Bad Ideas for Paradise
2002 20min
Two Ideas For Paradise
1) In paradise I am the most beloved person in the entire universe, and I make all the other citizens feel personally insecure. Imagine Jesus and Elizabeth Taylor and Nelson Mandela and Jaques Villeneuve and everyone else famous are all one person and I am her.
2) In paradise nobody is famous at all, and everybody loves each other equally, and if someone hurts someone else's feelings we all sit in circle and talk about it until we all feel better. If we get bored of talking to one another, we go out for a walk until the boredom passes.
Hollywood
If I was more talented, someone would ask me to come work for them in Hollywood, and I would say yes because it would seem exciting and glamourous. Then I would become a bit more shallow. I might try to offset this effect by taking up yoga or getting married.
Childhood
I remember feeling ashamed before I had done anything to shame myself, as a child. I began my life wailing. Most of us do, and go on wailing and demanding, piling shameful act on shameful act until we ice the cake with something really bad, like fucking our sister's husband, abandoning our children, or kicking a yappy dog.
We're obsessed with childhood innocence though none of us felt innocent as children. I felt I shouldn't have asked for such-and-such, I shouldn't have pinched my brother, I shouldn't, especially, want to dominate the world. But I did.
Maybe we come to the pinnacle of shame at some point in mid-life, and from there begin to rectify towards death. Maybe even despots and wife beaters top out at a given moment and then make their way back down to grace.
Maybe I have already done my worst, and can slowly soften up, stop swearing and start to appreciate nature. Maybe.
Maybe now.
Birds
I love to sing. The sounds fly up my throat like fat birds. Sometimes when I'm singing sobs fly up too. This is the greatest joy in my life.
Sharks
Poor sharks, never sleeping, always hungry.
You're restless. You fidget under there, twitching fins and gills on the endless cruise. I know, you'd like to frolic like those fucking dolphins, grinning ear-to-ear as boaters hooted and cajoled. YouÕd like to rub on pebbled beaches like the whales, state-funded operations launched to save you from the tide.
But no. When people find your body beached they scamper, shudder, puke.
You have only stealth and speed, and nobody likes stealth and speed but assholes.
I Want To Be A Teenage Boy
I want to be a teenage boy. I want to fuck pretty girls who look like flowers and love horses. Who have legs like stamens and glossy eyes like pistils. So soft and so eminently crushable they elicit the will to crush. I want to be a teenage boy so I forget to eat for hours, until I'm starving. Then stuff myself with Ding-dongs and ho-hos and pop. I groan, lowering my distended gut into a chair where I recline, flopped out, watching re-runs and getting horny. If no one's home I masturbate lazily, slowly getting into it, thinking remorselessly about girls I’ve fucked or want to fuck who beg for it.
I want to be remorseless and thump my friends on the basketball court.
If I were a teenage boy I would insist on brand name clothes. My laundry would be done frequently and comes back fleecy, golden, folded: heavy hooded sweatshirts, boxer shorts, and socks that always ball their mates. My garments would hang just-so on my snotty, lanky frame. Uncontrived, brand new, tumbled dry.
If my mother does the wash while I am in the shower I yelp and shout until she turns it off. Even if she's watching television, she eventually gets up, sighing, and stops the load. She thinks "he's still my baby boy". I think "fuck you, fuck you, fuck you" but only call out "mum, turn off the water!"
I like to get in fights and punch out assholes who disrespect me. I love sensation without reserve. I don't even know reserve. What's reserve? I like to belch and piss and fuck. I have never felt ashamed yet, not once.
My life is not stingy. I am not stingy. There is no stinge.
Brain chemicals flood, orifices gape. I fart with vigour. It feels great. I hate homos. I like boobs, my dick, my friends, smoking dope and listening to music.
Unselfconsciousness and arrogance are the hallmarks of my personality. I am unconcerned by my ordinariness. I am unconcerned in general.
I like summer, winter, fall. Spring’s too tentative and weepy. I hate things that are tentative and weepy.
Cost / Value Analysis
Everything's expensive, but nothing is important. How can this possibly be true?
What Animals Care About
Animals don't care about the conventions of realism and representation. Does this make us lucky? It does indeed. It means we can live our lives free from eating disorders and terrible student productions of surrealist plays.
Animals care about noises, and smells; and sex if we aren't fixed. We sometimes care about one-another, or you. We care, obviously, about food. I'm glad I am an animal. This way I don't have to worry about whether I'm an alcoholic, or feel inadequate because I'm lazy. I don't have to be always trying to discern good from bad ideas, stylish from unstylish clothes, things I'll wish I hadn't said from things I will be proud of. Instead, I can use my nose and paws to divide the world into edible and poisonous objects, soft and lumpy places to lie down, and predators and prey.
Bloom
The human capacity for fascination is the saddest thing on earth. Every fascination's like a seed containing all the genetic information required for the flowering of disinterest.
Boredom
Boredom, envy and temptation are my constant companions. I try to see the boredom as a lush thing, an opportunity. I try to dive in. I create special practices for boredom: breathe it in, hot and dry and crappy; breathe it out, transformed, cool and damp and nice. I try to find it funny or endearing in its persistence.
This works reasonably well as long as I'm actually thinking about it, but pretty soon I'm back to picking at my skin and complaining about money. Then I just start feeling bad and can't remember why.
Creative Visualization
There is a psycho-spiritual condition which can be represented
or rather which is experienced
as the sensation of a trauma to the solar plexus (heart chakra)
and when one is thus afflicted it is very clear that something must be done.
And so I picture the site of the trauma and I think about the following things:
The hole being poured into with clear bright water;
the water as it pours transforming into warm smooth stones;
the stones becoming gems;
the gems as they fall fusing with the bones of my sternum;
my entire skeleton becoming crystalline and radiant;
this new light generated from my skeleton flowing up and turning into sound.
The sound is a song and the song is about radiance.
Small animals come.
Deers and big-cats come.
Jewel like birds come and contribute to the song from my bones.
The light and song pour upwards
and the light from the sun fuses with
the light and song from my bones.
This regenerates and activates the tissues of my organs
and the muscles and connectors
and the adipose tissues,
and for a moment I know that I am
a fresh and seasoned person
in this mostly fruitless orchard of the world.