Last May, I drove my father to Columbus, Ohio to watch his father die. Neither my dad’s car nor his body was prepared for the trip. He had been recovering from diabetic ulcers, fatigue, the aftereffects of a decades old concussion–all of which left him with lessened mobility and energy, a disordered apartment, and an oblique (but reluctantly stated) need for help. I had traveled to Charlotte to help him clear the spiderwebbed curtains and supplement heavy counter-tops, to try to reset him to some normalcy that might encourage him to take his diabetes seriously, but his father was dying so we needed to make a long drive.

A long car ride is time. It pulsates with the rhythm of the wheels, the ebbs and flows of conversation, the impossible nowness that it always calls back to. Riding in a car together is being thrown into the present of a relationship. With my father, it was his ailing body’s difficulty driving for long periods of time, it was my desire to care for him through muscling through the long drive. I could listen for the echoes of his long drives: his post-grad years spent crisscrossing the country as a traveling bus boy. TGI Fridays offered a passport program where you could move from location to location at will. My dad took advantage of this to travel for baseball games. He would park his car in the empty stadium lot, fall asleep for the night, and try to see if he could snag tickets for the day’s game. Sometimes, he and his buddy would be hassled by the cops; other times, they’d get lucky.


—

There is a spiral staircase that leads to nowhere in a barren lot in Bed-Stuy. I walked up the first few steps and found myself inside the tattoo of a spiral staircase on the arm of a passenger on the bus to dripping. Inside the skin, the grates of the metal steps are pores slick with sweat. Slip and fall down the staircase into the void of untouched flesh, or climb the curve that disappears into a flurry of dots. I turn the corner to find the spiral tightens as it moves upward. Like a mouse squeezing under a doorframe, my bones become soft as my body navigates the narrows. The curvature is dark like that black of black ink that burrows into the skin. I am in the pitch darkness of an infinitely small step; I am an asymptote moving through the time of moving through the staircase. An infinite spiraling upward that never reaches the top, the nowness of climbing itself.


—

I am on a long car ride. I am trying to explain to my father that dance music is a durational, psychedelic form. I put on mixes by Relaxer and Upsammy, I try to explain that reputation can bring about an almost meditative state. I am trying to explain dripping, what I am excited about returning to the festival, how those moments where a gurgling texture burst into a serrated rhythm are like cracks in self, moments where you have been stretched so far by a fleeing but knotted sheet of icy fog, where water becomes gas in a continuous multiplication of snares spreading the body thinner and thinner.

On a long car ride, there are many car rides, humming along at the same rhythm of the journey. At some point, I might have had a momentary, but peculiar fantasy of the next years dripping, of bringing my weakened father to the festival where he might sit in the back of the inn like those old wooks who disappears into their beards and psychedelics–but our trip had begun around 8 or 9 pm, and as we reached 7am, Columbus Ohio an hour or so away, my dad suggested we pull over at a rest stop, sleep an hour or two in the car. I didn’t make the connection that this was an afterimage of his days as a traveling bus boy.

We didn’t stay for long at my grandfather’s bedside. He was tired, irritable, and ready to die. My dad joked with him about getting back on the golf course. My grandfather struggled to understand. We ate lunch with my uncle and his wife. My dad mentioned some worrying test results that pointed towards leukemia. My aunt cautioned that cancer needs to be taken seriously. My father seemed non-plussed, mentioned his regiment of methlemene blue to treat the blue light exposure from his computer screen. My aunt and uncle, both scientists, seemed skeptical of my dad’s wellness plan, unsure if his shamanic path (and new age medicine) was an adequate substitute for western medical care.

Absent any mutual understanding, we got in the car and drove back to North Carolina. Returning to my dad’s apartment, I heard the soft hush and distant twinkle of the sound healing machine reverberating against the haphazard stacks of boxes filling his consciousness outpost.


—

Oblique solutions to fabricated problems. The banker explained the court order I would need to pry open the box. His business card falls out of my notebooks at the rave and the person who picks it up informs me that she is legal counsel for the death factory and that they are growing tired of my riffling through boxes. I respond that of course I am tired of one box only opening to another box. I am confused by the TGI Fridays paystubs, unsure if they are a map through this maze of boxes, or if I only encounter the flaked skin of a careful architect. I present her my card, “The Rainbow System of Personal Growth and Health,” in a bid to reassure her that I am only concerned with the continuation of my employment at the death factory, that my accounting is not auditing in the service of subterfuge, or at the order of organizing. She looked me up and down, trying to pinpoint the movement of the sky blue aura towards and away from my throat center, as if evaluating whether I truly lost myself in the boxes or had fabricated a fake but effective map to move through the maze. And it was on this count that my presentation of “The Rainbow System of Personal Growth and Health” had actually drawn more suspicion because a color coded body map of the chakras is necessarily both a fake and an effective map, an unreal guide to techniques for wellness and a phantasmic portrait of the body. Do you think, she started, that you could squeeze your frame through the crack of the cardboard fold of a box?

—

Every celebration is a funeral. My grandfather died the day before dripping 2025. I brought a book on shamans where the shaman either journeys to lower/higher worlds or accompanies a spirit on its voyage to our world. My father had been fashioning himself a shaman, learning various esoteric systems of metaphysics, healing, mindfulness, politics, and geography. At the time, I was trying to formulate an understanding of raving and wellness, one that might take seriously the personal transformation that practice demands. Or maybe i was just curious if man can communicate with the dead. I am always placing an idea between myself and reality, uncovering a context that is a gift wrapped in a box. Once, when I was a teenager, my dad presented my brother and me with a box a week or so before christmas. He encouraged us to focus our energy on the box, to try to materialize the gift we desired. We always spent christmas with my mom, but, the day after (at my dad’s apartment), we opened the box to find a statue, or a totem, or a talisman. The shaman succeeded in realizing reality.

Now, my dad is dead. I crossed out father and wrote dad, the former felt like another container, an idea, a separation. What I am uncovering in death is a grand conspiracy. It is not surprising as the last section of the last conversation I had with my dad circled around Israel and Iran, speculation on another big attack plotted by the Israelis. I had wondered at first whether the CIA or the Mossad had finally caught up with the old man. A conspiracy theorist is not only a keen analyst of subterranean subterfuge, but the center and target of a gnarled scheme to eliminate free thought. The conspiracy theorist, the shaman, the father–all deal in rites of passage.


—

For a year, I only wrote in fragments, shards of glass. I preferred haphazard thoughts, the kind that you could break apart into different sheets of paper without losing any meaning. But my chopped up sheets of paper lacked that serrated edge of broken glass. A fragment ought not fold in on itself, and so I began to realize my sheets of paper were more like scraps, their edges grew dull, they ripped, but they did not break apart into more fragments. I have begun experimenting with writing on glass. I take a solid continuous plane and write a whole story, from left to right, up and down, making sure that I have reached an adequate conclusion. For example, I write about biking across the Williamsburg bridge wearing my jingle bell earrings. The story is a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydique where a lover bikes behind me. Up the incline, maneuvering around the absent-minded pedestrians, the rubber gripping the concrete, the eagle-eyed acceleration around the construction site where you must be quick to avoid the oncoming traffic. Through all these exercises, I would need to keep my eyes facing forward. I would need to have faith that the jingle of my bell earrings guided my lover, that they had overcome every obstacle, that they had not turned the other way.

The story concludes with me gathering speed, barrelling down the Brooklyn side of the bridge, not looking back. After transcribing the story on the sheet of glass, I take a hammer and smash it into fragments. I watch the story shatter into moments. The broken hole is not of the story, but of all the bike rides I have taken across the bridge. And so I find a moment and, on the exposed space of the shard of glass, I continue another story (of the misguided reconciliation with a friend at the center of the bridge on the fourth of july, of my scatterbrained flight from the anarchist film festival, etc etc) and as the story fills the whole shard with ink, I smash it again to find smaller fragments. I am going up and down the bridge, to Manhattan and to Brooklyn, all at the same time. Only when I have assembled the thinnest fragments, the sharpest edges, is the story complete.


—-

Bigfoot. I do not know if the plural of bigfoot is bigfeet or bigfoots. I do know that a regrettable misconception has spread that bigfoots roam the forests. The falsehood stems from an attempt to establish an equivalence between bigfeet and homo sapiens, to reify the missing link hypothesis, to find a corridor through the evolutionary maze. In practice, sasquatch is of a different order of intelligence, possessing the capacity for telepathetic communication. The adapation–or rather the refusal to theorize from this fact–explains the misguidedness of searching for bigfoots on the surface. Bigfeet developed telepathic communication in response to living underground. There are vast caverns underground, filled with stalagmites that resemble trees. The caverns do not have any light–natural or unnatural. Instead, the bigfeet have mapped the terrain through a series of bruises. Each collision with a wall, each fall down a hole snaking deeper into the earth, each eye poked out by a jagged rock emerging from a wall–every pain is communicated telepathically. This inventory of injury is geography. Pain is a map.

I only know this because a bigfoot mistakenly transmitted to me. He mistook my maze of boxes for the tunnels of his home. He mistook my thinking for the sorrow of his world.


—-

for isaac and ocean

There’s always a double
Another rain fly

In the echo of the bass
On the surface of the lake

Joy and sorrow
The same wave
Rippling
A wake