Coffee shops seem to be breeding grounds for pseudo-religion, pseudo-science, and pseudo-history. On the one hand the table next to me represents about 2 conversations per day I’ll hear in a coffee shop about religion, history, and philosophy. Not a single accurate statement. Attributing Aristotle’s ideas to “mediaeval Roman Catholic scribes”, etc. Then you’ve got the pseudo-science guy who is handing me talk of reptilian brains, who must have read Dragons of Eden and made it his religion, because if you say “I don’t believe” he says you’re reptilian and aren’t in touch with your emotions, the cry of every ideological fascist who wants to force his view down your throat. He says there’s no such thing as objectivity, but when you disagree, you’re wrong – so apparently he doesn’t believe what he says – he just means no one but him has objectivity – everyone else is at the mercy of the subjective on the one hand, or his truth on the other. These types are just fundamentalists, even while they decry fundamentalism – they’re just the version of the day. They’d burn us at the stake as surely as any other rock-thrower. Then you’ve got the table of A.A. unitarians, who spend their time discussing how they’re trying to hold the line for all the people who just don’t ’see’ – all the ignorant people. I guess I’d be one of those ignorant people, because I certainly don’t see, don’t plan on seeing, and would resist seeing to the point of death. Not to be left out is the ideology of the anti-ideologues – the reactionaries – these guys decry all ideology, not realizing they’re espousing one in the process. It’s easy to be ‘above’ all the ideologues when you don’t commit to anything, which is the equivalent to saying that having no thoughts is superior to having contradictory and factually incorrect thoughts. I don’t like either option. I don’t think a dead mind is better than a wasted one. But I do think that the chaos of mental contradictions, whether empty of content or full of it, is a particularly loathsome curse to heap upon oneself. The only thing worse seems to be to lack the intellectual tools to climb out of it. Being wrong or thoughtless is understandable, if you’re trying out different thought processes, but creating ideology because you just don’t care enough to discover whether it corresponds to reality is not only sloppy, but it’s intellectual suicide. How does someone who hasn’t read any real history decide what the “Catholic Church” did or did not “make up”? How does someone who reads a popular book of scientific theory make it the rubric for sorting out the rest of humanity? Since when did the world consist of people who can see and who can’t see, with the key to seeing being a young, inexperienced person who has been to a few A.A. meetings. In which meeting did the universe unfold and the cosmic insight was imparted? Or since when did knowing nothing about any of these things equal the things being unknowable? I like coffee shops, but I find them cesspools of belief. Belief is floating around like turds in a state fair porta potty, it’s as prevalent as dirty diapers in a Walmart parking lot. Mere belief. There are lots of beliefs, and you can’t argue with them, and you shouldn’t need to – “But you’re reptilian!” Yeah, yeah – and the moon is made of cheese, and little elves made my shoes, and so on. Yeah, I’m one of the inferior types, the unseeing ignorant, the reptiles – whatever the fuck that means. It’s one step away from “To the guillotine with these reptiles!” Belief. It’s a violence to the mind. I love coffee shops, but some times the violence is too much.

She saw that the shadows seemed to cling to him reluctantly, as if they were prisoners chained together, neither wishing to be present nor able to flee. Which of the shadows was him in the flesh, she could not be certain. And as she thought of it, her mind seemed always to settle on a different point, some irrelevant matter not related to his presence. What an interesting surface on that wall there as the shadows move away from it. How the sun shines on that patch of grass where something had been. But . . . and there was nothing there. What she had seen could not be remembered.

June 1997

To some he looks like a man passing through the country, limping, with one arm, and suffering from some terrible wound. To others he seems to be haunting the townships, swathed in shadows, the edges of his garments never quite beginning or ending. No one is quite sure where they have seen him. His features are uncertain. Nevertheless, they seem to understand that it is him.

June 1997

He is too gentle for them. They surround him. They are all he can find. They are much more savage than wolves, who are generally kind creatures when evil has not corrupted them. And he cannot live for long among them. He cannot eat carrion and like it and snuffle about in the dark.

June 1997

Orange grey pears – bartlett – delicious – the fruit basket adorns her hip, sways with the gentle motion of her thighs. Soon she forgets it’s there – the weight – but it gives the steady clockwork motion of her walking a painted pace that I never cease remembering when I see her thick blonde body forming on the market square – going with the throng – her body a throng unto itself. And she is just a girl. No. She has the jungle’s impulse – in her eyes – her step – in the arid square where humidity chokes the sweat of laborers and detergents reek from under the basin. She breathes out of pace – a different, liquid air – a tiger’s breath. She says her name is Rose, because her mother bled.

May 1997