The Goblin Within

It was so long ago, now that my life has moved on in so many ways. I was worried about sweating too much on my lunch break. We were trying to build an exhibition in Little Tokyo, right near Al's Bar in downtown LA. The Temporary Contemporary, the place I existed at the time was the gutter-child of M.O.C.A., the Museum of Contemporary Art. I once sniffed by accident there hydrochloric acid in the back room serving as a workshop, causing my lungs to freeze up; I once had a flake of metal flicker down from my stringy blond hair, as I flung it about, into my cornea after grinding bars in front of an international artist's ode to contemporary art; and I once played a pickup game with Willem Defoe, on a court designed by Jonathan Borofsky to illustrate the ongoing Cold War between Russia and the USA. We were so young, back then, and we were so isolated and insane. Being young is a thing which lives on in memory, but changes slightly as we remember the things we'd done; being young is both fleeting and permanent, a thing which sings its own praise down into our realm—being young. 

The actor agreed to cover me as we pranced and danced across the concrete floor, me wearing work-boots and him in huaraches slapping across the floor. He was shorter than me, by a lot, so it made sense that he was overly aggressive as we flamencoed to and fro. The game was over before it began, as he was famous and I was just tall. His elbow dug in at every turn, his face grinning like a goblin, but long before Spiderman battled him on the silver screen, and long before his story was done. The other players in our scrabble looked on as I struggled against the goblin, a real demon built by popular acclaim. I sensed their compassion as I worked it, driving down the court. They knew the outcome, as did I. The goblin could hit the rim, score a point or two, and live in the world we inhabited till its end. The goblin knew how to move and how to dodge, which he did to avoid my long reach, smothering his shot time and again; but, the goblin just knew how to live, how to push into the world, making the void unmade. 

He pivoted and slashed across the court. I stumbled and wobbled, my long legs like a spider's vibrating in angst. Driving down the center, with a few gyrations to fool, I tried but the goblin scored again and again. His grin was all-hell as he prided himself upon me, sauntering back down the court as it shrunk before him. I can still hear the slowing of sandals from his walk, slip-slapping on the concrete slab. I had lost the match; and he knew it, too. I was just a worker building other's art in the back-room of a facade to society, a facade to our modern world, while he was obviously the star of the show. The match was made, we both signed on for it, and only then did reality begin to unfold.

I've watched the goblin's rise from afar now, way afar, from middle-earth, the Middle East, and only now I see him as a mere man. I look on to the progress I can tell, one film at a time, and I can only see me looking back into the void of hell. I see me looking back at myself, and then again back at me standing alone. We only see one-another from the lens of ourselves. And yes, we can only hope and pray that the universe knows what we have seen, what we inherently know: that we are all One; yeah, we can all tell. The plain truth is simple: Although we are all One, we live within time and as it unfolds, we experience both life and hell, we experience, over time, everything and absolutely all.