Mount Pai
Pitter-patter.
I’m getting really worked up about onomatopoeias. How they rarely sound like their intended phonetics. How other languages have their own that read as incomprehensible to my primitive English-speaking ears. How arbitrary it all is. I am doing this to ignore the imagined scenario where my eyeballs are getting stabbed out.
Culebra Peak sits at the northwestern ridge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of the Rockies. It’s the highest privately owned peak on Earth. Former Enron executive Lou Pai once owned the property, now owned by William Harrison, a man whose real estate and energy dealings rival his infamous compatriot. I often think about Pai, a figure who unlike Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, got away with insider trading by selling all his Enron stock early. He was both a shrewd if quiet businessman and a legendary hound, with reports from Houston strip club proprietors that he spent millions on dancers. He later got married to one.
When I die I request that my ashes are spread at Culebra, even if my familial descendants must pay the Cielo Vista Ranch $150 each to do so. I have to pay my respects to Lou Pai. The scammer who got away. Not maligned like Madoff, or reviled like Epstein, or forever tarnished like the Sacklers. Pure, clean base impulse for the love of the game. Because every good deed I do is predicated on its reciprocation. And when I die, I will cash out all my chips and take what is owed.
Every sensation you’ve ever felt is the first time you’ve felt it before. Your brain betrays you, it is not your friend. Ground yourself unto the material world lest you become a prisoner of rapaciousness, desire and longing odiously controlling you. Solipsism does you nothing. You keep worrying about identity. Farce. Sham. Get real. There’s a pit there and there’s keep going to be a pit, so mind your fucking business. And each and every time I keep sweating and shaking and feel every nerve in my body lose its sensation I am willing myself to be as gregarious and self-effacing as possible because that is the only way I ever knew I was alive. But anyway ha ha enough about me how was Paris?
There is a moment in Tristan Funkhouser’s “Deep Fried” part for Baker that I cannot get out of my head. This gnarly-looking bank that he hits with no hesitation. It’s not novel for him—indeed, it’s his brand, an unwavering commitment to bombing, dropping, and twisting his way into the most unhinged spots possible. Rather, his effortlessness is stark. He hits that shit in one swift, glorious measure, a sort of ineffable poetry. The recklessness in which he puts his body on the line defies belief; one could say there’s a heroism in it. Funkhouser stands as aspirational because it is precisely by which I am so scared of doing anything so dangerous to myself that I have become a victim of my own making. In opposition to the physical, this too, is self-harm.
I see a girl running down a hill, face filled with tears and runny mascara, and I keep wondering whether it’s because of her drug-induced psychosis, but I keep it pushing. I have a mind to tell her that it’s fine, you know you still look good there’s a dignity in being so discomposed, it’s unbecoming to be put together all the time. When the devil leaves my body, I wisen up and sit on a bench to take it all in. You’re going to miss it when you’re gone, you know.