jasonspiro.com blog

“In the vacuum of space, no one can hear you scream.”

This slight corruption of the teaser line that the ad-wizards developed for the Alien one sheet, trailer, and other promotional efforts represents the germ of several thoughts that have batted around my brain for the last twenty minutes or so. Home, vacuums, space, screaming… all of these words represent ideas or partial culminations of motives in this week’s chamber pot play. I am not home; I have no home; the place that I am in is a home that I have called home but it is definitely tentative, fleeting, illusory, or at least a participatory imagining of a place in which I could not have been least of all now. Our home is an atmosphere that protects us from a relatively endless vacuum; our atmosphere is the home of the planet; the planet our home to which we are inextricably linked, save for the lucky few who have escaped temporarily, is hurtling through space though to us it is standing still, to try to put it actively.

That feeling of hurtling is the thing, the identity, that saves me from detaching my delusions and hobbling without the aid of my prostheses. The mental appendages are all I have, and they, improbably, are atrophying as I write–at least, far more perceptibly of late it appears I have less appendage to cling to and the void which really whips by now threatens to draw me into it and reveal its mundane finality that follows the brief exciting interlude of perceived flight. The world and time are vast constructs that we collectively agree to, due mostly to biological necessity, which would otherwise render us terror-stricken or schizophrenic or both. Whether we’re in the tree-house or we’ve built or own on our little strip-mall of consciousness, the element of surprise either delights, confounds or eludes us by dint or by nature. The tree-house’s The Thing–the escape from suburban reality that we either provide for our children or is provided as a blueprint for more adventurous children to build in recesses of disappeared suburban jungles. One of the first prostheses, a hiding place.

I should interrupt for a moment here, to save myself the embarrassment of unsuccessfully perpetrating an end to this last, unsuccessful paragraph which as I often do bites off (more than I can chew) probably more than I’d be comfortable with of some metaphysical style or other that I hurriedly half-absorbed, and to apologise to the fantastic Professor Wills for stealing his Prosthesis motive without having read or even been in a class that serves as a final editing ground for his book Prosthesis. By doing so give myself a break from the task of elucidating the tiny, attenuated filament light that was my grand scheming; the discomfort of the present being too much to bear and so I retreat to my wooden mentalist tree-house to plan with my hardly conceived imaginary friends a flight of fancy-ladness.

I mean, maybe it’s just the crazy talking here but everything, euphemistically speaking, is getting a little tired lately. In bed. That’s what she said: a metaphor for America. In the vacuum of space, no-one will understand your appropriated in-jokes–or your expropriated peculiarities–and as you boil away with a rush and a bustle nothing will be gained by humanity save the space freed up by your energetic dis-occupancy and you will have no conscious knowledge of whatever is gained even if you are probabilistically fortunate enough that someone notices you.

It’s timely that Lady should walk into frame while I completed that sentence to comment on her outfit, to say that people noticed her. Of course being in the middle of the sentence I registered physical discomfort, even disdain, while she launched into story and then into view and told me of outfit-affirmation, of sartorial acknowledgment, of outside respect for her get up. I’ve always said she wears the pants and the skirt in this family, and yes Mr. Ames I’m in some way trying to reverse the view of the disapproving parent-in-residence (who has not actually moved in but wouldn’t it be nice if she would I mean she’d probably do it in a heartbeat if you invited her but if she lived upstairs wouldn’t that be weird to like, have sex and everything but how often do you do that anyway) who inhabits the spirit of the skin that you fasten, or festoon mask-like over your partner and try so vainly to glorify with your funkified ideals surrounding the respect concept despite clenching my fists as Lady asked me was she interrupting was only partially involuntary and was not an expression that desired effects and was also entirely protracted and overly formal. Lady’s comfortable wedding to my concept of formality by calling it out, in part, was wholly comforting and in light of any previous thoughts of weddings or unions that we would have–and by we I mean us then–undergone if my own financial solvency were in effect much more strong.

This is all quite deliberate in its random, haphazzard, overly wrought, hastily revealed and poorly concealed way. And so this little essay-that-could spins into the void, finally, picking up that whooshing sound as it rushes past, deadline-like, in absence of eyes that couldn’t open anyway in this thin atmosphere. What I’ve attempted to festoon is a little broach of a subject on untoward ideas that never quite culminate. In this perpetually shifting landscape that I always already try to call home, things enter vainly fighting the cold lack of affect that personifies my life. Such as it is. If I ever may be so bold. Tableau.