BUDDY: The odor of brown paper bags opening can be comforting.
ZOOEY: Sure. Like when the sky’s strewn with ripped bits of Kleenex.
BUDDY: And the smell of jarred salsa upon first loosening the lid is downright spectacular. Everything about most things around here is…
ZOOEY: Broken? Unhinged?
BUDDY: No. Legerdemain. Just whimsical shit. You know, that at-a-loss-for-words stuff that clutters up the ionosphere.
ZOOEY: Lathering mayonnaise between ink-blue puddles. Projecting an ideal form onto the mundane, the ordinary, the murdered and mocked.
BUDDY: It’s like getting it together only to….shit. I might as well face it. I’m addicted to gum.
ZOOEY: Be not self-injurious nor let yourself grow distraught with perpetual ineptitude. We all close our eyes to certain unpleasant things about ourselves. Getting a haircut can be distressing, and might cause one to question the very nature of her existence. If the ideal form can be maintained in the imagination only, well, then reality can go about its business. There is a gruesome pleasure that comes with the freedom of dreams, that unbinding of oneself from the sticks and stones. We were raised to be this way in which we are now swamped. When does one finish growing up?
BUDDY: Wits be damned. I want shapely things, supple curves, hips that swing, an ass like a shelf.
ZOOEY: We shoot for the stars and hit only ourselves.
BUDDY: Something to do with the fact that falling out of love is so much harder than falling in love.
ZOOEY: April comes she will into the garden of your distrust. We don’t even have to try most of the time. Fill your cups with thrum. Not that the whorls of attachment will budge much. It is something to be given. Amends might happen without any making on your part. There is nothing to control. Be at peace.
BUDDY: Lessons like lemons.
ZOOEY: Drizzle on. Drip away. Get lost. Google yourself. There is no mishap too terrible to not canter over with a breezy slump. Just shout, “Yippee!” and get on with it.
BUDDY: Stalling is another way of getting back at time for being itself, when you are anything but.
ZOOEY: Yourself?
BUDDY: Maybe. There before the something, something, something…go I, right?
ZOOEY: Yep. That old let’s-start-spreading-the-news bullshit.
BUDDY: Not always. I catch planes, I catch flies, I catch colds, but I can’t catch a break.
ZOOEY: Put a lid beneath it. You’ll catch the leaks with Tupperware. Don’t mind if I do ask away then ok that’s fair yes sir that’ll do now on to the more moving messages…
BUDDY: Keep it clean.
ZOOEY: Sadly mild-mannered and mistimed are the miseries of us like this we tear the strewn atoms binding through the neural pathways of our regret like six-pack serious like superman’s day job like horses limping over lilies like hearts trembling…
BUDDY: I do declare!
ZOOEY: Simplicity abounds lord lord lord ye know my troubles well…
BUDDY: Like a docent for the touring of burnt homes.
ZOOEY: Keeping a straight face still laurel-resting into the shilly-shally so-long-see-you-later mood…
BUDDY: The strange weather one keeps inures the most tempestuous natured will to seek shelter in oddness. A view without a point. A self-defeating roar. As long as I project the purity of my idealism onto an imaginary object, well then I am okay. It’s when that canvas becomes a real thing, a thing of the world, something I can’t just slap endless layers of paint on any old time I want without any regard for the object itself, well, that’s when my world just up and falls all apart.
ZOOEY: You’d make a good lion tamer.
BUDDY: Yes. This might be true. I can lift a barstool up over my head. I workout with medicine balls. I make cartoons out of discarded missiles. Civilian casualties are very low, I must say. I know how to snap a whip. My legs rarely quake during moments of fear, and my stomach is lined with steel.
ZOOEY: You, my fine fellow and close kin, are one of much mettle, though I’m not certain of how it will test.
BUDDY: Passing.
ZOOEY: Sure. Go back to counting car headlights from the freeway overpass. Go back to sleeping on boxcars. Go back to flossing on and off.
BUDDY: I’d weigh my options, but my scale is broken. Assumptions are cleaning house, and if an oubliette opens up beneath whatever fancy pedestaling I might do in the hallway of my days, then I will take a pitch and wait out a junk-baller with one out in the bottom of the fifth. There is time enough, but quite possibly not world enough.
ZOOEY: Fumes fill the space between dreams, and you run on them and with them, and we all take pictures to give a place to things, to have a place to put things in, to not mistake friends for runaways.
BUDDY: Quit making amends for your sorrow. Tell me a joke.
ZOOEY: So. Okay. Here’s one for you. So. Well. Um. So. Let’s just say…that this guy…well, he enters into a…zoo? Fuck…how does it go again? Something about being hippo critical?
BUDDY: That’s enough.
ZOOEY: No way. It’s not enough. Nothing ever is.
BUDDY: You might have some sugar in your gas tank. Maybe take a gander in there.
ZOOEY: Choosing to believe your own lies does not make you truthful, but in my own eyes there is nothing wrong at all.
BUDDY: Soft golden sponge cake crumbling into microscopic flecks.
ZOOEY: That’s one way to put it.
BUDDY: Or faking the sky out of its blueness. Well, it’s nothing that’s easily stolen from a national park. That I can tell you.
ZOOEY: I’m not cooperating with this scooting-outside-to-check-out-the-view thing going on here.
BUDDY: Lame-O.
ZOOEY: Just because every place where it’s raining pizza sauce is a place where I’ve never been, that’s no reason to jab and twist a rusted metal coat hanger into my heart.
BUDDY: As long as the red rain’s not slanting or dreary…but come on, Tony Awards get handed out for less.
ZOOEY: Weightlifters grow old too. The hymnbooks of goody-goodies get used for scrap. And my face becomes less sensitive as it is mauled by the passing years. One might come not to notice the wheeling rhythmic clunk and clank of deserted escalators if exposed to it for long enough. These circumstances are anything but extenuating, but sleepy men still have a chance.
BUDDY: With all of their….faculties intact.
ZOOEY: Sweetly insert laugh here.
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