guts, to feel a knife dig around his precious interior; wanted to burn fistfuls of dollars in my bare bloody hands in front of his dying eyes.

Break was over. We streamed back in, the Arabic girls in headdress, sweatpants-wearing cigarette-toothed lifers, Montreal North bottom feeders, macks, bangers and hustlers alike.

The building was straight out of an 80's coke-flick. A squat six stories, it occupied prime real estate in downtown Montreal, a tough little aberration among the towering glass cathedrals of the banks and investment firms.

They owned the whole building. One floor was sales, one was the cafeteria, one was collections, and so on. Each entry and exit point was secured by an ancient punch-in security system, where you enter your hand and squeeze these stationary plastic pegs.

I guess the squeeze-style was as unique as a fingerprint, because once you squeezed, it clanged and registered your action. It was pretty cool.

There were cameras everywhere. The lobby was faux-marble and overseen by an attractive brunette, Italian, in her late thirties.

* * *

I rounded the corner and tapped on the glass door. My card didn’t work anymore.

She glared at me, then reluctantly stood and came to the door.

"What do you want?" Her friendly tone was long gone; I had walked out mid-shift a couple days previous.

"I'm here for my paycheck," I smiled.

"Well, they are not ready yet. Come back tomorrow."

"It's Wednesday, I know they are ready. Eric the collections manager has them."

"Well, we'll call him, and see about that." She swung open the door for me to enter behind her.

She sat down at her reception desk and picked up the phone.

"Hi Eric, I have an ex-employee here to pick up his check…mm hmm… it's Nathan… all right." She held the phone out to me, smiling.

"He wants to talk to you."

I took the receiver. "Hey Eric."

"You're a comedian, eh? You think you're pretty funny."

Eric, interestingly, looked very similar to Erik Engstrom, founder of my favourite band, HORSE the Band. I found it hard to reconcile that these two similar genotypes would go on to such disparate endeavours.

I pictured him speaking to me from his desk, the other collections agents well within earshot. Had I simply left, there would likely have been no bad feelings - call centers are designed for high turnover. But I had disrespected him and the company with my client-notes messages, which were practically impossible to delete once saved in the file.

"What's the problem? It wasn't working out, so I left." I was actually starting to sweat a little. I needed that check.

"Well, since you were being so funny in your notes, maybe I'll be funny too. Maybe I'll just keep your paycheck and cancel it. Huh? Wouldn’t that be funny?"

I kept my voice calm. "Well, Eric, if you did that, then I'm sorry but I would have to call the Normes du Travail. I certainly expect to get paid for the hours I worked with the company." The last thing these guys want is a complaint filed against them with the labour standards board. I hoped that would shut him up.

"I'll mail you the check. You're never setting foot in here again."

I smiled at the receptionist; her glare had never left me. "Thanks Eric. I'll expect it next week." I handed her back the phone.

* * *

I did a double take as I passed the newsstand.

The cover of the Montreal Gazette, Tuesday Oct. 9 read:

ALLEGED FRAUD RING BUSTED IN MONTREAL

Police herded about 130 people from a nondescript downtown Montreal office building to RCMP headquarters for questioning Tuesday in what they described as a major crackdown on an alleged international telemarketing ring.

"No fucking way," I scanned the article for details.

Jesus Christ. It was. Belmont Street. I couldn’t believe it. They had been around forever!

When had I left? The previous Monday…came by on Wednesday for a check.

And now… after 12 years in business… they were done.

I had some timing. But I was as worried as I was grateful.

How would I get the check?