Mr.
Bing’s is the kind of place you walk by and there’s only one guy in there. And
it’s the bartender. And he’s shaving in the bar mirror. Some people claim to have had a
good time there, once or twice. But me? Well, every time I’ve been there it’s
been an absolutely miserable experience. Just glancing in there is usually
enough to drop my spirits and scare up some vomit. But for some reason I keep
going back. And they hate me there. That’s very clear. There should probably be
a picture of me on the wall reading, “DO NOT-- WHATEVER YOU DO-- DO NOT SERVE
THIS MAN!” There isn’t though. So, well, they keep serving me, probably to
their own detriment.
I
am not infallible when it comes to matters of technicality, at least in the
supposition of hard drink. I take on a persona non grata, if only just a hint,
only on the occasions where an out-of-my-hands attitude shovels my better half
farther than below, and I’m not shifty about placing blame in scenarios where I
am granted a lucky fistful of anything but common sense. So, well, you’ve got
to take the good with the bad, I guess.
“Glad
to be of service, shit for brains.”
“I
don’t get even. I get mad.”
“Ornery
Neil Diamond fans can go take a shit in a lake, for all I care about it.”
“Just
another McDonald’s commercial. Take it or take it.”
“Jesus.
Somebody hit the eject button. I’m done.”
I
had something wonderful in my life, and now it’s gone, and I miss it. Is that
so hard to understand? Everything hampers me. Roads kill the meek. Inheritance
bucks and anchors more or less deadbeat with hard-to-master strums of luck.
I’ve lived on Assassination Street for too long.
“Boring.”
Fountains
of old age splash the Paris right out of me. I want discipline and rooting fans
and jaunty cocktail waitresses. What do I get? Loveless old lace spiked with
arsenic, just unlike the movies.
Pages
and pages of phone numbers inked in the margins of kept library books. Dancing
around loopholes. I am carried and sputtering. If love is something to fall in
or out of, well, then it’s been corroded and bandied around without much
solving going on. Clacks grandly, I say of it. I am indebted to the chase. The
company I maintain. They are dropping bowling balls upstairs.
Something
good descends, or is on its way, or it mangles itself into rotini.
“For
the best, if a corner turns on itself.”
Tricky
stuff, the things a burp struggles to say. Hard to be half of what was never
whole, in sudden instances ranked as brutal. Sham sweepstakes results. Tracking
codes gone for a spell. Instances of bioluminescence shallow in what’s gone and
rounded on back. There’s a trailing mercantilism lobbying for less justice and
more dough. I get botched in the midst of it, somehow. An instance of
spontaneity spurned in hopes of something sooner, more direct, possibly tuned
to sudden, immediate gratification-- or a farrier’s charming touch quickly
whipped into shape. Boom time is upon us.
Count,
spell, sit in traffic, get out a calculator and tilt it towards the sun. Truth
at times shuttles, slides, or defectively wields an aegis of counterproductive
blather. There was some advice once that went something like, “Don’t get in the
car with it. Lock all the doors from the outside. Desecrate its license plate
with flowers.” And then you find out, on your own, that it’s difficult, dreamy,
and rain won’t wash it away. And then you don’t find out anything. And then?
Well, right about now it is stolen property. You can only keep your fingers
crossed for so long.
“A
cichlid for your thoughts.”
“Good.
A circus avoided. Out of the safety net. Born from fire to fire. I only inch
along, and then there’s that just-married scrawl of shaving cream on the back
window of a pickup, and so I flinch and I fumble my last giclée of hope into
the bog of here-we-never-were.”
“That’s
more than not enough.”
“Every
‘so’ is often found malingering with a wily ‘no.’”
You
test questions out. You merge the ping of aluminum with lightweight neural
action potentials. You greet mourning street sweepers with toroidal fortitude
and tightly coiled handkerchiefs. You giggle in horror. Observatories built in
thin, clean air. Strange egg-shaped swirls. Red shifts of insignificant
galaxies pull you away from somebody else’s etcetera. The amplitude of
primordial fluctuations, hot gas filaments between clusters, the fraction of
mass in visible matter, and all of us basking in the afterglow of the beginning
of the universe.
“For
the observed magnitudes we expect to find no arcs over the entire sky as
bright.”
Not
well heard.
Refractions
count for something. Seven identical Wolter-1 mirror modules, each containing
54 nested mirror shells. Hell, there must be some room for indecision. More
room for heaven scouted on the outskirts of cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508, busy
bending and twisting light in a strange blue arc, for now.
There
is something dreadful left here, pitting around in my stomach. I don’t know
what to do with it. Where can it go? What’s to become of me? I could walk
longer, invest more time in carving up my personality, or maybe join forces
with a wedge of geese. There’s no telling what could happen. Things could get
better. The universe could start contracting. Also, I could plead indifference.
But nobody believes that. Nobody.
Please
stand clear of the closing doors.
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