Day 15: Psychedelic Wasabi and the Juice of Forgiveness...

             

Pyschedleic Wasabi is what I call the pulpy remnannts leftover in the top of the juicer after the juice is extracted.  It is a doughy mossy clod of botanical curds mashed into a sodden clay of vegetative dregs. It looks like a Grateful Dead Teddy bear took a dump on a Tellytubby. It looks like a variegated one-up mushroom in a Mario game after hitting a neon brick question mark playing nintendo while gorging on a sac of psilocybin ‘shrooms. It looks like Shylock-oriented wad of flesh taken from the abdomen of the Green Giant in a very marketable Merchant of  Venice sort of way.

It looks like, well, Pscyhedelic Wasabi (which I admit, sounds like a name of a failed garage band during the early 90’s).

 I'm at fifteen days in, over a third of my quest is complete. There’s been bitterenss. There’s been hurt. There’s been depression. I wish I could just crack open a beer because when I do, I laugh. I play the music louder. I’m more convinced of my genius at the keyboard. I feel immortal. I don’t feel like a fuckup everytime I assay the inteior of my checking account.

Instead, while blithely imbibed, I reminsince over drops of joy.

The other night I couldn’t sleep. Without the crutch of an emotional adjuvant I awoke, a bucket of failure sifting inside the lid of my chest. It was about three in the morning and it was cold as shit outside. I opened  the fridge and pulled out a basket of vegetables and fruits. I decided to make juice. Idecided to make Psychedelic Wasabi. I decided to juice out everything inside my chest that was holding me back. I decided to juice out everything that was spawning distress. Decided to juice out everything that was making me hurt all the time, creating Psychedlic Wasabi as an elixir, a putty of panacea, a blob of hope.

 

 

 

I turned on the searing purr of the juicer and inserted a cucumber. Before I placed the vernal phallus inside shredding lips I thought about failed relationships. I thought about the women from the past whom I gave everything to and that still, somehow, it didn’t work out.  Women who are married now (always married to short-haired fucks with money)  with progeny of their own. Women who are drippingly beautiful. Women, the scent of whose smile has served as the synaptic catalyst, the angelic impetus, breathing life into the arable canvas of my stanzas.  

I held the cucumber like a phallic torch. I looked at, channeling all my hurt.  I tried to see their faces. The sight of her porcelain forehead always occluded by a pinch of sandy bangs. The sight of a spontaneous text sprouting  up somehow inhaling the coy-sight of her smile.    The sight of her lips tucked into the bottom of my neck, her legs wreathes around my waist like an inner tube on a pick-nick table in lower Bradley park. The sight of her tattoo-arpeggio body waking up next to mine, the June sun echoing through the breath of my window in a secant lines.

I saw all this in the cucumber, channeling all my failed dreams of  timeless visionary romantic compatibility with the women I love. I saw this all in the Chinese jade tip of the cucumber.I then took the cucumber and kissed it three times for the number of females who were holding me back before feeding the cucumber into the sawing top of the juicer.

Making Psychedelic Wasabi.

Allaying Pain.

I grabbed a bag of baby carrots.  A sack of orange thumbs. Each carrot I slipped into the top of the Juicer I channeled the name of an event that has wounded me. An ex-lover telling me it will never work out, dumping me for a (fellow wannabe skin-head looking) scribe. . My high school English teacher (whom I love) reading my essay aloud in class, making a note of my grandiloquent use of words. My father (who I love even more) telling me that I would never be a writer, telling me in his modest Sunday School voice that “Maybe God just doesn’t want you to be a writer.”

I inserted more carrots in, channeling my anger from the past. The friend I assisted in putting on local readings who royally fucked me over by promulgating fabricated uncouth innuendo about my lifestyle and my craft. The person who, after I returned from a conspicuous out of state gig, felt the emotional need to start a rumor that I raped her when she was a teenage, turning the faux-artistic domestic hoi-poloi against me.

 

All hurt. All fed into the nasal grind of the juicer.

 

The last thing I did was take a piece of star fruit that my mother had given me last week. It was uncut and looked like a green condom flitted over a blimp. Rather than cut the star fruit in wedges resembling either constellations or Hasidic emblems I squeezed the uncut fruit as hard as I could. I channeled everything in the past that was manacle. That was holding me back. That was making me feel like failure. I squeezed so hard that the fruit ruptured and juice sputtered on my kitchen floor. I then tossed the star fruit it and juiced it in its totality, rinds and all.

 

I then took an apple and sliced it into a quadrant of sideway C’s.  I fed each strip into the shrill of the Juicer, thinking about my tenure at Bradley University, the University that fucked me over. The University that I worked for while still owing a friendly mortgage to in terms of student loans. The university that accused me of disgusting things when they terminated me (funny, they quoted stories I had culled on my desktop computer that no one else on the planet had seen, perhaps I should take it as a complement).

The University that called my moms house hours after my dad died, asking for a financial gift.

I thought about the cunt from HR (she looks like she had a penis) and how rude and hos shitty she me feel. I thought about the (now defunct) dean of the department, and much of an illiterate fuckwad he was. I thought about how my demure boss never stood up for me and then I thought about how I never stood up for myself. I took there fusillade of  career-marring insults personally.

I channeled all this into the Edenic apple.

I then drilled the apple in the juicer. Making juice. Creating Psychedelic Wasabi.

I let it go.

There was more I juiced. A stalk of celery thinking about the man who sexually molested me and, because I was raised as an overtly naïve God-fearing Lutheran, kept quiet and let the wound fester over time.

 

 

 

I found a pomegranate and skinned it, placing the heliotrope teardrops  into the machine, stating out the name of someone I have hurt. Girls I have cheated on. Friends I have fucked over. The worse things I ever did in my life (under the influence of blessed beer) shoved my sister Jenn across the room when I was 21 (envious that she was attending a crème de la crème liberal arts school. Hurt because I let the shitty high school I attended define me) and emotionally erupted ay my dear friend Aria, hurling puddles of vitriolic lava at her over line, envious that she was living in europe and had the perfect life. Envious and hurt that she had chosen to be with her husband instead of with me.  

I threw in some grapes . Not many but a few. With each grape I stated a fear. Things that have burdened me for years.

I took an orange and broke it into wedges. I then channeled my frustration of years of living pay-check to pay check. Of scraping by to afford RENT. Of feeling worthless because it seems like I have more funds going out then coming in. Sick of giving my money to an education I know longer recall receiving.

Sick of giving my money to the bars.

(it almost beckons the question is drinking-out worth it when a PBR is 3 bucks a bottle)

 I juiced the entire orange. I don’t want to feel like this anymore.

 

 

The last thing I did was take a piece of star fruit that my mother had given me last week. It was uncut and looked like a green condom flitted over a blimp. Rather than cut the star fruit in wedges resembling either constellations or Hasidic emblems I squeezed the uncut fruit as hard as I could. I channeled everything in the past that was manacle. That was holding me back. That was making me feel like failure. I squeezed so hard that the fruit ruptured and juice sputtered on my kitchen floor. I then tossed the star fruit it and juiced it in its totality, rinds and all.

                                                                       ***

We go to literature because we want to live vicariously through the protagonist. We want to see the protagonist endure some kind of quest, vault over personal demons, conquer and prevail, all the while ignoring shit in our own life. We cheer on Jesus, knowing that he will die, knowing that he will be born again, all the while we harbor beliefs of paralysis, beliefs that keep us rooted in the muck of our own paradigms.

Beliefs that keep us stuck.

We want to be like Jesus, but we don’t want to die to be reborn. We don’t want to endure the lonely struggle to make progress on our dreams. We don’t want to slough the ideological skein we have inherited and look at the world in a new panorama of hope.  

Instead we want to text. We send pictures of our bodies to people we have just met. We LOL and OMG. We read books by scrolling down on a screen. Haikus have been reduced to a solitary Twitter tangle. We are more connected than we have ever been and (OMG, LOL) we are all the fuck.

We want someone else to do the work for us

We don’t have the balls to be reborn.


                                                                        ***

***

After I finished juicing I stared down into the libation for a long time. There were swills of  tennis court green mingled plum polyps bifurcating into a meringue treacle of peach. If I held the chrome retainer under the central lights in my kitchen I could see my reflection. It was five am. The sun would not rise for another hour and a half.

I thought about drinking the juice I had extracted (since, duh, I’ve been on the Vegan-juice thing for over two weeks now). I juice every day only this time I couldn’t, I thought about how I cast my anxieties my failures, my forlorn dreams into each vegetable before plowing it into the grinding jaws of the juicer. I thought about how (for years) I had carried all this shit around with me. How it has anchored my ambitions. How it had weighed me down and made feel useless.

Manacled by emotions all theses years.

I looked at the iridescent soup in the chrome container. I thought about how I had extracted all the juice from the anxieties that for years have governed me. I decided not to drink it.

I thought about how I didn’t want that shit inside of me anymore.

After all what good is a detox of the body if you don’t detox your emotions. Regenerate your spirit. Jettison your attitude. Change the Duracell’s on your soul.

What I did was go into my bedroom and fish out my down winter coat from my closet. The lids of night were still clasped in a nocturnal hush. I bundled up and, with my right hand, grabbed the chrome vessel containing the jaded juice of last thirty years.

 

I then went outside and began walking north. Past the Owl’s nest. Past Tartan Inn. I stood on the corner of Western and Waverly and waited for the number 5 bus to stroll by. When the bus arrived I fed the meter a dollar, keeping my open jar of freshly juiced emotions nonchalantly tucked in my denim coat.

 

Fifteen minutes later the bus arrived at Citylink. I exited the bus and headed towards the Illinois river. I then started walking north. I must have looked like an eskimo-bum holding an urn in his free but I didn’t care. I was somewhere past fitness club, past the Taft homes, when I was able to skulk down near the Illinois river. Just was the sun was beginning to brush its blinding forehead over the ice floes and blistering eddies I looked down into libation, into the past I, for years, could not let go of. I looked into the girls I loved one final time, looked into the fear and the hurt and the failure one last time.

I then held the container over the Illinois river before emptying it, the way a Hindi ascetic lights a candle on the Ganges River. I watched as everything inside of me emptied. I watched every cell inside my body ejaculate.

I was emancipated.

I felt at peace.

I felt free.

The vegetable pottage of the past didn’t sink right away. It formed a hippie globule wafting for about ten feet down stream. A slice of winter sunlight ricocheted off of it. It then drifted even further, told an ice floe before dissipating forever.

 

                                                            ***

The story doesn’t end there. I walked three miles home, up the bluff, in the brisk cold, back into West Peoria. I thought about how, by channel my emotions of hurt, extracting the pain a and then flushing the past away I had to train my brain to act as if the past never happen. I had to focus on the covenant that things would get better, on the quantum tautology and there is infinite possibility in every snapping atomic quark of what is perceived as time.

 

The world was brand new.

 

I got back home around seven am. When I got to my writing desk I began to kick off the denim fins of my jeans, peeling off my long jones. I was naked when I walked naked into the kitchen opening up the lid of the juicer.

 

I then stared at the leftovers. At the Psychedelic wasabi. It was green and mauve and  tangerine and had a fluff to it.

 

 Still, naked I removed the lid with the Psychedelic wasabi and went into the bathroom. I stepped into the shower. I then started massaging the putty culled from the decimation of all my failures all over my body. I rubbed it into my cock, but also my chest, above the car hood of the aortic sac of arteries known as my heart, over my forehead, across my chest.

I kept rubbing the Psychedelic  Wasabi all over my body. I turned the shower on out did not step in. Instead I began to scream. I began to curse. It was winter outside and it was ten degrees and I wanted to look like spring. I wanted to feel brand new. I wanted things to be entirely different in my life from now on.

 

I screamed again.

 

A newborn enters the world he can’t help kicking and screaming, yelping out the heralded news of his arrival in this realm of being as loud as he fucking can.