serendipity + the sanguine possibilities of a masturbating god

the clouds hang over Los Angeles tonight and i feel mildly suffocated by a thick and swampy gloom. summer will be here in a matter of days and will burn all this murky crap away. i will feel romance and nostalgia for it when it’s gone, but in this moment my heart feels stifled by my inability to see thru to the night sky and to the stars beyond. inside this feeling of visceral discomfort, i feel an existential longing to be free – to be free of my body, to be free of any limitations, to be free of anyone else’s ‘no’s’ or even their ‘yeses’ that would impinge upon my personal space. i’ve missed the sun the last couple of days. even my brooding scorpionic exoskeleton starts to thirst for the stinging whipcrack of high noon. we all need our shit burned away at some point. otherwise, the grey water of our minds starts to stagnate – a sometimes odorless stench that keeps us indolent and sluggish. tonight, i am that slug.

my fingers are held to the creative grindstone. i am not my own muse. nor am i lifted with a winged spirit by anything around me, moved to some whimsical and feverish dance of words. instead, i am a rusted Soviet satellite left over from the Cold War, orbiting my own ennui like some kind of lifeless moon. no amount of scrutiny will imbue vitality here. the mission was abandoned long ago but the loyal droid continues its infinite cycle simply because it has nowhere else in the galaxy to go.

i listlessly thumb through the pages of The Book of Symbols looking for some flicker in the murk. dear deities of Taschen, smutty purveyors of the spiritual and the taboo, please save me from my anhedonia. apparently, the semiotic history of slugs was not robust enough for this anthology. snail: page 184 – 185. the shell, in all its fibonacci-esque geometric glory, feels far too dignified for the slimy, corporeal husk in which i currently reside. but it’s a close enough kind of night and i will proceed to orbit this point of interest, if for no other reason than nowhere else to be.

“Though most snails have genders and reproduce by copulation and internal fertilization, others, types of land and water snails, are hermaphroditic, reproducing like their gendered cousins, but equipped to act as male or female in the mating.”

internal fertilization. if only i could impregnate myself with some kind of zoetic spark. it strikes me that the hermaphrodite is missing from the major arcana. this seems to be a grand oversight. who was on the committee when the archetypes were determined? were the women allowed to vote?

like the slug, the hermaphrodite did not qualify as an object in Taschen’s ontology of symbols. at least it got sub-themed under masturbation. masturbation: page 412 – 413.

“Whatever culture makes of masturbation in its concretized form, the recurrent theme of the self-copulating deity in myth is one of remarkable generation. Like the tail-eating uroboros, the hermaphroditic deities, or the divine potter who rhythmically stirs creation into being, the image of the masturbating god intimates [the] psyche’s fundamental capacity for self-becoming.”

i see his lips go tight like a towel caught in the dryer door. i feel the shame of a child caught buying pornography with his mom’s credit card. a subscription to playboy.com used to cost 24.99. and i was the anonymous ‘pervert’ who kept stealing my parents’ bank information to jerk off while they watched the US Open on tv and shouted obscenities at Andre Agassi for being a meth addict.

what a remarkable generation.

a masturbating god gives me hope. something about swimming in the pool of cosmic seminal fluid gives me the existential delight of insignificance. after all, we are all the consequence of someone else’s orgasm. even me, of my father’s taught lips and swollen rage. his shame was his long before it was ever mine and yet i still lug it around like it was a safe of medical records too private but not yet old enough to destroy.

i am a narcissistic torrent of self-becoming. as if i’ve had to compensate for parental ignorance. you can’t be abused if you spend most of your time being invisible.

did he ejaculate into dirty socks and then accidentally wear them into first-period geometry as a high school sophomore because he hadn’t done laundry in months? nobody seemed to notice. nobody seemed to care. maybe everyone else was just wrapped up in their own psyche’s self-becoming.

it will be June tomorrow. the sixth month. the sixth house in astrology, ruled by the virgin. the virgin is also a sub-theme in Taschen’s book – found in the index, just before vomit and vulva. six: the digit of the beast’s mark. six: half of sixty-nine – the yin-yang of sex positions. do the taoist god’s also masturbate? if they do, the males in the pantheon definitely practice retrograde ejaculation. speaking of which, do hermaphrodites masturbate with both hands? as a bisexual man, this contemplation is deeply arousing. retrograde ejaculation: internal fertilization. what a wonderful seed to water. it seems we’ve meandered our way along the helical crest of the snail’s shell back to some strange but serendipitous ending point.

serendipitousness: young mother awaits a flight in the Seattle airport. she is leaving home, escaping an abusive husband, and father to her children. a janitor notices her, recognizes her distress, and sits down next to her. he cares. she cries. as she gets up to board her flight, he wishes her safe passage and ‘serendipity’ in whatever awaits her. years later, having started a new life – a happier life – she returns to Seattle for the first time. as she deplanes, she meets eyes with the same janitor that comforted her in the bardo of her previous incarnation. they run to each other and embrace.

he twirls her around.

“how is this possible?” she asks.

“this… is serendipity!” he replies.