all self-evidence aside

-- Excuse me, would you like to talk to me?

-- Depends. What’re we talking about?

-- Nothing. Life in general. Death in the abstract.

-- Okay. Like using a Synclavier to capture our chatter, the differences it’d make, okay. Okay?

-- That’s proper and at the disposal of the awns of grains and grasses.

-- Wait a sec while I yawn and check my wrist for the time. Hold on. Just a moment here. There. Now, where were we?

-- Hurtling through space on the densest planet in the solar system, tilted at a 23.4-degree angle from the perpendicular of its orbital plane, sucking up sunlight and water and air as we go. Terra, Gaia…home.

-- As the parking police dawdle, as the soda-pressed depress the rest of the wine back into grapes. We are the hobblers of justice, right?

-- Listen up. Hear, hear. Do not ask inappropriate questions. Do not remain calm. There are pine-tree needles in the coffee grounds.

-- Something to admit to over breakfast. I am sure of it. Certain. Just as Pepsi-Cola and Episcopal spell each other out. Don’t you go giving me that toothy smile. I’m overly cerebrated enough as it is.

-- Do I know you?

-- Yes and maybe, but almost not at all. Wait. I stopped to think, and then forgot to start again. We must be kin, or akin to it.

-- Rain-glazed wheelbarrows overflowing with worthless coins.  

  

-- Sure. Yep. Right on. If we stand upright, sit well with others, play moronic games of jawing with those we claim to love. There is a deepness in the slouch we stagger along with towards some boring recitation of Death Of A Salesman by a potpie vender in a small, crowded room. Let’s see. Something like…just the willingness to love and the ability to be loved; and then there’s the scrumbled scuff of sun gold-flaking bricks; the massive abrupt, lunged sway of tall buildings that dizzies sidewalk-bound starers; a clutch of shadows speckling a whitewashed wall like polka-dot wishes gone to underwater graves; the shrugs of grid wandering monks and the glint of gold off a motorbike cop’s sunglasses; care that wimps out as the streetlights wake up with a notched click and a lonely hum. There, of course, is much and a little too.

-- Talking to or at?

-- We’ve done more in discomfort than in the euphony of cellar doors. Order the marchers to save face and rid themselves of smiles.

-- Okay. At.

-- Who were we in the first? When one of us was invited to chat, was it not I? The track’s been skewed and, well, the world…it keeps turning.

-- As the world turns, as the commercial break begins, as the delighted take apart the motorcycles of their most desperate whims. And you find yourself just sitting there, singing along perhaps, immobile and in the trenches of an indefinite, indefatigable rut. Who are you to stray and fold photographs into the hat of a scarecrow in a windstorm?

-- I absolutely and pervasively have no goshing idea. Certain questions just stop getting asked.

-- Ever since I dwelt such a scream to happen ever such a tarpapered thing to happen ever and some more so intentionally so…

-- Gray honeybirds and hairstyle mistakes dream the shame from box office duds, just as I used to deal in apposite forms of retribution for crank 911 callers.

-- Well, milli my vanilli. It’s get-going time for the tracheophyte loving, for the darned minglers and space cadets of the unshakeable juries in our conscience. And now, a little cruciverbalist rapture: “Crosswords aren’t so different from life. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else.” 

-- Quote the glossy magazines. Go ahead, quote ‘em like you read ‘em. I don’t give a damn. I just don’t.

-- How are we speaking? And to whom?

-- The off is ripped from the whole ordeal of our tiny roofless lives. When in agreement with the masses I always feel I must be mistaken. Something like, “Me too! Me too!”

-- I can hear your voice in my head even when you’re not around. Declaring genius at customs. It’s a prize to be alone, the cost of which is a Lamourette’s Kiss of so-so detachment with just some strained baggy overhead to scrap with on sedentary Thursday evenings.

-- When it rains it rains.

-- Talk to me.

-- Love is bound and cagey. Not so tough. Lean and found out. Elvis in his favorite red shirt. A necktie on a bowling lane. Hamburgers set free of buns. A brainy way to not behave. Beer foam on the horizon. A lesson never taught. Bowties and uppercuts. A rangy horticulturist out for blood. Diving that does its own deeper damage in the shallow end. A seagull asleep on a rail. A century of stop and go. Not enough and too much. Sipping when you should gulp until you drown. A rap song about rocks. A never-heard-of-you cut with a touch of could-care-more. The work of bees spliced with the barking of dogs. A last cigarette crumpled to the floor. Ampersands eloping with commas. There, there we do, or don’t, go.

-- Sure, like when somebody hangs up on me I always catch myself looking at the phone before I hang it up. There are more whys in me than will ever come close to knowing a because. We’re just hangdog cheats looking for a difficult in. It gets colder all the time.

-- But we have conversations. We set our sights in concrete. Most of what’s going on, every moment all over this big blue world, well, it’s just unimaginable to us here trapped in the little cubicle of our lives. What’s some guy’s bad luck with wild apple trees in Kazakhstan got to do with me? The connections we make are feeble and sorely lacking in scope. Every second a hundred people die, and more than that are born. There’s nothing beyond this eternity we fashion out of our being alive. Death is not the end. Nothing starts or ends. This is it. Our lives. We can never know anything beyond this.

-- Bizarre. Just this space to exist in. It is all there ever is for us, right? Without space there isn’t even nothing. It is beyond nothing. Nothing? That we can comprehend. It is definable. But from birth to death, well, there is just this.

-- We know too much and never enough. And between you and me…

-- Yes.

-- There’s more commotion and pith in the boredom of number-crunching CPAs than in all of your philosophies.

-- We all save our good underwear for special occasions.

-- Okay. You’ve got me there. Some ethereal scammony as a purge for my weary aching head, perhaps?

-- If you could bet on such a thing, well, I’d hold onto that bottom dollar for a bit. 

-- So you act out by a window filled with rain. All those plops out there plunking away. The sensual drip and smack of it all. The sides are chosen and we pick the losers, right? The rain’s always out there, soaking somebody else. Then it’s a barrage more than a patter, then a deluge, a mad drumming symphony that’s bubbling up like boiling water on the streets, the slap and thwack of it flooding up to the curb tops. In the meantime, well, it’s turn up the heater and play the records a bit louder. I want payphones and postcards, and a girl who doesn’t need a computer’s brain to survive. What do I get? So little. Just a respite from lapses in judgment and impaired misgivings, with a touch of loneliness and a side of mashed pride.

-- What we do with what we got, what we’re given and what we take away? Bogus charm that only ends us up as spent geezers with half-off prices to the moon, doleful misled codgers on a train headed north by no south, wielding AARP cards and a lifetime of now useless wisdom and a thousand plus stories that nobody wants to hear. It’s creep obscurely towards the grave without anybody noticing, without attracting any attention, and then everybody’ll stand around on well-groomed grass in black formal wear and say nice things about you when you’re not around to hear, while they lower what used to be your body into the earth and your former possessions scatter amongst them.

-- You can’t take it with you.

-- That’s not it. You’re answering the wrong questions. You aren’t “going” anywhere. All going has stopped. For that matter, all stopping is done too. There is not even nothing, remember? We have to believe in this life we are living. It is all we have.

-- If a life is led and nobody is around to notice it…

-- Same old drink.

-- Sure. Same old drink.

-- Fuck it. I have proclamation to make! I oppugn the whereabouts of fiscal doomsday devices. I stand starkly in indirect contrast with mother nature’s curse of nobody knowing you when you’re down and out. We are shots never fired under the bright lights of persuasive lawmakers. Our courage is smelt out of us by the dim mechanization of hope. But…hell, bring me my shotgun. I’ve got the cemetery blues again. 

-- Declare yourself sane and get a one-way ticket to a shoeshine stand for your soul.

-- A shine for your soul. Like that. Just add a little luster to it, not too much. Just enough to feel alright, so others will notice and not worry about the condition of your…shit. I don’t know. Life?

-- No. I hate cereal, even if Mikey likes it.

-- We come and go, and nobody…nobody knows. I’m going to bowl my voice down a gutterless lane and pray for small animals to keep it sheltered from the rain after it crashes into the pins of my dissipation. I am friendly, damn it! Right?

-- The town’s empty. Even the ghosts have gone. Leave me alone with my Paris in a bottle and a six-shooter on the windowsill. I am cloudy with dark’s disposition, and even the gnats and the flies ignore what remains of me. Patching up today with the impure products of tomorrow. There is no crazy to go.

-- Would you like to listen to me?

-- That tears it.

-- I have measured out my life with toilet paper tubes.

-- Yes. Suffering from a mild case of anhedonia, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to fall in love. It’s a fight against the logistics of an algorithmically inclined world, one where everything is solvable and safe and where the only crops harvested are corporately owned, and they bear the fruit of advertisements and vicarious living for the almighty tax-sheltered to reap of the blood-stained benefits. Shuttling off from one barely legible scrawl of disaffection to an incessant scroll of pictures: a ferret eating its own tail in the latent crepuscular light gone too bright under the kliegs of quaint modernity. The circle is complete. We go eternally from useless information to distraction to overloaded stimulus to simulations of being alive, and then we behave in the most rational terms we can come to terms with in the rubbish heap’s scraps and flecks of the entitled warp-speed blur of it all. Everything constantly coming and going faster and faster all the time. Nothing stays. And, well, this is as it should be, right?

-- All we are is motion. The plunge and swash of parturient bombardment. Ideas? We’ve had them all. A dime a thousand, I say. Tell me something old. Something soiled and ripe with age. Something rotting with the rind and the pulp still hanging in there, the dust and the rich dirt of what it means to have lived through things.

-- The trenches are splattered with ads for aftershave and the latest electronic gizmo. We are inherently in search of acceptance, of being part of something more than just ourselves. What’s our teeny-weeny singular ado got to do with the devaluation of the dollar versus the yen?

-- We fall in love over catchy slogans and jingles for breakfast cereal or new cars. We fall in love with our desires and go nuts in our inability to choose any one thing out of a perpetually growing list of options for ways to add things to the bounty of our lives.

-- As a great man once said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

-- Something new comes along, and then something newer. The gap closing between the two exponentially faster all the time. Soon we’ll reach that point of singularity in the accelerating returns of it, and there will truly be no difference twixt what’s new and what’s next. It’ll all be one whoosh, a steady stream instead of a rung-by-rung climb. Your days will be filled with electronic birdcall and flurries of mechanosynthesis flicking the molecular switch of your dreams on and off, on and off. Your impulse control gets outsourced to the highest bidding handheld device. All your moments coalesce into one uniform moment, and perhaps you might find yourself rocked to sleep by a sheep-counting machine.

-- Lock the doors for me so I never have to leave. 

-- All we are is the garbage we make and leave behind. The commensurate decisions of a dashed-off morality one must make in a money-as-purpose culture. The expediency of the moment becomes all there is. And so everything gets swept under the proverbial rug of distraction so as to retain the ability to escape confrontation with the unpleasant realities of the world. Let’s make babies and prove a few TV pundits wrong under the holy kinetic strobe of redundancy.

-- Can’t consider it. Sorry. Too busy even for myself. 

-- Well, then. Night, have a good one.

-- Night.