seeker – Brunomad

Doubt Breeds Strength

Where to begin?

I hear it. Those reverberating beats of guitar, drums, and keyboard before the onslaught of lyrics eviscerates my reality. That booming voice; a war god howling his rage and frustration. Deutschland. Again and again, repeated for emphasis, to show just how important it is for the listener to pay attention – to take fucking note. Ah, battle ne’er sounded so angrily beautiful. This euphoric assault upon the senses, bringing one to realization that the world is far vaster, far more important, than whate’er miniscule problems one might think they understand.

This is music. Continue reading “Doubt Breeds Strength”

1500 Words of Pompous Arrogance (And Teaching)

Smoke. How I love watching it curl into the night air. Gray against the blackness of the dim night. Stars peeking out from behind the somber clouds, their faint light further obscured by the emanating ember of my fingertips, by the plumes I exhale upon vodka-tainted breath.

Ah, if only the kids knew what I was really like outside the classroom.

It has been a spell, certainly, dear reader(s), and I can run through my numerous excuses as to why I haven’t put finger to keyboard in some time. Certainly, my personal journal is stained in all manner of mad scribbles (courtesy of a sexy, new fountain pen), but I find myself lacking – wanting – when it comes time to pen things for my poor, beleaguered blog.

Inspiration; when did she desert me?

Teaching, I suppose, has consumed my day-to-day Life, as I find myself in a constant battle to keep ahead of grading (like the Germans in world wars, I consistently lose) and I oft struggle to present new information in an interesting, and engaging, manner. Wearing a bathrobe to work helps, but woe to the new teacher forced into a dull curriculum that focuses on teaching-for-the-test and not on critical thinking.

To which I respond: fuck that.

Continue reading “1500 Words of Pompous Arrogance (And Teaching)”

Lest You Become a Monster Yourself

Hey there folks,

Here’s where I make a typical excuse about how I’m pressed for time due to being a tired teacher with no recourse from grading an e’er growing mound of papers and spending all my free hours volunteering about the school. How difficult it is, then, to be a poor, beleaguered teacher beset on all side by obligations.

Hot damn; I love my job.

Continue reading “Lest You Become a Monster Yourself”

Writer’s Block

or How I learned to Abhor the Dollar

(This post is best read to the tune of Rage Against the Machine.)

Damnable thing, that; just when you think you’ve got yourself a brilliant idea to write about, you sit your pathetic ass down and try to hammer out something worthwhile in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, if you throw enough proverbial shit at the wall some of it will stick in a coherent enough pattern to justify calling it writing.

Christ, no wonder writers end up starving or blowing their brains out.

Trying to monetize my mad ramblings – who would pay money for this shit anyway? – is perhaps my greatest Sisyphean task, and one I frequently and mistakenly indulge with all-nighters of booze and tobacco, thinking that this one is the one to catapult me to success.

And after sobering up the following morning afternoon, I give it a laugh. Oh, how I am a creature of predictable habit!

“You think too much,” I’ve oft been told; and how damningly true is the accusation leveled! What did Bukowski have to say about writing?

“Don’t try.” And these are words to live by.

My on-again off-again editor (and using that term loosely here) said it best when I asked him to review some of my latest poems I was peddling for submission. “Artistic integrity,” he laughingly said. “Die in obscurity; that’s the only way to preserve it.” He struck a chord of clarity with that remark: why bother chasing dollar signs when I should be writing for writing’s sake?

After much introspection, booze, tobacco, fatigue, and ink upon the page, it is decided he’s absolutely right. Maxwell, you wonderful kike, you’ve nailed it like Christ to the Cross.

Let’s be clear: I’m no professional and don’t plan on achieving such status. I’m not half bad with a pen (so I’m told) and the hacked state of most publications these days indicates I probably could achieve some sort of fame as a professional writer.

Provided I sell myself out, of course, to the Almighty Dollar. People tend to like vulgarity in their blog posts, paving the way for a book deal, which leads to a movie deal, which leads to death by selling out and cocaine. And if there’s one thing you can take away from Ozzy, let it be that money ain’t success: the truth is inconvenient.

Be a travel writer! they say. You go on so many adventures, surely someone would pay you to write about it!

Perhaps, but that profession is bought and sold like cattle at auction. You want to write whilst on the move and make a buck doing so? Well fuckin’ a right! You certainly can provided you advertise featured products. I do love traveling, as we all know, but I’d rather starve than shoehorn in an article about how fantastic these Hiking Shoes™ are when doing so.

And I’m pretty fucking good at starving.

It’s no secret that the majority of published material these days is written with an ulterior motive: for the piece of rubbish to end up on the big screen as a giant shit show of a poor adaptation for the sole purpose of raking in the dough of suckers who ever after debate which medium expressed the author’s intent best.

That’s why we have “literature” like Fifty Shades of Gray, Twilight, and the shit clinging to the arid ass cheeks of Nicholas Sparks defining our generation’s literary contributions. Again, I’m no professional, but come on folks: if this shit continues to be published and publicized what happens to the real authors who are actually trying to make the world a better place with their words?

Sellouts are rolling around in their Scrooge McDuck money piles whilst the genuine artists are faced with a horrid decision: keep up the good fight and die in obscurity, or join the herd and feed yourself exotic sushi off an even more exotic Asian babe.

And lemme tell you folks, after having almost married an exotic Asian babe, it ain’t worth it.

Comrades, keep up the fight. Die in obscurity whilst sticking to your morals and guns. Write for writing’s sake and let no one persuade you to give it all up because “this could be a blockbuster.” You’re better than that. We’re better than that.

Fuck you; I won’t do what you tell me.

Paper Towns

There’s a notch in the fence where a board has given way; a three-inch indention in the warped wood; the perfect amount of space to put a beer. Allows one to take a drag from a cigarette whilst simultaneously running one’s fingers through their hair, taking in the beauty of suburbia – that singular moment to contemplate and concern.

Yes, even suburbia can be beautiful, if one merely takes the time to admire.

The euphoria of finishing a book from cover to cover as lazy, gray smoke lists playfully about in the calm air; a feeling with few compatriots.

You can hear the laughter of neighborhood children as they chase one another up and down the block, giving Life to their still undaunted imaginations. Innocence before the misery of Real Life comes crashing through like a maddened bull against a Spanish matador, horns raised, red flashing, cheering crowds, and the abject danger of Man versus Beast as a single misstep can spell either victory or crushing defeat.

Apt.

An apt metaphor for Life.

The beer teeters precariously in a sudden breeze, the old wood shaking ever so gently at the nudging of Zephyr. But it doesn’t fall – of course not. The beer – the stimulus – that can never fall.

Tobacco and paper burn together as they are inhaled inward. In a few moments, the delightful toxins are expelled in a plume of smoke and sigh of satisfaction. A swig of swill washes the acrid taste down.

You can look through the glass door and see the piles. Stacks of them, haphazardly arranged as if Ajax and Hector were tossing their Trojan boulders about, hopelessly aiming to slay one another with but a well-placed stone, always missing their mark and adding to the battlefield Chaos.

Monuments of knowledge and history and philosophy and warfare and womanizing and politics and chivalry and poetry and madness and tales and myths and legends. Thrown about the room as if Katrina had worked her mischievous way to the bowels of Paper Town, New Mexico, her mighty gales picking up each stack and depositing them about the place without reason. What use had Nature – Knowledge – for Reason?

In a structured Life of Order and Balance, the piles were anything but. They represented the face one cannot show the world: this is me.

These, philosophically gesturing to the askew piles, are me.

Where the heretical mix with the orthodox and the deviant with the pristine. Where the drunkard laughs along with the teetotaler, while the Muses sing songs of poverty and richness to the tune of iambic pentameter and spontaneous prose. Where the traveler on the road is met by Logic and Reason but quickly accosted by Imagination and Stream of Consciousness. This unstructured Chaos, this ode to madness, these, these! These very piles – this is me.

Books, of course.

Piles of them.

Books still in boxes. Books in bookcases, in bookshelves, on the coffee table, on the kitchen table, on the writing desk, on the painting desk, on the record player, the laptop, the sofa, the nightstand, the bed, the kitchen counters. Books in piles thrown about the place in absolutely every room, growing here and there by the day, an escape, an outlet, to worlds far more intriguing than the one of laughing suburban children.

Tomes filled with dangerous thoughts and ideas, of sexual deviancy and extreme piety. Books on obscure characters – lost to Time – with even more obscure authors. Books from the modern era and books from before. Spines broken and unglued (the work of many a sleepless night) with pages scribbled upon in minute handwriting. Here and there a few pages – hundreds? A dozen? – missing completely, but others supplemented by indexes of numerous pages.

Now that you’ve read this, they whisper, read that.

It is like hosting a massive party with every person you have ever met. Not everyone at this party will be similar, indeed, even tolerable of one another, but here they are. Gathered under one roof for one mighty bacchanalia of insight and introspection. Every famous and obscure author sending their second to represent them in this dusty hole of a town where the host is just as damningly confusing as his guest list.

Dark now; when in blazes did it become dark?

He reaches for the beer tucked away in the safety of the rotten wood, but it crashes to the ground before he can place his grip.

The contents splash about the yard – overgrown – and the laughter of children has now given way to the still of the night. How long can one be lost in their imagination? Ballast; where is the ballast?

He turns, looking through the glass door. A ha! He chuckles to himself. That’s where you’ve been hiding, my love.

The euphoria of knowledge becomes the best high, the thrill of turning the page the most alluring conquest. The desire for understanding becoming the stimulus.

People. Work. Taxes. Phones. Electronics. All meaningless. All paper. All blinding him to the crests of the mountains he’s built for himself to climb.

Seeker, he hears – a chilling whisper upon the silent wind. When did you stop Seeking?

I’m Going Nomad

Hey there folks,

It’s been quite the spell hasn’t it? I have half a dozen veritable excuses I could use to satiate my claims of inadequacy, but in truth, none of them really matter. The fact is I’ve been neglecting my poor blog in favor of the tenuous here and now – and, shame, that just isn’t my proper style. What sort of wandering vagabond am I if I can scarcely keep a blog updated, eh?

Things have been quite tumultuous on my end, what, with the moving back to Lovington, taking up residence as a local English teacher, and trying to juggle my new work schedule, academic career, and personal Life all in one go. And here I thought I had mastered time management. Joke’s on me, because time is a fictional concept and you cannot master fiction.

Despite my faults (which exist purely because of my own machinations), I am acclimating well to things I reason. Forsooth, I heartily enjoy teaching English – that should’ve been a given considering my penchant for arguing and being a pompous ass when it comes to literature and opinions. And Lord knows if you’ve ever argued with me I don’t back down in the face of Reason too readily.

Yet my writing Life has certainly taken a most severe blow within these past few months. To be fair (which it isn’t), moving back to Lovington was a burden. But that was accomplished in little over a week (thanks, Po – you’re the best). And acclimating myself to the new teaching gig has been rather touch and go at times. Just when I feel I get the hang of things, the local Umbridge brings the thunder and I’m back to drowning in a heap of acronyms, paperwork, and children with banal questions. Yes, you put your goddamned name on every assignment; stop asking.

Even as I write this post, I am unsure of its completion. And if you’re reading this, hot damn, that means I finally finished a fucking draft for the first time in months. True, my personal journal is stained heavily in fountain pen ink (with my distinctive script), but it is indeed a far cry from keeping up with my blog. I’m paying for this damned thing, right, so I might as well write something worthy of note.

And here we are, for something has compelled me to write tonight, or rather, some people.

A couple weeks ago, a Camino Comrade of mine happened to be in the area on account of business. And by in the area I mean within two hours of me, which, as any red-or-green blooded New Mexican will attest, is close by. Despite it being a school night (still getting used to that again) and having a slew of grading, lesson plans, and my own academics to fret over, I saddled up after classes let out and made my way to the grand city of Andrews, Tejas. Despite my reluctance to ever visit that dread land of faux-Cowboys e’er again, this woman was well worth the voyage.

And so the two of us – having last met back in April in Missouri – dined over steak fingers and Cokes (no booze; damned dry city) and caught one another up on the shenanigans we’ve been up to since attending hospitalero training way back when. And I must say, how delightfully refreshing it was to simply spend a couple hours with an old friend. Truth, we had only spent about a week together in person, but Camino, as we all know, is simply like that: making eternal friends can take as little as a chance buen camino.

We sat in her car, chain smoking and bullshitting, reminiscing about this and that, and speaking of our desires to once more rejoin the Way and how we planned on achieving that. We spoke of our mutual comrades with whom we had both visited this past year, of our singular encounters with others from our hospitalero group, and the significant moments in our respective Lives from encounter the last.

She remarked upon the blog, how she really enjoyed my “sermon” to the Presbyterian flock of yesteryear, and I recall beaming with pride in the darkened vehicle, the ember of my cigarette dangling from my lip the only tell-tale sign of warmth across my face. Though my biggest critic and always downplaying praise, it touched me to know I had made an impact.

“You should write an anthology,” she said. “I think you’d be great at it.”

I’d be damned if I said my heart wasn’t aflutter at that kind suggestion.

Forsooth, comrades, there is something to be said in the mere innocence of it all. To simply sit there in plumes of smoke, watching the night sky take shape as the sun sets, and speaking from one soul to another. As I drove the hour and a half back to my new lodgings, how I wished I could merely keep driving and continue the great journey ever onward, to forever seek out such companionship and understanding, to keep the high.

Stephanie, I am eternally in your debt for shaking me awake. For reminding me that my Life isn’t meant to be forever in one place tied down to any single notion of reality. For indeed, reality is what we determine it to be.

And my reality has always been on the road.

But that moment of friendly bliss was soon swallowed whole by the new Life I had crafted about myself. Schooling is no joke – my evenings are oft dedicated to keeping ahead of my classes. My days are entirely devoted to my newfound charges – they may curse my name and workload at the present but I’ve hope for the future. And my personal Life – that damnable thing I can never quite put right – goes through the motions of ups and downs.

As a dark cloud swallows the sun in the encroaching storm, so too was my brief moment with Stephanie in danger of being eclipsed by my own machinations of realistic defeatism.

Yet Fate, comrades, had yet to abandon me completely.

Today, as my red pen flew across scores of comma splices and words in need of capitalization, my phone chirped the familiar sound of a message received. And there, though she didn’t know it at the time, came a familiar face with some much-needed words of encouragement.

“Hey Bruno!” she began. “Miss your posts!”

My dear Stacey – how powerfully wrought were these simple words.

We chatted for a bit – apparently, I may be considered a Subject Matter Expert on all things Grado (adding that to the resume) – about her upcoming writing responsibilities and the Gathering of Pilgrims outside Atlanta next month. Although I didn’t tell her at the time (indeed, I wasn’t quite so sure of it myself initially), her innocent comment had knocked something loose. It reminded me of my brief dinner with Stephanie, of the potential I had to actually put pen to paper and write.

To write, dammit.

That inspiration. That nugget of wisdom. The kernel of truth. Whatever euphemism you need, whatever you call it, to begin writing. And to write in earnest. And here we are now, dear reader, a full 1000 words later, writing about things that may seem trivial to the casual observer, but which mean oh so much to me and my flying fingers and racing pen.

Perhaps it’s the copious amounts of booze I’ve ingested. Maybe the plentiful amount of cigarettes smoked. Or the thought that tomorrow I could very well be hungover in a highly stressful job but without a single care to my name. Maybe the reverberating sounds of angry Finnish death metal within my addled skull. Whatever it is – whatever name we wish to call it – some cobwebs have been batted away, the dust scoured clean, and the writer once more unleashed unto himself.

Indulge me, comrades, for your Nomad has returned.

In parting, may I recite my absolute favorite bit of Passion Proof Power, a casual reminder that I am my own Fate, and that no matter what: I am fucking crazy, but I am free.

I Am
You Are
No One’s Slave
No Man or God They Have Made

Limping Along (Part III)

Hey there folks,

I’m currently in the midst of what I call a Dark Day – that is, where the depression seems stronger than normal. I’m literally sitting in an ivory tower, watching the pristine ocean fade away into nothingness, cold beer in hand: and I feel nothing.

Guess it’s time to write, eh?

As you recall, I am in the midst of giving my testimony to a group of college-aged kids in Chile. You can read the first part here and the second here. If that tickles your fancy, go ahead and give them a read, then return here for part three of the Limping Along series:

On Camino the First and Revelations Aplenty

Editor’s Note – I’m pretty certain I didn’t go into this much detail when I spoke the testimony, but, again, the story might change but the message is the same.

Continue reading “Limping Along (Part III)”

Master of Two Worlds

Hey there folks,

Forgive my lack of posts and updates for the bulk of my time is devoted to the pilgrims at the albergue here in Grado. Plenty of time to jot down thoughts in my journal, but bangin’ out a bitchin’ blog post is much more difficult. I’m not even mad; this gig is such a welcome chapter of my Life. And soon, my Life will change yet again for the better. I go from one happy moment to the next – yes, Life is good.

But you didn’t come here to read about how much I’m enjoying Life and brimming with excitement for Our future. If you’ll allow me, curious reader, let me tell you about being a hospitalero.

Continue reading “Master of Two Worlds”

Poor Grendel’s Had an Accident

Hey there folks,

If you’re familiar with existential literature (which you should be, peasant) then you’ll recognize the title of this post comes from John Gardner’s brilliant piece, Grendel, which, if I really had to pick a favorite book, would definitely be a contender for that moniker.

Exceptional book, Grendel; creates such a sympathetic anti-hero and makes you think – the hallmark of great literature. This post will make a lot more sense if you’ve read Gardner’s novel; otherwise, you’ll just think I’m nuts.

What? I can’t enjoy philosophy too?

What are you getting at, you loon? I hear you say to an empty room. Well who’s the loon now?

Meat and potatoes, comin’ right up. And might I recommend you give this a listen as thou read: Dark Paradise

Continue reading “Poor Grendel’s Had an Accident”

It’s -My- Camino (And Other Stupid Things)

Hey there folks,

I actually wrote this last week but didn’t feel it appropriate to post until I felt it necessary.

Before I buggered off on San Salvador without telling a Soul – what a heart-wrenching, foolish mistake that was – I stayed in the monastery in Leon. And here I am again, having successfully completed this pristine Way, mostly intact and in good health. And once more, nestled amongst them in their hundreds, I realize just how much I can grow to dislike pilgrims.

On the day I started San Salvador, I left Leon rather late by Camino standards – half past 7 – even though I was awoken at 5 by those goddamned bed chasers. You’d think we were all forced to sleep outside, this constant hustle and bustle so many pilgrims concern themselves with. As if the beds evaporate overnight, and everything becomes completo at approximately 11.

Christ, pilgrims, get your shit together.

Oh, yes, this is a rant. A rant against those who are here on the Way by not being here on the Way. If you think this might apply to you, even in the slightest, then, yeah, it’s probably about you. You’re That Guy.

Continue reading “It’s -My- Camino (And Other Stupid Things)”