The Suicide Diaries

The clown was dead. On this, we all agreed.

We stood around. We stared at all the pieces – his remains. We stared, but with each other we did not make eye contact.

This clown, he had tried to cut his wrists at first. He’d used a pocket knife. He’d failed. Fumbled it.

Then he’d moved on to a belt. He’d wrapped his clown-belt around his clown-neck. He’d closed the ends of the belt in the closet door. Over the top. This proved to be more effective than the pocket knife. He’d succeeded, and now the clown was dead.

My Possible Pasts

This is a story about a sock.

Or rather, it is not about A sock so much as THE sock. The sock at the beginning of the whole Universe, yeah, way, way back at the start. The point to which every line can be traced back, if you only had the patience to trace back every line. Why, even the things that look  like they came before it – the oceans and the canyons and the fossilized reptiles, the comets and the planets, old light and ageless black holes – those things were just thrown backwards in time from the story of the sock, instead of forward, like you and I were.

This is the way it all appears from my perspective, anyway, after years of thought and of measurement and research.

For you, maybe it is different.

I hope that I am not overselling this particular piece of men’s footwear.

Dead Doors

Ray Manzarek is dead.

A long, long time ago, way back before I was born, he played keyboards in a rock and roll band called the Doors. “The Doors”  was short for “The Doors of Perception,”  which was short for “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

I never met Ray Manzarek. I was not a fan of the songs that Ray Manzarek used to play with his rock and roll band. On those exceedingly rare occasions when I thought about Ray Manzarek at all, I invariably pictured him, in my head, as the actor Kyle MacLachlan.

But Ray Manzarek is dead now and I am writing about him, and I am writing about him because he is on my mind. He is not on my mind for his art – for his keyboard playing – which sounded the way cracked carnival lights look.

He is on my mind because a movie about the Doors, called “The Doors,” was the first R-rated movie I ever saw.

I am going to talk about that for a little while now. I hope that’s okay.