Bo Jackson Was A Royal

“Sometimes you abuse alcohol. And sometimes…well, sometimes the alcohol abuses you."

“My right side’s never up. But my wrong side’s high enough for ‘em both. Plus, you only die once.”

“Don’t you know we’ve got a fifteen-drink minimum up in here?”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t had near enough.”

“Do you always sound like that?”

“Only when I talk. And let me go ahead and tell you, I’ve been flying too close to the sun for so long now that I get the chills in July in Death Valley.”

“Right. So, whatever happened to Sour Grownup Jane?”

“Man, she’s meaner than 52 rattlesnakes. She’ll eat her half of the cake without ever halving it.”

  

“Some for no one, huh?”

“Not some. Not for me. And not for you.”

“A codicillary act if I ever knew one.”

“Added down and off. Subtracted up and on. A stirred movement on formerly placid waters. A deceit that suits.”

“Well, me? I say arugula to all that. Failure’s always been my only destination.”

“Salad rocket?”

“Not just your garden variety eruca sativa, buddy boy. It’s hell’s cabaret kicking up their heels. Shorter skirts and taller women. I gave up cussing when I ran out of coins to toss in that proverbial mason jar of suffering and mad hinge-squeal pitched lowing. Some jaw-rubbing, tawdry things that just never don’t ever make no sense.” 

“I’m sure any occasion when you’re around is special. And remember, September’s on the make. And we can’t tell the movies by the reviews. But, but, but…but nobody here knows the things that I know.”

  

“We’re all pragmatists over here where the grass is never very green.”

“Sure. Everything’s over there, where the grass always grows just a little more green.”

“A terrible night for avocado fishing.”

“I hate it when things get too precious. I don’t want to need objects, to have to have them stay and age and be with me just the way that they are. I want hardscrabble things that I don’t have some sacred value attached to—things that I can throw away and be done with and not have to worry over so much.”

“Well, then let me tell you something not so very dear at all. This was some time ago now. I had a girl to call my own. We lived on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, then. A mongrel thought turned stray in the cruel bluster of a night’s roam. We got tuckered out. We got slow. Nobody was more brave or alive. Now I’m just a craven cowering bluff of a guy who stands himself up for cocktails before even the sun sinks into the drink.”

“Get this, then. Showed up for a job interview. I was a bit rusty. I was nailed to a plaster wall with baited habituation. I filled out multiple forms to get the damn thing. And then some lady with a wooden tooth’s going to tell me how it’s going to be? I’ll be damned.”

“Doomed to a life of mediocre orgasms. Somewhere there’s a curse with my name on it wandering around in search of a finder’s fee. Lately it’s been lowly and the finesse has worn from the finer points of telling it like it never will be.”

“Yuck.”

“You, my unkind fellow, are manipulating molehills. Distorting. Magnifying. And, ta-dah! Manipulations a plenty.”

     

“This is the sound of me oohing and aahing.”

“So, then, well, um, you see, but, ah, here’s the thing: my father built a swimming pool so we couldn’t have kickball games in the backyard. He had a room added on to the house where the attic used to be to separate my brother and me, to keep us from fighting. Grandiose solutions that didn’t deal with the problem directly. Ways of avoiding things, going the long way around them, ignoring the root to spare the branch. Now? Well, so, you see, ahem, now I’ve got these structures of boredom to keep me in line. I am never at ease.”

“A body in motion and all that fronting. To what purpose? It’s like what I read on the label of that bottle of vodka you keep beneath your sink: ‘Emergency Bottle. For EMERGENCY USE ONLY! (i.e., between the hours of 2-6 a.m. if, and only if, there is no other available alcohol in the house.) An emergency does not include being too lazy to go out and buy a bottle during the afternoon. This bottle is only to be consumed on those dire occasions that warrant it, such as extreme, interminable, and completely nonfunctional bouts of DT-induced insomnia. Anyone found drinking from this bottle in a non-emergency situation will be dealt a swift kick to the groin or nether region of their person.’”   
                  

“It surely is not like that. It is not like that at all.”

“Don’t be so smug and sure about stuff like that, Schmoe. I’ve got my calculus glasses on. I’ve got my gut finder. I’ve got my ambition monitor. I’ve got my suspicion bootstraps too. And these here boots, they stomp capitalists dead.” 

“I am living through all this on the assumption that every day is just a countdown until there are no more left to count. Or would that be dying through all this? Just something else to shake my head over, to lie low in, to cuddle up to and hide. Confusion’s bottlenecking conundrums are the safest places I know of.”

“This Chucky Chaplin mask is losing its luster. And me, I know where the rain goes slower than the sound of trains. So, what’s making a pass at being rambunctious going to hurt? And maybe I ain’t asking so much as remembering badly.”

“Buried in your overcoat, again.”

“Just a febrifuge for my ailing, temperamental judgment. Somehow strained to see success as the superficial illusion of erroneous meaning. Our over-videoed lives come with certain binding clauses. The cameras are always rolling. We’re debilitated by the reaped self-consciousness brought on by the burden of our own digital images, the stored potential of our past actions to ruin us.”

“At some point you just have to say, ‘Fuck it,’ and get over yourself. Who really gives a monkey’s ass what rumbling and stumbling way you make your way through the days.”

“Roughed up and rusted like an old water tower, killing time like snakes as a laughing kookaburra would. Covered up, resistant to all antibiotics, burrowing deeper in the catacombs of a corny ego’s bones.”

“If it were my dime, I’d spill it.”

“Sure. And we hotplate the stuff we don’t care to know about ourselves. Just the burnt crumbs remain for us to dawdle in. If it were up to me, I’d say we use the crosses for firewood, leave the martyrs begging for what we’ll never give ‘em. And let the yuppies take the biggest flying fuck of all: let ‘em go on being themselves. I don’t think there’s a more cruel and unusual way to go than that.”

“Come on. It’s all big-rigs’ backup alarms blaring you awake when it’s way too early to be alive. A real stick in the muck forever leased with no option to buy. Resale value’s gone. Caveat emptor, I guess. That’s the real doozey of it.”

“A thumb’s oath. A pinky’s law. We all push for the un-meddling of our affairs. And just so we can beat the traffic and go moan alone.”

“I tell ya something. I says to this gal, I tells her, ‘Face it, Doll. He’s a yuppie. He ain’t the one for ya.’ But it don’t matter none, you know? She keeps fallin’ for him all the time. And I gots to go throw in that towel. Maybe you can’t make a horse drink, but he might piss in the water, ya know?”

“Beats me. My goat’s been got for years.”

“Ah, there’ll always be butt faces out there to dour your good tidings. Sighs floating around in search of a mouth. But I don’t let it get me down. I’m a real trooper when it comes to such stuff, even while camping sadder in the thousand or so frowns I’ve begged answers from over the years.”

“Tell the kids I’ve gone out to November again. They’ll know what it means, eventually.”

“You don’t even sense the making of your own sense. I mean, whatever.”

“I will not scram. Don’t test me. My colors will fly higher than the troposphere.”

“Honey Bunches of Oats. I don’t go in for all that garrulous peace mongering. Casual constriction deepens all ties. I am only my body’s keeper. My mind’s final fouetté, less graceful without motion to conceal it, will encompass more than should ever rightfully be only mine. Only not for keeps, this once that is also, by the way, infinity. Choco Taco.”

“You’re like a real fucking Viking sometimes, you know that?”

“Fruity Pebbles. Pop Tarts. Lunchables. All of these little stabs at happiness I keep making. A big step for me; a small step for the rest. Cup Noodles. Hot Pockets. Runts.”

“Brand-name philosophizing might get you just about nowhere. Or is this just the spit of the poet?”

“All great artists should be contradictory by nature. Ford. Chevy. Dodge. Onomatopoeia! See? When the artists creates he is holy, even if just for that moment.”

“And what a dull moment it can be for the rest of us suckers who are merely waiting around to enjoy the view from the cliff’s edge before we leap.”

“The lonely sport of distraction. I’m a good one though.”

“Sport?”

“Ask any copper-wire thief around.”

“Sure. I get it. Because copper has excellent creep characteristics which minimizes loosening at connections. So what? I cloak my disillusion with delusions from carefully timed swills of the devil’s flask too, just like anyone else does.”

“Aleve! Bayer aspirin! Motrin! Advil! Tylenol! I am weary yet true of heart. Count Chocula!”

“It’s hard to tell so much in this light.”

“The bale of it all, so misguided into lugubriousness. Better than the treacly sort though, I suppose.”

“Please excuse me. Necessity has called on me again. This time it must impose itself on me in the form of a poorly timed vomiting episode.”

“Wretch away, you poor bun-bo-hue of a thing. Wretch away.”

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