Sonata Epistaxis

I am in high spirits as I’ve just doused my brain with a boatload of caffeine, and now will relate to you in the most roundabout and senselessly obscure of ways, with myriad digressions and saliva-inducing moments, something that happened to me about four years ago, back when I could still drink whisky all night and not suffer horrible suicidal consequences the following morning. From the fucking shores of Tripoli, my friend. Ah. But it was not the first time I’d broken furniture. No. I’ve punched my fists through and kicked over my share of coffee tables and the likes. Buying brokenness? Hardly, hardly, hardly. It doesn’t take tulips in the glove compartment to drive the final nail in. It’s more of an accretion, of becoming unmoored to the rhythms and conditions of everyday life. My temper’s as short as you’d live shot into outer space with no spacesuit. Entropic concerns notwithstanding, well, plug, plug, plug. Ever the mind wanders, huh? Got a light? Ya, ya, ya, ya. Dank Cha. Muchos. So, there’s this only, well, once-in-a-…….decade? Maybe. Something more than less often than cockroaches die. So, then there’s this guy leaning against the railing on the balcony. He’s doing a great impression of a trapeze artist or something. This guy? Well, he seems like he’s about to go plummeting ass-over-weedwhacker to the floor. I don’t want this to happen, you know? Who would? I mean, I’m like you and me, and me and you, and all of us, and we all go in for the same types of dismantling gestures from time to time, right? Where there’s this feeling called loathe, and lisping doesn’t squirt mustard at the speed of light. Well, we all get down with the times in the now and now. And playing comeback is better from behind a windscreen. Cigarettes and my old lady. Yep. So, there’s this kink in the fixations of my wayward loopiness that’s catching me off guard here and there. But, be sure, I will continue. Oh. And let me tell you all about the bar. You know, it was one of those Thomas-Pynchon type places. They’re showing a subtitled 50’s sci-fi B-movie on a wall, and the bartenders are dressed like doofuses, and they’re slobs to boot. I’m pleased as a prince though. I’m trotting around and picking my boxers out of my ass without any self-consciousness at all. Surfers and boombox salesgirls in bandanas were wandering in and out. Purity had jet out of style. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, getting broadsided was imminent. A garage-band cover of Neil Diamond’s Solitary Man blasted. I couldn’t think of anyone who was having a birthday. I made haste for the potty station. Traffic of bodies in motion was crowding things up, and I was slithering through it all like a man in nothing but slippers and an overcoat, which is exactly what I was not wearing. In fact, if truth be known, I was duded up in golf-ball print Parachute Pants, a salmon-colored cowboy shirt with scared horses on the front, horn-rimmed sunglasses, brogued beige monk shoes, and a newspaper hat. Let’s all look at me folks. Look at me! Look at me! I’m weird. See? That kind of thing, you know? Any old how, let’s butter up some bacon and get this show on the go. Tempestuous gargling aside, I was trunking along a whole sheep herd of gewgaws and frown-weather inhibitions, so I wanted to, well, wake myself up a bit before I go-go’d. Playing catch-up with sleep is a battered slurping affair, and I showboated about it ‘til the band banged out the blues into reds and yellows, but the concoctions of better-off-dead weren’t wearing off so well, and, as if you really need to know, I was mustering up my pain threshold for the becomings of blotto. Grew up too slow. Got frazzled on the streets of Chicago for 11 days when it was doing nothing but rain. And now? Well, now I’m more afraid of trains than planes. That about sums it all up. Letter’s in the mail, you know, that kind of thing. So, I’m wailing on the inside, creeping along with duct tape covering up my wounds, and I dash off for a spell into the bathroom, where there’s running water, of course, and I make nice with the sink, and I rinse off my face and arms, ogle my features in the mirror, flat-out refuse to make exceptions when it comes to paper towels and soap, and then I’m all bug-eyed and awash in adjectival phrases, reflecting mood music from the whispers inside of my skull. I was making history. I was listlessly aware. So, move over Colonel Swanky, I’m parking my Chevrolet spirits right outside the door. Hold the door motherfucker? You know? Well, that’s the way it don’t go sometimes. It just don’t. I was starting to suspect that I never’d get my bearings back. Then it was, “Look out!” I mean, well, more like, “Wait here, please. I will have a silver trophy for you shortly, and, I give you my word, it’ll look swell on your chrome mantel.” Don’t get me wrong. I wash up after wiping my ass and all, but there’s just a Psychadelic Western movie playing in my head that’s more mean than moral, and also less normal than I’d originally thought it to be. Yep. Gobble it up, buddy. If it might be a rental purchased from the clutches of armchair mathematicians, alone, thinking and drinking, following the tail of nature around the corner to the nearest Catholic Church, or maybe a classy wheelchair, well, that’d be the slices-of-bread of the thing, wouldn’t it? Wise up. Get a corner to do your whimpering in. I give up a thousand times a day, sure. But I keep trying. Who cares about mustard-colored bananas anyway? I am not the hand-wrung colors of grief. I am not wilting, at least not in the knees. So the dolorous music plays, and I care a little bit about all the crabbing going on. The bar’s filled with jealousy and motorboat kindness. The sure-footed are on the balcony, and they’re cutting everybody breaks, and the floor’s got a bad case of jaundice. I fix my flat and swear my way out of a few conversations with almost-strangers. My eyes are x-ray machines. It was a sweetheart of a deal, cardboard style. You know that song Battle Hymn Of The Republic? Well, I prefer the Ellstein & Rechtzeit Yiddish version myself. But, at the time, with a plaid-coated vision of the propositions abounding, what I’m gunning for is a timely recounting of whether or not this song’s got sex appeal. So, I started humming the damn thing, and pretty soon I’m messing around with the words too. Mrs. Howe wrote them in her sleep, basically, and apparently didn’t even glance at the paper once while she was at it. A bit of inspired somnambulism to say the least. But that’s a paperclip’s load of pure bickering, if you hold all of your appointments and really do some recon. Jon Brown’s body ain’t rising from the grave anytime soon. And look, I was trespassing in truth’s realm at the time, and all this glory, glory, hallelujah and marching on was just more jabber to add to the pasta primavera sloshing around in my thoughts. Dying to make people free is not always so valiant. Let me tell you, I’ve buttered my bread with the gestures of being facetiously nice from time to time. Cop to it? Sure. The nuances of gypping weasels out of their unfair share is appling the orange of conviction, which I swear is my wont, especially on days spent shredding postcards and scissoring diamond-shaped holes into my socks. Well. You get the whole causality of my instance here. My ideas were morally bankrupt, and, at least in that instant’s Time Present, situational prurience was on the wane. So, then suddenly, and this is all pre-balcony, there’s this guy in wingtips with golf gloves on and he’s saying, “Hello. I’m here to talk to you about your life.” I found it strange that he said, “talk to you,” instead of, “talk with you.” His hair is like wet brown clay. Talking to myself, clueing my ears into what’s what, I fought off the impetuous urge to clean up shop and take my hassles out on this hoe-nest chair-ick-ter who was licking his chops to sway my at-attention salute towards his ship’s shore. I tripped over an ice cube. I thought about the girl in grammar school who always fainted. We called her The Fainting Girl. Vastly underrated as a stunner, she was. So, there’s this not-too-bright place that my mind kept dwelling in, and then there’s this momentum that tips and borrows addresses, this sinister-notioned thing, and it kept meeting up with my love at gas stations and bird stores. Lump me in with the corny. That’ll save a date or two. Or at least imprecate what fondness has now come to represent. Until then I’m, or was, cheating the night out of its moments. But this guy, this greaseball of a waiter’s uncle, he’s got some serious business to attend to with regards to me. He’s claptrapping at me big time. He’s going on about my wayfaring nature, the holes in my head letting sappiness drift in, and he’s even giving me grief about my overcoat being in not-too-top-shape. The landmass of me was flopping over beneath a mound of horror at what I’d so carelessly become. Griping wasn’t going to do any good. Maybe a beheading would’ve helped. There’s not a tinge of happenstance round those parts. It’s all over-hard eggs and church bells tolling If I Were A Rich Man. Kind of helps to stare back though. So I did. Glared right into those pea-sized eyes of his, made my mark, left the working parts of me for Good House Keeping to clean up. Casseroles of my cares put up Gone Fishing signs and spilt. These things I sort of hold to be other-evident, and by looking I made up my mind to splatter-proof my soul. This slimy specimen giving me all this trash to digest about living, well, he’s puttering about, side-swiping what I should be doing with the stilts of god-willing maneuvers. I tell him I don’t like the looks of him. He responds with the impishness of a stand-up’s forgotten punch line. Making movies was out of the question. We were talking. Damn. For a lack of a better term, well, we were associating. Like that. Just like that. And it was on to the races. So I’m thinking, ‘Why don’t you pipe down man?’ But he’s not looking me in the eyes anymore. He’s looking at the balcony above us. I’m stewing dodges and galoshes up in my pate. Just measly notions of getting by. I’m, you know, worn out by this point. For christ’s sake, my grandmother kept a 1964 plane ticket from Omaha, Nebraska to Louisville, Kentucky in her wallet until they shoved her under the earth forty years later. Some junk we keep. Some keeps us. Nothing was lending a decent name to my fractured manners. I tilted my head back and espied trouble a brewing up above. I thought, ‘I am not the sun.’ Everything changed. Dumbshit was my middle name. It was like finding an apricot in the freezer without the foggiest how it got there. Interesting? Perhaps. Well, the long and longer of it is that my vapid lawn-chair existence was fraught with peril. That’s the way it goes sometimes. I marched. I stayed assiduous. Not that patterning myself after a club-footed Demiurge was going to plink away at an understanding, but I held my ground nonetheless. Lying to myself was the only proposition I wanted to catch an earful of. And so, well, who’d a thunk it, huh? The grass here is cooler, but less green than it once was, you know? So, forget about battle hymns and bathrooms. Overlook the refinancing of good intentions. We live in a world that is fixated on visual and audio stimulation, gentle exfoliating visions that lull us into a dispassionate, brain-warped state. Well. Just get on with it. Looks like supper’s ready, and I haven’t heard a name like yours in years…