When Harpocrates Abducted Calliope

I’ve been on a kamikaze nosedive into Infinity.

The inkwell hasn't run dry so much as the arm meant to hoist the quill has been busy swinging a machete against the dense jungle that is Reality.

Shall I resort to writing with my feet, that act of adaptation an upper-body amputee takes on as a shining example of human resilience?

My feet are silent as well; they tread a terra nullius, fluent only in the tactile language of a flagellant. I could go on with the enterprise of writing in the name of discipline, sure. Nothing is stopping me except for damn near everything.

Here's the rub: the creative act of writing—of selecting a topic, an angle wherefrom to approach it, and a touch wherewith to anoint it—excises all other aspects of the universe. The creative act disposes of the bulk of reality to zoom in on a given particular under the guise of appreciating beauty. Such fetishization often feels successful, but only within its own frame.

If I detail the lineaments of a beautiful woman, I do so only to the detriment of everything that is not her. You, Reader, can well find this observation to be profound or pathetic. Those two superlatives are never mutually exclusive, of course. Like many extremes, they form the nexus of a Möbius strip.

The dilemma I currently suffer from is not writer's block. I have three literary projects in the works. Calliope, the muse of writing, has both hands cupped over my ear. She's decked out in plastic-explosive lingerie.

No, the dilemma is that I have crept close to the edge of an abyss of silence, fallen in, and haven't found the way to get out. Someone may need to rappel down the sheer face of the abyss wall and airlift me out, because I'm not so sure I want to get out.

I have fallen in love with silence. I have been basking in the auric glow of quietude. Words, yours or mine or theirs, are only ever inadequate. Silence speaks multidimensionally, a decoded roar of useful, bliss-inducing information manifested from the storage space of the Unmanifest whenever the laser of silence hits the hard drive of being.

I have been spending too much time in esoteric texts, afraid they will all up and disappear. I keep forgetting it's called Ageless Wisdom. I haven't read a good novel in some time. The last good fiction I read in book form was from Substack's very own B The Author, C. James Desmond, and Caleb Caudell. Killers, all.

I will always love literature, my first love. But I can't stop shoving my snout into the trough of esoterica. I try to pull myself away, but people keep filling it up with that turbid elixir.

I have a novel coming out next month. It's titled The Sisterhood of the Wick. It's a follow-up to Crushed Trachea Blues. Instead of LA, it takes place in my native Orange County. How am I to market it if I've been on a digital fast and dumped social media?

I've also been working on a nonfiction book. Its title is The Blowtorch Gospel.

Whoever flies a flag, any flag, flogs and fogs. The truth is behind a paywall: for $7.99 a month, you get to capitalize the T. I envy everyone their convictions, their certitudes.

But it is my contention that we let so much pass through our ears. We need more cerebral customs officials. We need underpaid, overzealous guards to make the incoming tropes empty their pockets and pass through our bullshit detectors before boarding our brains. We let so many packed flights of nonsense fly into our own personal skies!

I've been repeatedly told we are all God. I go along with it, but the deeds and remarks of the rabble take on the shape of pitchforks. It's nothing personal? Yeah, well, it's nothing promising either.

The rabble are all just moving pieces on a gameboard, muted plastic figurines who unleash tsunamis of syllables when you bump into them. You hope for them to offer clues to your own advancement on the board, but they just hold you up, downloading terabytes of junk files, asking if you'll accept cookies, No, I don't want to accept cookies, No—I said no! I'm accepting cookies.

Is excessive verbiage finite? Do chatterboxes’ motors die, a welcomed shock of quietude after a logorrhea that goes nowhere but in circles of self-aggrandizement and/or oneupsmanship, a loquacious rage against the dying of the light? Does a bullshitter's life allotment reach its capacity? Is a single life gifted only so many sentences with which to flog the ears of would-be interlocutors?

If only their droning had the ominous tones of threats, I at least would be prodded into growth, for a worthy enemy is never not a boon at the end of the day. But litanies of mundane goings-on go to work on equanimity like termites to a 2-by-4.

I confess to harboring justification for feeling this way towards others. Yet what right do I have, honestly? A murderer could just as well lay down Aristotelian precepts to explain his reason for his grisly behavior, and no one not him could challenge him on it. How am I any better?

Who am I to challenge, let alone argue against, a spiritual path of mayhem? With nothing less than the sun behind a killer's convictions, all potential rebuttals will incinerate upon contact.

But aren't I supposed to be tamper-proof? Is not all this work meant to make me withstand anything? No weapon formed against thee shall prosper. Quoting Isaiah is an admission of fear.

Multi-dimensional multitasking is multi-annoying. But then my characters start up again with their whisperings.

Paisley Fuentes, the likeable protagonist of Crushed Trachea Blues, asks, “When you going to promote The Sisterhood of the Wick? I want them to see how I handle a cabal of weaponized cosmetics companies and murderous online gameshows and a delivery driver who runs a portable confession booth as a side hustle.” And Gaugamela, the female pope looking to start a sovereign network state, “Would not the world be a better place if its denizens had the opportunity to buy shares of Aletheia, the crypto-currency of love? Finish up Scourge of Honey.”

So it’s my job to balance input with output. Silly and stuffed goose that I am, I've been gorging myself on esoterica to the detriment of my Darlings. Who are these Darlings? The characters and the readers. I therefore hereby slice open my own chest cavity and offer you up a foie gras of fiction and a pâté of inane but not altogether useless observations.

Training wings off.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

Crushed Trachea Blues is available in ebook and paperback. It's a fun murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos.