I'm an American, once removed. Don’t rely on me to tell you when it’s time to task-complete. I mean when it comes to collapsing, when it comes down…what I mean is, when it comes to being unimpressed, but not showing that you’re unimpressed-- when it comes down to that, well you don’t got to go around and change the light bulbs about it. Gas it. Cover the once of it with over. Done. That’s all I’m saying. It’s grok between you and them, and your urge to create and your urge to destroy get tangled up, and your pins are quaking, yo. That’s a fair assessment. Don’t be so damn scared. Shit. Get the with-of-it the hell out of your system. Get the laugh, then jet. What’s to know about it? Edification. That’s not a secret any of them will fall for. I’ve been living with cats for too long; they crinkle my broadsides, or’ve come to. Do this; don’t do that; fit in; die. That’s what they spit on about. Tromboning on through the cummerbund of seasonal maladies. I’m looking. I’m almost aware-- unreliable too. Just in case you didn’t notice the first time through. Getting through with waiting around, with loitering in the shadows, with Krazy-Glue sunsets and glow-in-the-dark on/off switches. And crawl (bent like knees) through, through, through the badly timed jokes, nifty piebalds and mares, geldings and jennies gone to pasture, and keep crawling (evenly on all fours, no matter how odd), as it’ll be older here by now’s then. Big kids take the bus; you know that, at least; don’t got to feel it too. And sure, Avogadro’s number ain’t as constant as it used to be, but I spindle my brains over the feasibility of that damn Hadron Collider making any shit-stain of a difference in why my kids are all bothering to ape TV characters over Fruity Pebbles in the morning. Vapid, it all takes shape, and we shoot out the color from traffic signals, and our eyes adjust, and the scramble for justice rings itself up as free. I’m only spreading a truth that rings rumorish. Don’t believe in me. Go about your glib saucy way. I’ll be hiding in the medicine chest, behind the Vicks Vapor Rub and the mineral oil. All the newcomers are growing old, wildly. I’ve got the grace I’ve got, hidden there, beneath the broken flowerpot; it doesn’t show. Hydrangeas are my oldest pals. My pride? Riata it in, banged up as ever. Man oh man, am I going stuffed and underused. I sing like Dean Martin and get all the laughs of Jerry Lewis, too. So, give up. Pay the bills. Offer a few tads, there and here mainly, of flavor to the world’s boiling smorgasbord. You need the courage that comes with the companionship of others to combat the loneliness that’s life’s dripping faucet. Reliance. It’s a gamble. What seems an easy exchange from hand to glove gets kicked around more than a rodeo clown. The strangeness of trying too hard to forget what went wrong and kiltered, kinked and warped, off to avert truth-be-untold differings of trauma: so this is how it’s going to be, huh? Mainly, man’s done for. Stack a couple of Big Macs on my grave and toss the wrapper in the grass. Shit. I mean, where’s the where of here? I’m not there. Fuck it, man. I’m here. For fuck’s sake. I’m here. Hear me? Not there. Here! Here! Ah, shit. Well, what’s a single meaning of it all anyways? Beat yourself up about it and go straight to hell. Crowds of cowards gathering. I sense an unmonumental shift in how things will never get finished. I’m talking packaging: Styrofoam containers, cigarette packs, lost wallets, basil, mischievous underpinnings unique only as imperious items in a display case warning of illicit housewarming gestures that everyone wasn’t scared enough not to make. Importance fallows on away. We are thumb-based creatures of uneven psychotic apparatus who stumble post-id into filling-station ideas without caring or knowing why or how, or mostly who too, really, and then lying down comes around to coddle the insecurities that come along with a poor-credit rating for your soul. Don’t believe me. I’m out of sorts. Grumpy and jilted and appraising a slump’s last confetti toss, scrounging through lost pieces of evidence before a jury weighs in. A bad bet to make against the nature of capitalism, something that outlasts us, up-down haywire shiftings in a loose network of economic transactions that’ll become your life’s Richter scale if you’re not careful, or too careful for that matter, about it. Don’t take my rice-futures word for it though. I’m not going to go ahead and blame myself for hedging and leveraging derivatives like a ninny. Many’s the deep-in-the-dollar-signs, in-the-buff calls I never made. Got me? Bluffing was never my forte, though I did gamble without a clearing-house’s chance to insure against-- what they say? You know: inclement weather. But that’s just stringing diamonds behind a trash truck. Sometimes the smell of it gets to you. Sometimes you’re free enough, if you can afford the market price of freedom. From? Of? Do we even know how to be free? Sometimes I wonder. In more than a while's once, we all need to do stupid, reckless things. Unfortunately there's a certain joy in being held captive: never having to make a decision; the convenience of being caged. Maybe you pay somebody to be free for you. That’s a one-way ticket to the kind of thralldom where the one locked up doesn’t even know she’s enslaved. Like the prisoner who’s asked by the guard, “So, how do you like being kept here in this prison?” and in turn asks the guard, “What’s a prison?” The large notional value of your life keeps growing as the reality of your worth remains hidden smugly beneath an arbitrage-free personality, a lady who smirks and winks brazenly through the variegation summing up the barrage of what’s persistently being lost and gained without much notice from those attempting to ogle into the machinery of the not-so-free market. Risk it none. Accept what’s commonplace as a lost cause. There’s a clatter in the basement of the stock exchange. We’re scrambling to make ends never meet. Bilateral netting gone to the cats. Lipless OTCs and ETDs playing dangerous with expensive lipstick. Swap me a few ounces of equity for a few pounds of moral fiber. I’m making planes from faulty parts and selling to an over-paying Uncle Sam, and all for the sake of a greasy buck. Maybe you lose a few fighter pilots here and there, but there’ll always be innocent casualties to get blown to flower fertilizer by the wayside. Can’t worry yourself to death over the lives of others. And then you glance around. You give the thrice-over to lapses in somebody’s idea of good judgment while hedge funds are quick to rally with much pluck and myopic, foreshortened foresight to take advantage of the tiniest moment of hysteria and slight panic. A bell tolls? Maybe. But who’s listening? We rush through the throngs, the clamber of shifting variables that’ll puncture those delicate speculative bubbles, those soapsuds of no intrinsic value, checking our pockets constantly for signs of a past we’re unable to keep up with or feel we’ve ever known properly, while paperless worries cast ominous shadows that we grow so accustom to that we no longer realize that we’re in the dark. And the cost of war rises as the price of life drops. I spill a few tankers of oil on the sand, and somebody screams, “Blood!” It’s all a wash. Get yourself a dollar’s worth and heave away. This ship’s sinking and sailing at the same time, and there’ll surely be more shores than we know what to do with soon. Soon. That’s the marvelous stink of my own marginal profit. Richly poor. Always just on the cusp of it all, but never there. Or here, for that matter. Yep. Ask for me in the morning, and I’ll be gone-- even if this is the morning already, and we’ve always only known fixed interest rates that stay up dancing all through the night. Because, you know, we’ve all been doing the dead cat bounce for the eternity it takes for the present to occur. And this, in the beginning, middle, or end, is what’s keeping the most of what’s really us just passing for what we currently call being alive. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Shit. No. But hell, nobody’s looking. And, as far as this here proverbial bed-wetter is concerned, there isn’t even a tunnel. Say goodbye to all of your tomorrows. I’m checking in late and staying until the bulls make a break for it. A hopeless case? Sure, but listen: there’s a hell of a party going on next door; let’s go.
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