Most
of my friends were the kind of kids who get called names and beaten up at
recess. You, of all people, do not know at all what that’s like. The
below-the-surface fury of this feckless struggle to ignore or run away from
things. I am in constant fear of being waylaid. You, sir, certainly have no
capacity to understand this. It is beyond your universe’s scope. Sorry, am I
boring you? You fucking doofus. I could shit in the corner and tell you it’s a
bowl of Frosted Flakes. I could slap you with a live fish. I do not like this
visage that I am peering at here, cowboy. So get your fucking two-face self
together and take it. Pull it together, Shemp. We ain’t got time for any
misappropriating here. Got it? Shit. So, the customers come in, right? They’re
always wrong, but we don’t let on. It’s stop time, and we are taking, taking,
taking; and all they know is give. Put it wrong. But, pal old buddy, we’ve got
bottled water for sale, right? We’ve got toothbrushes with the NDCs of
narcotics. We’ve got sunglasses with tiny video cameras on the lens. We are
trained to serve. It’s simple. It’s the wind’s geometry played out for sissies
with fake tans to splurge on without a nod or a hope at ever knowing why. And
they don’t. Care, that is. Why? I don’t know. I stopped asking those questions
years ago. They just don’t. Strange. The manners of the told are rubbing off on
us, huh? We used to be the ones doing the telling too, you know. That’s how it
all started, this whole go-to-hell mindset, that in hindsight seems just
unreasonable enough to have worked. There it is. And there, of course, it all
is not. Fuck it. I’m sending in the funambulists.
A
warm, windless night comes around. A night that’s great for walking about idly
with nowhere to go and nothing to do. A vagrant breeze in your head maybe, but
that’s it. Mind readers be damned. Don’t get touchy now. Don’t get all abysmal
about it. We’re copycats at best. And so you get to walking around, gazing in
closed shop windows, shuffling on and down narrow alleys, crookedly strolling
across streets against light traffic. As if this or any passing of the time is
ever really easy, you go on, and maybe you squint through the streetlights’
sodium glow, and the flickering neon signs, and perhaps even a bit of moonlight
struggling through from a starless opaquely tinted sky. A word of advice? No.
I’m just another cohabitating pseudo-realist who just happens to believe in
mushy foresight and shipshape disaster theory. You sympathize, right? There’s a
lot to not understand about it. You get that, at least.
Play
the tambourine at a criminal’s funeral and dispense with the easily lost
satisfaction of tears. I potty-mouth the whole affair. Remember the cadavers
who never got dissected? No anatomy lessons learned. It wasn’t disgraceful
though. Not at all. I still get the chills when I think back on the bad old
days of suffering and defeat. We sulked around. We got traumatized. We were
less nimble than we should’ve been, and more capitulating to the sorry demands
of hulking grade-school beasts. We were weak and ineffectual poltroons, cowards
of the most literal tail-between-the-legs scuffling. These are things you look
at and probably say, “So what?” to. That is not my opinion.
Me?
Me? Well, I go pointing to foul territory, in a determined distress, while
riding the bus, faking a cough into my fist, something about the angle of light
daggering in through the high trapezoidal windows, the stingy ones you can open
by pulling them sideways, horizontal, a challenge at times because they get
stuck and it can take some serious grunt work to get the job done, something to
be done while standing and not for the less brawny among us. I am wincing at
people’s faces. There’s a rubbed raw hue to the persistence of vision. Colors
are warped. The fabric of whatever seems like the nature of my current reality
is shredded and threadbare. Some of the advertisements close to the ceiling are
stretched, the elongated pictures and words pulled taut and thin, and somehow I
feel like something will snap suddenly and nothing for me will ever be the same
again. But nothing ends. There is no finality to any of it, and this fills me
with dread and terror. The phrase, “I got treble in my mind,” flickers through
my thoughts. I know something is wrong there. It’s close, but not right. I
can’t figure out why. Something is wrong with me. The pinball game of my head
is permanently tilted. A scream longs for a mouth. A small Chinese woman, whose
feet are swinging high above the grip-tape covered floor, sits eating a lychee
fruit on one of the facing seats at the front of the bus. Her smile is crooked,
something skewed about it. I can’t bring myself to look at her with more than a
general glance in her direction. I feel as if I am being expertly watched, and
I don’t for some reason want to make any mistakes, though I don’t know what
would constitute a mistake in this position that I’ve found myself in, whatever
that position might be. You wouldn’t know, Charlie Cheese. You wouldn’t allow
yourself to become lost in this sort of spellbinding and eerie situation. To
ask yourself, “What’s put me here?” You see, it’s as if the world around me is
appearing to whatever’s passing for my eyes at this moment to be some sort of
drafty Phenakistoscopic vision, something playful and lost, and I can’t make
this fluidity of botched movement stop, even for a second. I’m not looking for
a fight. There are no giant oak trees to hide behind. My pockets are empty and
out. Everything is just flowing, bright and dull, in exasperating shivers of
kinematic sadness, a strobe-like flickering paired with torched remnants of
stop-and-go animation, or perhaps things being continuously carved into wet
cement that never dries. You’ll never comprehend what any of this is really
like. You see, there is no me here.
Whatever
we don’t end up selling we’ll end up stowing away in the rafters of our desire.
Got it? And think about it. All those stories we used to tell ourselves to keep
up the farce of being contently ourselves. Then, well, you go to the office. And me? I
go straight to hell. Now, get the fuck out of here before I really start
launching into some theatrical tirade and “accidentally” punch the literal
lunch money right out of you.
Thanks.
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