Once upon a time, long ago as children, we were kings. Our inner lands were happy, the forests teemed with game, the waters were fresh & sweet, and much gold spilled from the treasury-- our inward hearts of singing, skipping, and masturbating with stuffed animals with a bopped crotch.

But trouble comes to the psyche, when DOOM itself seems at hand as pulverizing upheavals wrack your undisturbed cosmos with a spray of bricks. As an exercise, envision the sage king, (-- who thought he knew it all), enthroned in the great hall where torches flicker from an unseen draft as he licks beef-fat from his lips like a possum, a boyar in bear skins. For outside advances the dreadful oblivion, CHANGE, whose shrieking winds and whirling, impenetrable mists have already devoured the outer boundaries of this ailing childhood kingdom.

The castle rumbles to its very foundations.

Trophies of dragon's heads and demon-swords, relics of a fabled, sugar-coated, mythic Ur-consciousness that once meant something, clatter worthlessly to the cobblestones. Wooden beams supporting the ceiling collapse with a snap, stone walls blow inward, and a bleeding illumination-- pale blue, eternally gentle-- the underlying motherly aura which had so whispered reassurance, thoroughly mislead, and was all that remained of this dying fiction-- shines stagnantly above.

Welcome to real life, kid.

After you're left standing out there naked and humiliated, looking at the silent rubble with your mouth agape, you can either shrug and move on to something else like someone who "accepts fate" or continue to roam through the snows in your long johns, muttering "I am the king. . . . . I am the king. . . . .". A particularly cruel gust of wind blows away your taped-together crown and you curse the gods with both middle-fingers, more silence your only answer.

I would say this happened to me when I was about 11 or 12. My parents as painfully-nice liberal arts types never had the personality to temper their child's instincts, "where he ruled this inferno" like "King Turd of shit hill" until occasionally "the wrath of Dad" would come descending down like Homer throttling Bart Simpson with a gagging, choked tongue. My instincts were grossly undisciplined, my "piety" rotten to the core because it was all secretly about "ME" with a big, fat pointed finger of self-conceit. Up to that point I always managed to surround myself with weak, ineffectual people who were either so tuned-out or hyper to realize that in my secret narrative, "I WAS THE KING" convening down with the lowly, and in this set-up, this story I created in my head, "this diamond in the rough" would rise, behumbled, to accept his noble, foretold destiny like something out of a Donald Trump fable.

The ride ended when "The King" was singing "1001 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" and got thrown off the school bus of life when the ordinary world had enough and "had to walk home". But his "home" as he knew it, was gone-- a sheltered sub-reality of nostalgia and kitsch-- and now he had to make an incredible journey to find "a new home". . . . .

The universe-- like the forces of the free market-- likewise in the world of humanity, is always "in flux" and nothing is permanent in this whirling veil of atoms. Thusly, one's efforts to "wall in" decay and change is a wholly human concept-- mostly born of the luxury of modern civilization that has "the breathing space" to live in the mental cosmos of abstracts only too much, most of them not of a very high quality. Ultimately most of us idolize things that are probably not worth remembering in the course of life's brutal struggle to propagate and possess.

When a ship from ancient times sinks in the Mediterranean, very little is left by the time the wreck is dredged up except for the Roman coins-- that which survives like chipped, rusted currency in your hand. The rest recedes back into the nothingness from which it came, because it was neither hardy nor worthy enough of outlasting the centuries nor the judgment of time.

Over the years I have seen things come to pass that I thought I would never see. The destruction of marriages, illness, death. . . . . cosmically rotten events that forever destroyed my vision of "the solid, immortal fist" of absolutes. And to the extent I tried to make my life fit into the contours of "this fist", what others told me "one must do out of duty"-- crammed inside a row of standardized cubes like a graveyard of existential angst with the gray, miserable texture of sadness that marked those made of an irregular shape, who thrashed like Satan moored in the ice at the bottom of hell.

Personally, I always had a very difficult time "fitting into the box". Of course, a big part of this came down to the fact that I was self-indulgent and didn't particularly want to, but I was a strange case, regardless-- as principals and authority figures and fundamentalist right-wing ideologues scratched their heads and wondered what to do. Once they brought out "the saw", I turned tail and ran. Their "plan" for me was not my plan, nor anything I could visualize or remotely feel comfortable with as I had this image of a stork hobbling along on a leash with clipped wings and a nipped beak, permanently disfigured in an effort "to make it acceptable to civilization".

Any symbol of fabled, conservative tradition in the American mind yet had rotten, gaping holes knocked into them if you thought about it at all. I had an image of shoddy, leaden ideals and the black suck of death pulling me down into the grave. Though deep down I wanted to believe "like a good person", I yet felt like Huckleberry Finn sitting on the fence and squinting at the society that passed itself off as some kind of answer (?), wondering if he should be seduced by the adults waving him into the hamlet or if he should hightail it for the majesty of the river.

Well, let me tell you something. No one should be forced into an awful situation, like crackpot experts claiming they have the remedy and rummaging around for their tools of butchery that leaves us "recovering" in shadowed existential rooms, staring up at the ceiling with emptiness and feeling "worse for the wear" like victims of a wasting disease who will never get better as they die a slow death, "the fishbowl" turned upside down and the oxygen slowly running out as we choke on our own expiring fumes.

But back to our story. . . . .

The usurped one, meaning myself, managed to pull together "a castle of sorts"-- fortified behind a primitive pile of rotten, moss-dripping stones, each cruddy rock made out of a comfortable, grandiose rationalization as a rotten king "trying to reclaim what was", supposing "this was the best he would ever have" as he set up "a wary compromise" upon a shaky negotiation table.

Finally you climb down into the dungeon, the shameful bedrock of existence, hoping they won't find you in there. But yet they do, and there you are-- cornered like a fat, black rat scurrying in a privy. But still you try to break into another room-- this time, one of irrationality and delusion-- and there you are with your rump in the air, crawling but not getting very far and mewling like a wounded animal. At this point, the invaders figure that they've seen enough and will leave you be.

Later-- hours? days? years?-- you crawl back up to the throne (-- dripping in shit) and take a seat, trying to pretend "that nothing happened". But deep down inside you know you're only "King Nothing". And that's where I was when I dropped off the face of the earth. . . . .

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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

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("I heard that, Missy!")