'America is not a young land; it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting'�
- William S. Burroughs



The Lost Alchemists Who Had No Teachers


To Jacob- You did not fail on this day or ever.



Well, I guess what I call the beginning of my life, was after the broken years of high school with its teachers who were small and treated me small. Some of the worst experiences and moods I ever had were in those short, but dense four years. Started out innocent enough, little teenage rebellion, how bad could it really get, just kids right, think again smart guy. It was the 1990's and I guess that in itself had something to do with it.


What it was like to be a kid in America in the 90's, first it was like the gay 90's that preceded it by 100 years with the fin de siecle and decadent movements. Figures like Baudelaire with his 'Be drunken continually' and Rimbaud with his 'season in hell' played a tune that the young in the late age West tend to hum. With all their disillusionment in the West, they had a spark in them, they recognized something that was happening within their culture, their time and weren't afraid to find a poetical account of it. They made the same conclusion as the Beats, in that; authority had no credibility that gave them the right to tell them how to live their lives if all they do is follow a fascist dialectic. My friends and me felt the same way in the era of political repression and the shit in the middle east that we were entering, American hegemony was just beginning to form a vast network of roots for itself in the American mind.

I never got how these images of mature people, teachers, who were in theory giving me what I needed to face the real world out there would turn to hate and have an utter disdain for kids. Where did compassion fit in to all this? What maturity or any sense of what a teacher is does that demonstrate. My dear friend the Buddha said 'ask any question'; he had the patience and compassion to answer even in his high state of enlightenment, so what was up with my teachers. It was fear of what would be asked that existed in the teachers I knew.


In America a teacher has become a title, a bureaucratic functionary fulfilling his or her 8 to 3 and as far as those who need a Teachers, guidance in the higher things in life, the aim of teacher hood, well, they're bum out of luck. Teachers, for the most part, were Meticulous insect human beings filled with a contempt for any individual who was Real, young or old, who reveled in the fact that they were alive on this karma earth, who were riding the wave of the heart, or who would stop at nothing to find a True Vision in late 20th century America. The teachers I was taught under would have done do more service had the glorious days of the Inquisition continued to hold popularity in PR departments.

My teachers reminded me of a Dostoevsky narrative, The Grand Inquisitor, where Christ returns and the Jesuits, or inquisitors in the trials of the Inquisition, concluded that his message was not good for the church. This was the similar mindset of American education, education is caught up on itself to the point where it is a tomb where cadavers walk around with there heads so far up there ass so that Truth becomes irrelevant. The Beats had a good start in changing the situation and they were my first Teachers.


To be young under these conditions meant you would be an incomplete person; life in America was becoming more and more incomplete, disjointed, fragmented and unsatisfying. Every person I new had two faces, a condition created out of the fear and self-consciousness that took over in these States. With the majority of the families split-up, the Gibraltar appearances that must be maintained, and the utter absence of emotion in daily life created a vast wilderness of plastic emptiness, a sanitized pretty face in a clean suit that has no heart behind its eyes. Something was missing or askew in the world and yourself but you couldn't place it but it was there and you felt it as a kid.


The best description that I can dig up that accurately describes what my friends and my experience was in school and in life in the 90's is a few words from Rilke that he donned in The Panther: 'His gaze has grown so tired from the bars/passing, it can't hold anything anymore. /It is as if there were a thousand bars /and behind a thousand bars nothing. /The soft gait of powerful supple strides, /which turns in the smallest of all circles, /is like a dance of strength around a center/where an imperious will stands stunned. /Only at times the curtain of the pupils /silently opens-. Then an image enters, /passes through the taut stillness of limbs-/and in the heart ceases to be.'�

Kids shouldn't feel this way, but they do, with all our so-called progress of cell phones and smart bombs we deny children any reasonable youthfulness or compassion. The Heart is gone in America. Society is falling in on itself. Our entire conception of education has been brought to the ends of its philosophy the result is a spiritual nihilism.

Kids have the purest, most revolutionary thoughts and they are naturally unaware of it. Yet, the youth is continually told to ignore their truths, diminish and deny them and join in the American game of racism, capitalism, and soulless war, which towers in leviathan desks with meaningless paperwork. As a student you're always a scrivener. Waiting for life to begin just as these professionals do, to late it already past them by they are the hopeless unteachable and unreachable. As a kid you realize soon that it could be your fate as well, and its time to think fast to get away from that crap.


This is America's peak, height of its sophistication, and in its progress it continues to ignore the needs of the young leaving them rootless, alienated, and having a feeling of emptiness that they carry with them like a coal delivery. What they do have is a fecundity of TV, video games, CD's, fashionable clothes, jock sneakers, and MTV, but not a single human hand to wipe their tears or validate their existence.

America doesn't raise children it raises interests, whether they be hopes that went unfulfilled or a tradition to pass on and keep among the living or an impressed future Albert Einstein. All sorts of horseshit and abstraction come before the Being, the human entity and all of its needs and individuality is considered.


The thing, element, necessity that was a lack in high school was the environment for true honest human emotion and has continued to be my experience of America, become more and more plastic and detached from emotion. This was not something to be voiced, but should have been noticed with even a rudimentary common sense. From the lectern on down there was a need for something, something was missing or lost, a blandness, aridity was in its place, a place of desolate and fragmented lives. People were 2 places in the same instant, in every instant. They were in themselves hooked on their pain as well as an education (or if out of school a job, some activity where you function in society) if you can call it that it was schizophrenic. What people really were outside in the quiet or the noise of their rooms was and continues to be naked, innocent and holy.


The true substance of humanity had no place to be, especially when in your teens when the emotional map goes in all possible directions, there was emotional stultification enabled by putrefying lessons of the magna carta or to pledge allegiance in the mornings.
The friends I had were never tame cookie cut examples of the human, especially when we were on our own, then the pressure cooker lid was off. No more rules. Its no wonder we went crazy- we were only reacting rationally, as any blood pumping human would, to the conditions of indifference that we had to live under.


They needed a class like mine, the buggers, a class of total iconoclasts who liked the label, who understood the meaninglessness of a high school education surrounded in barbs- we knew what mattered was what came after, we were just doin' time. We were not convinced of this American bread basket filled with Horatio Alger baguettes. Back when I watched TV every body's a movie star and all that horse shit it made you believe that effortlessly all these people entered the limelight and you too would have a wand woven over you and you'd be living big and out of this unknown dead end town every thing would become cool, after all, after high school its all gravy, that's what were told.


You need a diploma in order to get a job but that's only the beginning of having every last action thought word needing to be certified by some institution. You could be the next Einstein and no one will listen to your theory unless you have a degree or shall I say degrees. That TV myth soon dissolves and with it your naïve understanding of the American dream.


In high school some of the most intelligent and sensitive and original minds I was surrounded with and most never even had a chance. Between Hollywood and academic bureaucracy is where we all stood. I saw all of this in people that most brushed aside with pompous and superior attitudes cause their parents had a little more money. I knew a good deal about money at an early age, the more money and material accumulation the more disconnected people become from one another. This all reminded me of my distorted slice of the American family. My family was liquidated by the real estate market and because of this I tried not to take much stock in the whole money thing, now art, philosophy, poetry, that's something you can sink your teeth into. I saw a tender beauty in people that the majority dismissed and sometimes they were right. But I was a Romantic before I could even define the term


We had heroism that could be appraised as having a Romantic tendency (as the academics call it) found in Rimbaud or Neal Cassidy; hell one of our inductees was Allen Ginsberg's cousin which put us right in the vortex ' it was in our blood - and he was a dear soul in his own right who had a thing for good conversation, speed, and fast cars- ready to experience anything.


Vignette: School sports event: bottle in hand getting pretty high leaning on a brick wall burning a cigarette, parents holding they're young closer. Wander into the charades in the same condition, sweet redhead who knows me, we get wasted together and talk well, grabs me before anyone big sees me, totally oblivious or having any decent concern for the form I was entering, hop in my friends Jag with the redhead in quite a state, had a liter of hard stuff before I even besieged the premises. Time for a fast ride that grips the endless road real slick, I don't think the cruise ever ended. Wake up next afternoon safe in bed.


Vignette: spurting poetry essences at the riverbank, florescent streetlamps glow orange and tired, abandoned cracked house with an open back porch, bottle of 3 dollar port, many nights in the streets at 2AM walking drunk and alone searching for the MADMAN THEATER with new poems rolled up and my audience, the universe. Bum freedom in Salvation Army tweeds and torn jeans, freedom from under the docks of a forgotten Asbury Park or Hong Kong. Less hang ups fewer demands.


We were WILD with Appetites, ferocious appetites for excess of the best chemicals we could get our bliss starved hands on, anything that would do the job.


Vignette: Taking a shit, just slammed six shots of McCormik vodka, spew in shower stall next to toilet. Really loud vomiting process friend blows open door, I'd feel awkward if I wasn't so gone. 4am. Friends father gets up and showers in 2hrs. go out choke down a blunt on a hillside drive. Actually ponder going to school that's in session in 3 hrs. Friends do they managed to do a report through the night. I think they had speed or something or they dropped. I pass out, just before guys treat me like a loser as they go out the door.


Vignette: 8am, trying to score beer for girls, and me, total eyes of disdain and unfitness everywhere, 'wino' I fit their part and don't care. On Protestant terf, working folk grabbing coffee, paper, and lottery- no suds til 11. Walking into an alternate reality compared to the dregs of last night, it's arc lit with florescent bulbs isles of mismatched goods lined up in neat tidy rows, whole place plastered with advertising, good deals on 30 packs just not now. Sun glares down, been in a haze for weeks maybe months. Don't care don't drive- suspended license.


Vignette: It's an odd ritualistic act of rebellion, the use of marijuana. We all huddle around like cantors and hover over the herb giving possibilities and suggestions as its prepared and deseeded. In awe over a sacred quality the whole crowd of professionals has personal claim for deft abilities in rolling a joint or blunt. The ceremony is getting on. Turn up the tunes we're about to burn one. Towel under the door, exhaust fan in the window kicked on, light some nag champa, and were on our way. Some minutes after 4, same crowd as yesterday we'll all be back here tomorrow, dug in in this hut like primitives after our return from the medicine man milking our joy and each other - in position. We are sick and tired; we need a lot of medicine. Its calmer today, it's a weekday. We'll lose time pretty soon and play a game of chess in eternity.


Vignette: Never underestimate the valuable resource of a higher education institution nearby when your 14. A whole nebula of narcotics becomes available, an import emporium with ghetto prices and a diverse market that had attractions for even the most novice user. El, the fattest nic bag you can get your hands on raved about even in future years ' plastic busting at the seams with bud. A good time had for all, he sold 40's on the side as a convenience and gave a blunt with every bag. My friendly relationship with mescaline began at one of these fine institutions, if your perceptions aren't expanded after 2 straight weeks of that shit call the doctor you were born without an intellect. I attribute those wild days of premature enlightenment to my first clean up; psychedelics set me straight for several years. Those who condemn drugs are those who have no way to evaluate their benefits, its an unconventional knowledge that the Billy Gramm's of the world can never comprehend, I heard a comic once say 'heroine never hurt my record collection' I believe this illustrates my point.


When kids turn to drugs to fill the void in them created by a missing love, the majority of my entire class in fact, chose one form of drug or another. I'm not a family values freak or anything but the decline of the family and subsequently the community is a direct link to our predilections for a drug rebellion and a total rejection of all values held by our parents- sound familiar. How could we have any decency or shall I say morality and believe in a hollow plastic existence ruled by money- they broke our hearts and we drowned our sorrows.


Our taste for revolution, our intellectual hunger was for great music and great words that truly put it down for us all and those who would come after us an endless unbreakable chain of the reveling soul. From Nietzsche to Charlie Parker to Bob Marley to Kerouac to St. John of the Cross-it was like feeding time at the zoo as far as fellas like that were concerned for some of us. No authority was safe from the flailing of our scrutiny, from sad haggard faces at the check out to the chief of police, all were potential targets of our anarchism. And why, because we were young- we had a saintliness that their entire metaphysics could in no way comprehend and nor could we theirs. Money Bunnies all of them, all chasing a Faustian bargain of the Benjamin exchange of their human spark.


Most of all we had style this was an essential requirement and necessary for a level headed search for a right mind in a thoughtless nation. We flipped the tables in cafeterias and brooded in suburban parking lots 'a whole compendium of automotive machinery gathered together and with it was US and there was an us then a community, a unity of people feeling similar things sorting it all out getting down to IT.


Vignette: Weaving in out of cars and crowds and cliques- attached to nothing. A night is coming on, butterflies in stomach. A Great American parking lot (food chain), owners hate us all they squeal to cops on what they pick up from the pavement. We get people to score kegs from them. A kid worked there, bad news for him good party though before the cops busted it. Shit, they get into a sporting spirit when it comes to nailing kids, 10,000 dollars in damage to nearby golf course. New cop SUV's against 2-legged kids on the greens how America is beautiful. Did a lot of beer funnels that night got good and stoned pretty foggy about that night remember arriving and dejectedly departing with chicks. Some bitch crater face daughter of a detective ratted the whole evening out to dear old dad and then pleads to good friend not to party- Total Square probably on the honor society.

Vignette: All sitting on the porch. A friend says 'do think it time to go biking' we all agree with phases like 'it's been a few days'�, 'no time like now'�, 'I could use some exercise'� we haul a mountain bike up from under the bridge nearby, bring it on top of the bridge, lift it as high as we can and with the force of a prize fighter slam it back down 30 ft to the unforgiving ground. We repeat this about three or four times with screams and hollers and eyes from worried onlookers, return to our seats and relax. One friend says 'I love it when we go biking'� another says, 'its good exercise, keeps ya fit'�


Today you don't find these collections of motley youths with wild hearts willing to imagine what freedom is scattered about gas stations or supermarket parking lots radiating from a future joy. A sad thing to see that gone, far gone nestled behind residential walls removed from the brink of eternity.


Back then we'd get released from our cells and we'd hit the street always finding something, a person, an adventure, ourselves. It was easy to find it then, there was no Bush no Patriot Act and no war junkies on patrol. We were a lucky group, pilgrims at a time when there was something to find- to get your head around, now its all been reprinted and mass-produced so effectively that everything's a year old Wednesday edition paper clogging the street. There's none of what Keats called the certainty of 'the holiness of the Hearts affections and the truth of Imagination'� alive within the conveyer belt of young floating in and out of semesters in an ether of materialism.


But there is one thing that saves, it's words put together in a particular way where they make more sense to an individual surrounded by absurd madness than any basic algebra. The words go deep as a surgical incision to reach that place within, slicing right to the source. People young or old have ears for what speaks the human center, there's been a caravan of messengers donning their deeds prior to time itself and people who are ready and need it always find it. Governments may be lost societies may be lost but the individual remains lucid in the light.


It was all up for grabs and we grabbed - black was white and white was black' we created our own form of education in a melting pot of the most depraved and most honorable individuals America could offer - who all burned like Kerouac's roman candle of delight (It's a lot different today with that whole Patriot Act deal that an entire nation snoozed as it passed into law, we're all locked in, I can't think of any more accurate evidence of America just plain giving up on itself, tossing the declaration out like kitchen scraps- an end of anything patriotic. With this deal kids don't even think of the potential within their Hearts their stuck in the web of an inferno ' mere oppressed repressed truncated drones for the Man and they don't even know it and that's the biggest crime- their IGNORANCE).


Being a part of this whole energy was quite a refreshing alternative to the trained responses of an honor society groomed for the walking death. We had a belief back then in those early days of limitless possibility- no limits and no pathetic middle aged pension or bust way of life was going to come between us and our capacity to imagine of a life with values that worked, on our terms perhaps, but we went beyond the clutches of a mad capitalist autocratic illness! We did it!


What we were doing was picking up a torch along the overgrown marathon track left waiting for us by the cosmic era of the '60's, and the Beats before them, an era when our parents still behaved with human gusto and passion, when thay hadn't sold out for SUV's and materialism and welcomed oppression of steady jobs and bank accounts. Damned hypocrites suffer the fate of the Damned! 'hypocrite reader, - my alias, - my twin!'� .


Its quite sad actually to come so close to an earth finally being born in '68 after millenniums of gestation only in the last push to be given over to corporate greed and to be filleted into massive marketing schemes that devour the soul.
My father was a 2 qt. a day alcoholic, where did he have the authority to tell me how to live my life. He's a good image in the extreme of the baby boomer generation that had a total rebellion involving a cistern of drugs. They were brought up under Ike, and Levittown, and they created a society even more restrictive than the values of their parents. The hippies didn't learn a thing. All their beliefs in free love, they denied their children any sensibility of love and left the job up to the educational system.


I say System, you know the Man, the thing they were never going to be. My father wanted to become an artist, ends up a Regan loving real estate broker, salesman with a flare for being a fascist. It is an entire generation of sellouts and Swine.


I only met one man later on in my life, actual guru perhaps, who didn't sellout in one way or another and didn't organize his life like the host of ghouls who gave me an education. He got the 60's as much as I got 'on the road', he understood love and civil rights, and war and he's still a hippie and always will be. Most of all because he finds the intrinsic value of love that supercedes and is most definitive of life. He is one of the few and disappearing band.


There was a group of girls I was friendly with who had parents who were a part of the hippie fallout they were involved in a local co-op, real natural types- crock of shit. The most unloving, distorted, dysfunctional, and wealthy families I ever witnessed. One of the fathers was involved in corrections and always away. Hypocrites.


How we processed all this was at certain age and given the gumption to utterly revolt against all systems of governing, all institutions, all Pride these conventions all crumble in complete shameful limp impotence. You see you're to young to persecute yet, ha. It's a special kind of achievement and a great high that my friends and me all felt by our senior year (What the Fuck, your Young go! go! go! for it all). By that time the heat was on our ass, you know the old game from early puritan America 'lets burn those bad kids'� up through to liberal middle class America that mark is still there you see it in the aging eyes on the street you see in the cop heart you see it in NRA members and convenience store clerks watching out for a lift -the gig is up at the end of that fried wick, you know its time to disappear to fade into blurry impressionist landscapes for a while and let things cool down or they'll drop the hammer right on you and you'll become a corrections statistic, you know it, you feel it in your spine- good god flee that depraved indifference! Great numbers of respected law enforcement looking to strip you down and make you spread your cheeks- sick bastards they are. The Banality of Evil just like the camps comin' your way on a freight line- straight!


Vignette: Out running cops in a rusted Snoob, back seat bloody, busted nose and debauched worse than others, loud, working with yellow gas station napkins. Ditch beer; hang out for little while hidden in the trees, let the adrenaline dissipate. Everyone radiating- Regroup, pull out, cops went screaming by, red lights of hate, 20 minutes ago, we'll just find another way home, always end up in my own bed somehow. Ass considers going back for ditched beer plenty of liquor. Really high by now do this again tomorrow.

Some went west, found jobs, found out how much they didn't get along with each other, returned sedate and able to drink legally, some went my route went to college and took up space as my uncle liked to call it- its funny all you learn is this total cultural arc of a challenge to authority and convention but once universities get their chalky hands on it and it gets institutionalized it becomes just more dusty lace in a drawer. Every recess of what is understood as a soul is wiped out at the end of four years as steady as the proliferation of nuclear arms in the cold war. In fact the entire educational process is a nuclear fallout that wipes clean all things living, when you're done you're a wasteland ' 'have a nice life kid'. I asked this question so often: is this the way to fulfill the American dream or any dream for that matter- its all askew?


my teenage years and how they were not anymore compassionate or progressive than the 1950's indicates to this writer a flaw in man and the American dream. The dominance of the valueless American dollar that now gains priority over all areas of existence to the point where emotional problems are solved with material solutions. People cease to be human to one another, fragmentation increases. Few take a chance on the inclinations of their own heart. The heart is what connects us all- our humanity is reduced every year with a new profiteering war. You think well that's politics that's not us. We are politics- without a culture there is no politics, without concern for our situation Moloch rules the world, as he seems to do. Kids kill themselves and I ask why


Kids need love that's a reality; this world grows more loveless and more apathetic every passing year. The world in general doesn't believe in the practicality of love or compassionate existence that's a reality and a flaw in man. Money, position, indoctrination takes precedence over being human to each other.
On that campus surrounded by kids concerned about how their resume will look or teacher certification- AHHHH! HELP! This is no dream it's a nightmare created a massive governmental bureaucracy and irresponsible media structures its all been bought up and sold and the American dream along with it. All these concerns for a good financial standing, good pension, or a good credit rating ' what was formerly thought of as slavery is now accepted and defined as the most liberating condition of the American character. The flag has not only been burned it has been used as toilet paper by neo-cons and right-wingers all out for the fast best buck. These wrinkled men with their scotch pickled livers and golf course deals put a shroud over what America could have been- hell the architects would have figured on a handful of revolutions by now.


The heart has been removed from everything it's a hell where what is most needed can never be had. It's all on the brink. Sit back, grab a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and watch this Precipice of Doom.


What's most important about this monologue on adolescent revolt is that we were only seeking to know a form of knowledge that no institution in the west seems to want to accept or legitimize. I could safely say that the teachers of the Western tradition fell off the mark as Burroughs said 'Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside'�.


There is a stain in American teaching, a sad illusioned suspension of disbelief. We sit there chained to a lousy desk, captive to the facts and anecdotes that do not raise our souls or inspire a compassionate attitude, instead we are trained like junkyard dogs to sink into the mire and be effective thugs and thieves ' and to enjoy it. If your lucky you've got a discursive intellect that disposes you not to fade into the faceless American mass that seems to devour purity at the rate of 10 gram a day addict. Today the era of war and the end age of the American civilization that has budded with a lifeless momentum to destroy the soul will end. A few have cried out in the desert but their echoes become ever more distant, ever more a whimper for those who can hear.


Madness reigns in a land founded on a reasonable approach to organizing society, independence is not flawed irresponsibility is. What happens to kids is a crime. They're given nothing but new cell phones and trips to the mall to fill a vacuous whole within themselves. Where is the Heart? ' The Heart is what people need but are denied in these fallen decadent States.


Dante had a poignancy for these kind of scenes that are closing in on us, very descriptive of the culture that America, you and me, pulsate with - a fathering of mediocre minds and pursuits that Nietzsche warned us of ' 'who are these people defeated by their pain?' And he said to me 'this miserable way is taken by the sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace or praise. They now commingle with the coward angels, those who were not rebels nor faithful to their God' '�

* * *


So, these are the adults that groomed me with their unresolved fears and their catatonic hearts that they call giving me a good start I say it's a bad end. After a college education stored housed with false beliefs, at that point it seemed to me that after this plethora of socializing institutions had their tawdry way with me like a man in his late fifties grabbin' your ass there was a certainty that my life was mine, finally, and nobody else's.


This new dawn or consciousness was created, the reality of adulthood. It was a consciousness where there existed a total emancipation from all the snares- totally, all the older generations' lessons and preaching of how I should live my life as well as an entire abyss of responsibility for what a human life on earth is- it was all my game now. I reached the ambivalence, unadvised of this new life I had and really didn't understand any of it at all. My whole massive culture with all its constructions of authority my parents my teachers my professors, hell even TV told me that without an education I sunk, a bum, a loser- I must be professional.


So I went through all that shit only to find my self not knowing a fucking thing that could get me through the American Night. Oscar Wilde was right 'Nothing worth knowing can be learned in school' or at least it seemed so to me.

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