A meandering melancholy.

“You wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that’d disturbed you in the past would disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of your consciousness.”


Even though I cannot see it, I know that it’s nearby; I lower my skull underneath the intensity of the showerhead, and suddenly, sharply, vehemently, beautifully; I catch traces outside the opacity of the glass, like Hitchcock-flickers that cease to be faster than they ever actually existed.

Even though I cannot touch it, I know that I believe it’s here; I close my eyes and sweat in darkness, intensity doubled by the weight of the summer night, and think, and think, and wait, and think, and get somewhere, somewhere that’s gone the second I open my eyes, the second I move and let a trace of cool air stream-slip over my trembling person.

Even though I cannot know it, I…well. Well.
Even though I cannot feel it, I know -- I know.

I know it’s been about this place for something resembling an age. It has to have been, right up to right now, sweating once again, but with open eyes and willing ears that are picking up the traces of the neighbors that I don’t really care to know, while still paying more attention to the light cast from this busted behemoth that sits on my lap, as it plays songs that endear themselves to me by the strength of their trills on the harmonica. These days, this thing runs pretty hot. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t run itself down. That it stays alive, throughout everything. But then again…we were focusing on something else. But it’s hard to stay with, I think.

I want to remember the quiet times.

When it was morning, when I could look out the window and see the mostly-empty parking lot, no signs of life beyond my own breath on the glass; when I could look about with a grin that might be described as impish, and run, run full-tilt boogie down and around the narrow hallways and open corridors, hearing nothing beyond the roar of caged air turning to wind; being overwhelmed by the way it found freedom around my ears. When I would listen to that, and stop, and think about how it sounded like the inside of a seashell. But all around. Like it was everything. Like it was the sound of my own blood.

That doesn’t change anything. But it seems like something I should note.

I’ve been someplace. For a while. The kind of while that seems almost unheard of, given the state of averages in regards to the business that I’m in. People in my line float about, like dandelions blown off the stalk by a pudge-faced six year old boy, only to get snuffed up by a passing adult in a business suit. It’s not a fool-proof system, and it doesn’t take long for such things to run their course.

Usually.

Hard to trace, something like that. Hard to trace, and harder still to remember. Because something like this, something that lays deep and quivers like a creature in a the solitude of a burrow; such a thing stays there, cold and alive, away from the injustice of open eyes. Unseen, but still living. Still there.

I’m losing the trail. Of the thing that’s been there. Of these words.
You know how it is. Out there, you…you. You know what it is, to be looking at yourself, looking down at a path that you’ve carved in the depth of your chest, so that you might twist your legs up and around, bending your body into something unheard of; ghastly contortions that make use of all the pain brought on by the collision of the calcium pale and the viscera glow, using the clarity of active senses to make it happen as you know that it should, driving your mind on, keeping everything focused, moving forward upon this inwardownward sort-of sorta journey. You know. What it’s like. There.

You know what it’s like to look at yourself.
To know that everything, everything is fine. The rigors of an uncaring world notwithstanding -- because those are things that you’ve long ago made peace with, those are things that you smile at with the wide teeth of a smug bastard, those are things that make you feel as perfect and wonderful as only the purity of a void can -- you know that for you, despite the domineering forces of linking trails and possible options…you know that things have turned out pretty good.

It’s going well, your life. It really is. After all, what is it that people have, beyond the realm of the world and its influence? Hearts, heads, and fluctuating voices.

Things that exist to be clear.

They’re all right there, and right now, they’re all here. There is a heart that is unlabored, a head that cannot form a coherent sentence but still seems to steam ahead, and a voice that sings along even when it’s advised against doing so. But then…there it is. Right there. Can you see it? Out of the corner of your eye, something that trembles at the base of the light that being made manifest by your screen. There it is, right there. Here and gone, but always here. Something that isn’t as brackish as fear, and isn’t as sickening as depression.
Something that you notice, living in the stillness.

A shadow that floats like vapor, obscuring the clarity of certain moments.
This very afternoon, I found myself sitting next to a girl. As a side effect of the books that we each were reading, we ended up discussing both the specifics of narrative savagery, as well as the various initialisms related to the Irish Republican army. Before she left, she asked my name. She had a British accent and eyes that were Illyria-blue.

And there it was. The whole time, there it was.

Years ago, when I was laying back on a borrowed mattress, I remember getting a phone call through the haze of a Sunday morning. It was received, and there was something about it that made me feel, oh, so, special. But now, I can look back.

And there it was. The whole time, there it was.

Recently, during the stagnant depths of this stillness, I had thought something went well. Nothing that had earned a name, nothing real, nothing tangible. Nothing yet special.
Still -- for a bit, I had thought the something was going well. And now, here today…it would appear less so.

And here it is. Right now, here it is.

In my depths, but on my skin. Despite the strength of my many desires, there’s been nothing like a drift towards a place of fury and wonder.
There’s just this.
This stillness.

In the summer heat, I still feel the tremor of a chill.
Here I am, in the Way of the World. Right?
Maybe.

Maybe it’s enough, for now, that I’ve managed to put this down, as chaotic as it might be; and maybe it’s good that soon I’ll find myself enjoying my vocation once more. Maybe it’s true that sometimes, sometimes, sometimes…sitting there at night with nothing but text and layers of stacked memory to keep me warm, it’ll find me and take a moment to blur the clarity of my world.

And maybe, it’s enough to know that I’d miss it, if it were gone.

Because somehow -- somehow, it makes me feel like me.

A time, just another time.

I’m going to listen to myself, right now. But I don’t think I can hear anything. Just whistling, just echoes, just the sound of this empty room, groaning and grinding and existing around me. That’s to be expected, I suppose. After all: There’s no one else here.

Just me.

I’ve been busy as of late; compound conundrums composed of certain cads who couldn’t command their compunction for catastrophe in any fashion that could be deemed “reasonably competent”. Needless to say, it became a little bit stressful. Needless to say, it brought the fellow who is listening to the ambience of this empty room to a place where thoughts and words and wisdom and stupidity couldn’t quite be accessed, as if Mimir’s Well had been covered by a lid of the heaviest iron, and jovial Bragi had decided to go on holiday. It wasn’t best of times. Nor the worst.

Just another time.

Which is where we are now, I suppose. Just another time, just one time in the place of the other, the other being the last. The previous. The last. Whatever. A year began, the same as any other; my dear sister’s birthday came upon us, and just a day later, a new man came into an office. People were happy, people were proud, people waved flags, people had things to say. Good things. Such things. Things are bad, but everyone takes a day to start singing for the prospect of the good. Things are good, while everyone else’s things go the way of the bad. True, Life, Love. Good, Bad, Weird. Way of the World. Right?

Just a new year.

Right you are. Right here, beside me, as is everyone else, even though they’re nowhere. But the times they are a changin’, as the day to day keeps up appearances, and most people are waiting for something new to happen, perhaps because of this cool new cat who is sitting in that chair made for men to be big, or perhaps because they know that as history repeats itself, and as years tumble forward one into t’other, that things are going to be made new, things are going to be different, things will tumble and burn and fall and crash and rise and gain and grow and smile and then fall down one more time. It’s what happens, it’s what will happen, it’s probably what’s happening. Because that’s what happens. And as surely as I’m sitting here, looking forward to the next episode of United States of How I Met 24 House Lights, I know that this is how civilization goes.

Just a time, like all the others.

I was busy, before. Busy doing very, very specific things, writing down so many numbers that were importantly separated by semicolons as opposed to colons, making sure that all fell into place, digits and fades and colors and chyrons and mattes, all exact, all to the frame. I did those things, made them exact; and then, and then, someone else screwed it up. Part of the business, the stressful part. The part belonging to those certain cads, falling into their aforementioned compunctions. The part that makes me so, so tired. Tired enough to step forward, I suppose. To try something just a little bit different, even though it puts me into quite a different position: The position where I might tumble. And burn. And fall. And rise. And gain. And grow. Just because I can.

Just because that’s what happens.

A fucking fuck, you fuckers.

Ok.

You…You madcap society of delightful fiends, who run across the countryside with wind blowing through your hair, trying to fight your way towards something sight unseen. Wonderful people, beautiful people, ebullient people; people all over the place, who I can’t manage to lay my eyes on outside of my window that fails to look over the Earth, giving me no sights, but plenty of sounds.

Originally, that paragraph was supposed to lead us somewhere else. It was going to talk about you, and I, and grand wonderful things. It was supposed to segue into a series of sentences that would essentially call David Foster Wallace a cock for subjecting himself to a short drop and a sudden stop, tearing himself free of this moral coil, and proving himself a coward. He had been a lion, but he became a coward.

That’s where this was, a short week ago.
And still…just like I felt when Hunter S. punched his own ticket, it seems that the grand and the great take themselves a notch or two down when they do this to themselves. How I felt, how I feel. But even so, even with that being the case, I just can’t seem to shout.
My eyelids are falling -- I’m becoming weary, with my feet up high and my head laid back. Too tired to scream out about this sort of thing, unlike the week before when I blasted songs about an Aeroplane over the Sea and drove through a sky devoid of stars. There was anger, then.

Not now, you lovely bunch. Not now.
Let us just sit here, you and I.

Let’s sit here, and think about the things that we like and the things that we love. Details and rain and soft loving smiles. Supposedly godly things, things that survive through devilish hues. Things that make the world run rivulets around our spines, like cherished sweat falling down all of our broad backs, making us feel as if a job has been done, has been done so well.

I’m tired, and I’m ill.
My eyes are welling up, and just last week a good friend who keeps getting better sent me salutations that eventually admitted that she wasn’t in a good place. Another friend got shit-canned for no good reason, and all I could do was bake her cookies and listen to her speak. My Dad’s dog died, and My Mom’s Mom has had attacks on her heart. A plane crashed, and a train crashed. High-profile people are making unintelligent pitbull jokes.

But the Mountain Goats are playing on. Cars are running by on the freeway, keeping life after life contained within them, bursting at the seams with sordid and spectacular stories while somehow keeping it all held in. Friends I know are working through the problems that they have, holding foreheads together in displays of meaningful intimacy, all because they want to fight for a world where love works out. People are working, flirting, dancing, moving, driving, making cookies and carrying on.

Somewhere that I can’t see, there is surely another tired person somehow getting by, and a host of sad, sad people still standing up with feet planted firm, looking out the window and learning to stride again in a manner that reminds the world itself of voices singing songs. Way of the World. Right?

Right here.
Right now.

There’s air in our lungs, good world of folks. There’s blood in our veins, surging from our hearts. There’s heat in our bodies, noises in our ears, churns in our bellies, and sensations on the surface of our skin. And I say for you, for us, that these things keep us going. They must. They have to.

They will.

A burn on the world.

You could see it from the freeway. Going up, up into the sky, mingling with the particles of smog like blood pooling in water. It turned the air into a sickening yellow cloud. Anyone driving by, they could see it. Helicopters soaring overhead, vivid orange colors dotted, dancing through that nasty yellow. There sat slouch-backed I, one person, staring it down, watching entropy work its way upward towards the blue, hazing up the gentle air. The air that we happen to breathe.

Well, it happens, and we -- this stink of a sweatpit of a claptrap of a squeezebox of a limpet of a city, that sticks to the side of greater whatevers with a sense of purpose that doesn’t seem to make much sense -- are still here to breathe. As it happens, as it stands -- it’s terrifying. As terrifying as a day. As terrifying as a life. Watch it: there it goes on.
All the time, this happens.
All the time, this stands.

All the time, this is what we view, and keep on living through.
After the smoke went higher and higher, just like the Sun in the Sky, I went onward to the post office. It was where I had been going, all while something burned hot underneath the heat. It was full of people.

There they were, the lot of them in a holding pattern. Holding off on living for however much time they would be spending under those buzzing lights, smelling nothing but the sweat deposits building on people’s shoulders, and the scent of cardboard in the air. It was hot. It was something, it was something, it was something…it was something to see.

It really was.

Because the post office is like an airport, or a traffic jam, or a frigid street corner, where people gather while waiting for the bus -- it’s a place where people can be seen. Their fibers start to unravel, because of the heat and the cold and the tedious sways and half-hearted half-steps. It’s where people let elements of their façade start to flake away, falling down like their skin, hitting the floor, becoming the dust.

Outside, the world was burning up.
Inside, the world was burning down.

It was a place where people could be seen.
Like the balding man with sweat-stained shirt of robin’s egg blue, holding sadness back in his eyes, only letting it escape through the distance of his thousand yard stare. He looked worried about something as his young son came up beside him, gibbering happily about the dinosaur on the poster that stood to remind people about the eventual switch to digital television signals. His father nodded his head, while never moving his stare from their spot in the vicinity of nowhere. But he…he cradled his son’s head, carefully, delicately. As if it were the only thing that he knew was real. In the face of his terrifying life, that was the only face that he could feel, like the hands of the blind, feeling out love.

He was living through the ways of the world.

PS
I got a new job so you dont have to worry about being paid on time ever again. Im sorry about everything.

That was the notice scratched on the back of a piece of scrap paper, pressed against an assortment of other things so that I could not see the other side. The man with the new job was sending a money order, with the note to be delivered alongside. He was two people ahead of me. He borrowed my pen.

He was getting by, as best he could.
All the while, things were burning.

Things are always, always burning. Out there. Way of the world.
Right?

I suppose so. I suppose it’s terrifying, in a way. I suppose it’s comforting, in a different way. I mean it. Because if things are always burning, that makes it easier to understand when things are happening closer to home. Things are happening, out there in the world. To people of mine.

And yet, as people speak in hushed tones, I find myself surprisingly unafraid. This is what happens, as the world out there continues to burn. This is what is supposed to happen, so that the world might turn. Sun in the Sky. People who cry. Moving on, getting on by. In a terrifying world, where people can be watched scrawling fear on bits of paper, where men can stare into an abyss but still hold onto something they know is real, then that which is always happening -- naturally, expectedly -- is nothing to fear. Entropy burns the world down, while life builds it up again.

So don’t cry, dear people. Look out there, out at the haze from the fire.
Look at it, and don’t worry.

Things will grow again.

A symbol of status.

Oftentimes, when you run out of words, you change the way the words are read.

You twist, you turn, you melt. You manipulate. To change the way the words are read, the way that the sentences come across, so that the nubile-minded reader might reach into the Grand Guignol universe of the Whatever-It-Is that is presenting them with the sublime gift of printed text, if only to bring themselves ever so much closer to someone else’s headspace, if only to help people come together, like precious lovers in a movie running across the width of a 2:35:1 frame with so much careless abandon; you -- meaning I -- the proverbial scribbler; we do this when we cannot bring our capacities to manage anything else. We manipulate. I try to manipulate, when I can’t bring my sentences to a place where the main idea could be managed by anything else. It’s cheap, is what it is.

It’s cheap.

It’s also fairly common. And it works, for a time at least. But bit by inch, inch by bit, the people -- the you’s, and the I’s -- start to notice. They start to see through the mechanical nature of our proceedings, and then the take to the streets, throwing fruit that’s rotted through, so that it might freshly bud and blossom on the soil of our only pair of battered shoes. Truth be told, it’d have been a long time coming. It’s been a long time since I’ve -- it’s been a damn long time since I called myself a Writer.

And now, still: It’ll be a long time yet. If ever.

These days, all days (as is the case with the internet) I’ve been making my living doing something else. Something that I like. Something that gives me room to grow, something that will possibly let my fingers dance in a different way than that with which you precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent readers are so joyously familiar. Somewhere with people that I can appreciate, who I can talk to in dire hours; people who I would happily pick up from the airport, with a morsel of delicious muffin at the ready. I like my job enough to not mention what it is, as I’ve no desire to get TOTALLY DOOCED LIKE A DUMBFUCK. I like it enough to keep on truckin’, babydoll.

And yet…it’s cheap.

Even more than the last few jaunts around this tiny block of free webspace, wherein I danced like a silly gorramn clown with sentences hanging from the edges of my lips like churros covered in seasoned salt, dancing, dancing my way into some kind of oblivion while hoping that the precious We of us wouldn’t notice. But we -- you and I -- we noticed. And nothing happened, of course. Why would it?

How often do you wish you could manage proper words?

Constantly, I’d imagine.
“Constantly,” a precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent reader says.

As people who live in the world, we wish that we could see clear enough to let our words -- and consequently, our thoughts -- stand lean and tall, like willows laughing defiantly at roaring typhoons. We wish that they might be able to fend for themselves.
No tricks, no weapons. Skill against Skill alone.

“They get brutalized,” that precious -- so, so precious -- non-existent reader says.
“They always get brutalized,” I say, “But at least they could manage it on real terms.”

The world where I exist, where I work now: It’s a world founded on manipulative things.
It’s acknowledged, it is. To a point. It’s tolerated, it is. To a point. It’s cheap -- so, so cheap -- but I’ll be damnable entity if it doesn’t pay well.

So.
Last week was my birthday.

Here I am, a sweaty entity in the midst of a sweltering world. Not a Writer.
Not as far as we -- you, and I -- are concerned. Because a Writer means more. A Writer writes. A Writer does more than simply fill pages, a Writer does more than try to spin fancies by way of complicated jibber-to-jabber ratios, a Writer does more than simply try to get things down. A Writer writes. S/He just does.

And that, babydolls…that there is a world of meaning.
Here, here, there is a world to see. Perhaps someday I can write it down.

Until then? Until Ever?
A fool -- this fool -- will spin his wheels.

Anon.

A WHEN for the EVER.

WHEN that time comes around, the time when I find myself yearning for steps, when I find myself desiring concrete getting softer beneath the rhythm of my steps -- when that time comes around, I never find myself expecting much. EVER.

If I did, it would rarely matter if and WHEN I would EVER find something. Those times, where I look down. Where I see the place for what it was, and find that things, that normal things always have more impact than you might expect. At first glance. At a glance. To see the world, you have to look.

I try to look. I really do.

WHENEVER I get the opportunity, I try. Most of us do, I think. I might not know, because WHEN do I EVER know anything? But I think it, goddamnit. I try to.
I try to expect something glorious, fascinating, wonderful and lush. I try to expect a nervous dive into a stank-ass pool of personality and grandeur, ranting and raving and anger and fear, countless things that affect that which is dear. I expect to be interested.
I try to.

WHENEVER something happens, I try to let it mean something.

That’s why this is funny, it seems to me. That’s why this I find this weird.
I’m sitting by myself, on that red faux-leather couch of times past, listening to the Allman Brothers play “Ramblin’ Man,” into my cochlea. If I look over my shoulder, out through the window, out into the light, I can almost glimpse a place. A place that almost seemed to mean something.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a fella sitting on the street, his back against a stoplight. He had a violin gripped between fingers that were surely strong. They have to be strong. Fingers and arms, gripping as tightly as can be done, moving assuredly, swiftly, sharply. It’s the only way you can play. It’s the only way it can be done right. He was busking in a decidedly non-showy manner, nothing but his checkered shirt on his back, his violin in his hands, and an empty tin can, polished to a brilliant sheen. The can granted images of a man on the rails, washing metal in clear river water. And it reminded me of a WHEN.

EVER since past.

I moved on.
Until I saw that fellow again.

Same spot, same checkered shirt, same gleam of machine-fashioned tin. Except this time, something was different. Except this time? The fella had hisself a banjo.

Just sitting on that corner, with assuredly strong fingers picking themselves something that could be called Banjo Fury. That’d be a reference, if it wasn’t just a wee bit off. But then again, then again, then again…the whole thing was just a wee bit off to its own side. It’s a combo that you don’t see all that often. Violinist/Banjolier. In my own life, I can only recall one such previous instance. And WHENEVER it’s remembered, I find myself struck down.

Even after time has passed, it’s surprising how little it takes.

WHEN certain times come, I find myself talking within this light of boxes -- scratch that/reverse it -- box of lights about a period of my life where things were not getting better, instead always sinking towards the bad. If you’ve read these things, you might know. You might think you know. You might think you know what happened, you might think you know what it meant. You might think you know how bad it was. Believe me, good friends, good family, good people whom I love with all that I can muster -- believe me, such things are probably beyond what can be explained. Not to be known.
Not EVER.

There was a time WHEN things were bad. WHEN I heard the siren call of the violin, WHEN I heard the spark of the banjo string. EVER and EVER, I run these times by my understanding of the world. And EVER and EVER, I find myself a little bit lost.

On that street corner, only a few days ago, I couldn’t have told you what I was looking for. But believe you me, nice people -- it sure as fuck-balls wasn’t that.

I might have kept looking forward, but there was water in my eyes. So I looked away. So I walked away. I looked again. I walked back. WHENEVER and EVER, I walked in circles around that block. Wondering what there was to think. If anything at all.

I looked around, at the other things that might be seen on the scene. I looked around. A too-young girl with attractive socks, men who reeked of ganj; the roadtrips we will never take, the days that run so long. In my head, instruments dueled away, refusing to be lost. So I walked away. Not far.

WHENEVER I feel depressed, I go and eat Ramen by myself. Not that it makes me feel better -- it’s simply what I do. I go and I eat the food that makes me sweat. Sweat like I’m sweating right now. Seeking clarity through the water in my eyes.

WHENEVER I feel lost, as a person, as a man, I sit down and watch Fred Rogers speak before Congress. Not that it puts things in perspective -- it’s simply what I do. I sit and I watch the things that make me cry. Cry like I did on that corner, back where. Seeking clarity through the water in my eyes.

WHENEVER I bring myself out into the world, I never expect to be introduced to anything of particular consequence. Because that’s not how the world works. There are always things, various bits of life ringing out like the clearest bell on the tallest hill, echoing across our landscapes, singing in our ears. But rarely, if EVER, do we notice. The ringing is loud, but most of the time, WHEN we hear it, the frequency is just beyond our range. We never think we’ll find something. Not something that will change our time, anyhow. Nothing like a fateful knock on a wooden door. Nothing like spittle flying on wings of misdirected anger. Nothing like lives that aren’t really worth anything, but still shouldn’t be considered cheap. Life is never cheap.

WHEN it finds us, we’re not going to be ready. Not EVER.
WHENEVER it finds us, we always just do the best we can.

A stageplay that is not a stageplay, that makes no sense but that's ok. -OR- A straight line.

INT: A ROOM - ANYTIME

(A room. A man enters, with hands that shake like they’ve been living through fear. He stares at No-One. He’s looking at us.)

… : Verily, verily, hither and yon. I knew a guy who broke his leg once, doing little more than just walking down the street. When he was on the ground, I took his hand; I held it as he wailed. If I’d seen it actually happen, I’d have laughed.

(A man enters. Another man. Not the same man. How different do you want them to be? That’s how different. Distinct. Separate. They’re similar.)

--- : I’d never have believed it. Not a dash of a snowball of a foundation of a beautiful chance. Where?

… : I stay awake at night, thinking about that. Do you know what that says about me?

--- : Where’d you go?

… : It says that I’m human. A person that lives and breathes in the world we were given. We gave in. We’ve taken. We took it, ourselves.

--- : Where’ve you been?

… : It makes me fear what that means.

(The man turns, looking at the other. The another. The another man. The another man doesn’t flinch.)

… : I think I’m in a desperate place.

--- : Is that where you’ve been?

… : Still there, I am. Verily.

--- : Glad to hear that there is a somewhere. If it were here that I was hearing, I’d be cross. Where did you take yourself, that’s a here to there? Where?

… : Down a ways.

(The man turns back towards us. Addresses. He looks hungry.)

… : S’ further than you’d think. And nearer.

(The one looks back at the another. He looks full. Which one? Pick one.)

… : I’ve missed it here.

--- : Here is where we’ve felt missed. Being missed was not never ever to be our mission. Where we are feels left behind.

… : Verily, verily, hither and yon.

--- : You never made any sense to me.

… : Was I supposed to?

--- : I haven’t a compatriot’s inkling of a semblance of a resolute clue. What’s the sense in something not-sensical? Things have to make sense, Mr. Man. If they do-ent, what’s to prevent the truant-truancy of mindliness? Where we are is where we are to be.

… : The world makes sense. Verily.

--- : Of does it course. Of course it does.

… : So it does.

(The man wrings his hands, as if he were trying to scrape them clean with little else than the particles that betray the visual spectrum. He cannot see them, they cannot be seen, but they have been seen, they have been categorized, they have been documented in tiny notebooks in handwriting as small and neat as that dust in the wind. The man sighs, but it is not a sad sigh.

Listen to yourself. To yourself sighing. Go ahead. I, and he, and you again, and the another, you and I and he will wait. Did you hear it? Was it special? Of course.)

--- : If all we have is the physically material, then all makes sense in the interlocking building blocks aside from the positively ephemeral, which is just a silly serious of stupid scenarios. Silly so silly.

… : He’s not wrong.

--- : He being me who is I. WHO IS yet another.

… : Yes, you are. And no, you’re not. You’ve wanted to know where I’ve been.

--- : I have notes of you, Mr. Sir Man. To leave them incomplete would be practically preposterous to a degree which I cannot found on confounded logic. It’s irksome, to be sure to say the least.

… : You’ve wanted to know.

--- : Yes.

… : Where I’ve been.

--- : Yes.

(The another nods, clears his throat, and bows his head as if he were in silent prayer. The man takes a step backwards, then turns, moves forwards, looking out over the sea of non-committal faces, including you, and yes, including this me that is sitting here. And there. He crosses his arms. He pulls a small bottle of mouthwash from his pocket, takes a small swig, and then swishes it around his mouth, loudly as he possibly can.

[He has a microphone to aid him in the purpose. An old-timey radio mic, lowered from the ceiling like at a boxing bout. It’s his, and his alone]

He looks ready for something. Whether he is or not? You know. It remains to be seen. You know.)

… : I like to speak. I like to make guttural vowel sounds in the depths of my throats. I like it when my thoughts are known, when and where they’ve gestated enough to be worthy of regarding. I like it when I’m worth something.

I could tell you a story. The story that I’m not telling him, this other another. I could tell you of that day before, when I was walking down on the path from whence I had came, singing quietly to myself about days that had never really happened. My ears were plugged with the sounds of my words, and I can tell you that I was nothing if not happy. I can tell you that. As I was walking, my footsteps began to slow, as the path that I was on suddenly seemed different beneath the beating heart of my bare, exposed, pasty white feet. The ground felt as if it were covered in darkness. It FELT like it.

I could tell you that. And you, just as likely could tell me that it doesn’t make sense. Because you’re right -- it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense, and in the words of the world, it didn’t happen. Undoubtedly, you’d be right. It didn’t.

Even though it did. To me, it did.
How do I explain it? There’s no way to explain it, because it’s not real. That doesn’t matter, but I still know that it means nothing. I felt it, so it matters to me. There’s value to an enigma, even if there’s no true joy to a mystery.

(He bows his head, as the another did, as if he were lost in prayer.)

… : Pointless, but beautiful. Not quite meaningless. If you feel something -- if it makes you feel something, it’s not quite meaningless. As long as you still know. Know the world, I mean. As long as there are still no lies. Verily. Verily. Hither and yon. Amen.

(He takes a step backwards, out of the light. [The microphone rises] Together, he and the another are barely visible in the edges of the glare. The man is breathing harder now, and somehow he can still be heard. The man looks at another. At one-another. Together)

--- : Where are you going, where have you been?

… : Haven’t the foggiest.

--- : Who do you think you are?

… : No one of consequence.

--- : Consequently, you consign yourself towards a conundrum. I hate you for it. I Hate You For It. Make sense, please. Make sense, you git. Make sense, you trollop. Make sense, you anarchist. Make sense, you antichrist. Make sense, you dingo who ate a baby. Make sense, you fool. Make something, something of worth. DO IT.

… : I’ll make what I please.

--- : What pleases you is meaningless.

… : Not quite meaningless. Fall down go boom.

--- : Meaningless.

… : A shapeless man cries out through a rainstorm of tears. No one answers.

--- : Devoid of meaning.

… : He imagines himself in a monochromatic hallway.

--- : Without meaning.

… : He reaches into your face, pulls, tugs, jerks upon it, finding something, anything, everything that can be tugged free. Your eyes are weak, your skin sallow and pale. You fall, because you can. Fall down go boom. Verily, verily, hither and yon.

--- : MEANINGLESS.

… : You think so?

--- : I do, you devilish do-not.

… : You know so?

--- : How can I?

… : Precisely. It’s pointless, but it might not be meaning-less.

--- : Meaning?

… : You fall down. Go boom.

--- : Verily.

(Another falls down. Goes boom. Fall down go boom. You get a headache. It thunders across the stage, cracking the walls, causing lights to shake from the tight hold of their casings, raining down shatterings of glass that fill the air with sparks and shrieks and puffs of smoke. There is darkness, here. Nothing left but. But you and I, and whoever might be up there, doing and being and meaning nothing. Whatever. We’re quiet, now.)

... : Verily.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd -SCENE-

A homing beacon.

What was promised has yet to come.
So here instead, is something muddled and addled and mad. Cheers.

*

I came here to see a friend.
That one friend, actually. The one that once upon a sometimes propagated this place with mention after mention, the only person who ever really took root in these bimonthly (not always) writings of white on black.

Until she left.

On that day, she was the one to whom I said goodbye. “Sayounara, fweckles.”
That was two years ago. Not exactly, but very nearly. Here we are, two years on.
Here I am. I’m sitting in a bowling alley on a Saturday night on the classically afflicted Ides of March. I’m alone. Surrounding me are people of various assortments, decked out in tattoos and leathers, while they stand next to families, and four year old girls who wrap themselves cozy in squishy pink coats.

I’m in West Allis, Wisconsin.
In this sprawling expanse of land that’s somewhat like a colder version of Northridge, California covered in dirty slush, there exists a bowling alley that almost seems to boil; with a demanding need for human interaction, a place that gets by with the action of throwing open its doors and declaring Ten Pins To Paradise!

There are a lot of people in here. Good people, I’d wager. Rebels without causes who haven’t yet stepped out far enough to realize that they haven’t got anything to rebel against, managing to somehow spread their wings across the contradictory identities of the sloppy chaos of the lanes and the comparatively (surprisingly!) cosmopolitan built-in-bar. Smoke Free Bar/Smoke Filled Alley. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

But then again, maybe it’s just me. Just me, the only fellow here on his lonesome.
I came here to be around people.

Earlier this evening, when the dear friend and I were out for a bite, she talked about how it had been when she had first returned to this state, state of being, state of mind; state of winds that cut thin, like slivers of paper that send stinging pain through your ears. We talked like we once had, in diners and dirty cars, either one or the other of us saying a bit too much while one or the other egged on. She talked about how hard it had been. Leaving things behind.

Leaving people, leaving places, leaving what felt right.
For a long while, she wasn’t happy.

She’s happy, now. Happy and settled (to a point; always, to a point), so much so that she had to get herself back over to work, something that I’d known about beforehand when setting this flashflood of vacation and schedule and technical difficulty and value and holiday underway. What I didn’t -- what I didn’t anticipate was the place.

So I’m in this place, watching people joyfully pantomime the lyrics of popular 90’s thrash tunes, being rowdily loud and sending balls plowing through pins with a collective skill set that documents serious effort. In this place, these people feel camaraderie run rich in the very air, warmth that overpowers the cold of the slushy outside ground, laughter mingling with the crescendo of steeeeeeeeeeerike!, lines of people coming along fine. They’re at home, in a way. I’m still lonely, and they’re at home.

Back in the earlier, it wasn’t so. I was there alongside my dear fweckled friend, feeling nothing but comfort in the waning sunlight of this place that I had never before seen. And then…it was less so. I had felt home before, at home, comfortable as a wayward lad, stretching my legs out into the frigid air with a sense of place that placed me as well, well as I could be. And then night fell. My friend was to work, and I was to sit. That feeling of home long gone. There I was, in a hotel room with a high-ceiling and little light to see by.
What could be done?

In the chill of the Saturday night, I bowled.

Five names on the board, me playing every single one. A couple of the meselfs manage to break 100. But I don’t talk, I didn’t speak. I pass the time, I didn’t extend an olive branch.
That night is done, and still, here it is. Place isn’t a home. Home is.

It just is.

It’s comfort, no matter where we are. It’s the touches that we add, the things that we make our own. The people that we grow to understand. When my friend was gone, she was here. She didn’t actually make it back, back to the point where the world made sense, until she settled herself down, worked out her workspace with people that she could grow to know, to care for. She built herself a home, covered with bricks, yes; but made of people.

That’s what we do.

I work a lot. Most of the people I know do. So what do we do with our time? How do we keep ourselves complacent, at peace, piece by piece by piece by piece? It should be obvious by now, so I won’t even bother saying it. But that’s it. We take the place that we spend so much of our time, and if only in the slightest manner, even if we don’t really recognize it, we mold it into something that is. Pictures and posters and people around.
“Do it for…,” You should know the rest.

When I’ve been around the person that I came around to be around, I’ve felt at home in this place that isn’t much like home at all. When we painted walls and tore the heads off of mudbugs; when we talked freely and well, or sat silent and stared out the window.

It hasn’t been an eventful time. But when the moments counted, I felt at home.
And that, good people, will do.

A watchman's call.

Shhh…
Come closer, come in.

Huddle up with me for a moment, as we sit here and be quiet. Taking a split of a second to gather in the warmth. And now that we’re here, let’s imagine there are people around us. Hustling and bustling, carrying on with the normal activities that people tend to do on lazy Saturday afternoons, that momentous occasion where they find their week in transit between the back-breaking dullness of work and the contradictory obligations of religious gatherings, between that last nightly quiet and the leap back into the fray of stillness that tears flesh like a horde of Mongols in their prime. This is the time when people are people, when they sit in the world and talk out loud, because it might be the only chance that they get.

This is the time to listen.
That was the time where I used to sit back and watch.
I don't get many chances to watch people in motion, not anymore. The reasons for this are nothing sinister, of course. Nothing sinister, nothing special -- Nothing to be called a "happening". It’s just that I find myself at work a lot, which only gives me the opportunity to survey people as they chime in with occasional storytelling and idle insults directed towards people on the other end of the phone. They’re good people; there’s pleasure to be found in that place. But it’s hard to see folks as they are. People in function are not people in fact.

So I’ve brought myself back. Back to the place that has since been morphed into a different sort of animal. I can look around from this elevated perch located in the corner of the coffeeshop that I used to frequently frequent, seeing memories of old spatial arrangements popping up like holograms in front of my veiled eyes. When I come back here, sometimes it feels like everything is nothing but a ghost. Or maybe the ghost is me; I never really seem to know for sure. In any case, when I get a chance to sit back in public, tracing the roads of memory lane the best I can, I remember the scenes that I’ve been lucky enough to see play out, even if the show on display wasn’t meant for me. Sometimes, casual voyeurism is the best way for people to figure things out.

I say this because of the condition -- that pesky “human,” one -- has a tendency to make itself known all around, in ways that are stupid and meaningful and drunk and calamitous and vengeful and quiet; lives that screech like a kestrel’s call, yet still somehow go unnoticed. Like the fellow who sits to my right, voice churning in the very back of his throat as his grinds out unintelligible slurs of speech to no one and nothing, while he clutches a copy of “High Times,” close to the silvery jacket which binds his chest together. Earlier, I’d seen that he had a can of Miller-Lite jammed unceremoniously into his back pocket, and I was amazed that he seemed to have no issue with sitting down atop of it. It makes one wonder if such a thing would ever burst into squirts of foam under his (admittedly thin and frail) weight. Later, after he took a stop in the commode, he emerged, red-faced, from the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of his back pocket. The can was gone.

I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed this. The watching.
It’s all there, you know.

Wincing before you like the sunken shoulders of that girl behind the counter, the one with a face that isn’t handshake firm. But earlier, I saw her smile. Earlier, she comped me on some eggs. I like her more than the one who stands directly to her left, the one who poses as if she were trying just a little too hard. What she’s trying for, I’ve not a clue. But whatever it is, she wants it.

I look around, I look around -- I see a lot of new faces. The girl who has her rounded features half-hidden by a shelf; the pretentious peacoat-wearing motherfucker who was slumped down on the slippery skin of the faux leather couch, who I could see beginning to sweat as our preferred star burned behind him (Now that I’ve secured his former seat on this couch, his eyes look at me with the force of the rampaging wild as he plays online poker and unsuccessfully tries to hide the porn that he keeps going back to); the mismatched couple who sits in the corner in silence. I remember how it felt, being a silent watchman in the midst. That feeling, the one of plucking plump secrets out from the air.

It really can work out fine. Where you find the trouble, is with the people that you know.

After all, it has been said -- by others, as well as by this particular fool who sits alongside the silvered growler -- that the internet is a tool that steps us forward into a new idea of the ages, helping people establish new modes of humanity when they take a second to stop looking for boobs. It changes the way that we exist. And more often then not, it also helps us watch.

There are people that we know, who won’t say things to our faces. Yet the still speak out into the ether. And we, the watchmen -- we listen.

Listen to words that are draped with ambiguity that somehow manages to cut our thoughts like razorblades as we try to puzzle out the problems that are going on in the lives of our friends, the problems and the loves and the lives, all while never stopping to ask what it all means. We can’t ask. If we did that, they’d know we had our ears to the wind.

And if they knew that, they might not say anything at all.
But as we, the you’s and the I’s, come close and come in, sitting quietly so that they might not hear our breathing -- they say things. And we listen. We watch.

We wonder.
About the lives that are going on outside of the vanishing point of our perspective, the lives that we know -- the lives we thought we knew -- that are moving forward even as we sit around, waiting for clues and voices to give us knowledge of the human stain that we hadn’t been lucky enough to discern in the quiet lulls within our own thoughts.

Here I am, waiting and watching and wondering. I don’t…I don’t know what’s going to happen. Not with the people outside of me, the people who I’ve loved. The people who send out signals of pain that race with nerve speed to my ears, to my eyes. I hope that I might figure something, so I might figure some manner of hope. Even though that’s ridiculous. Even though I know it’s pointless. Sometimes, listening is the best you can do.

After all: a watchman’s quiet voice gets lost on the wind.

A sleepless night.

“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

-- “Der Sandmann,” (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffman

For a good portion of my life, I haven’t been fond of sleep.
Haven’t been fond of laying my head down on cool pillows and closing my eyes, haven’t been fond of wrapping myself up tight against the chills of the night and then shifting, shifting, endlessly shifting while trying to counter-productively shout away the din of my thoughts. It started when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I couldn’t sleep.

There I was, something close to twelve, spending my nights doing little more than staring off into the darkness. No books to read in the agreed upon darkness, no laptop to stream in youtube fantasies, no hard-boiled noirs to talk me down with razor sharp patter. Just my eyes, trying to focus on patterns that probably weren’t even there. Just me, waiting for dreams that weren’t going to happen.

Even now, I rarely remember my dreams.

Back then, I’d do what I could. I’d eventually sit up because of the onslaught of boredom that had been pelting me throughout the night, and I’d do odd things like melting candles into horrific little snot-puddle sculptures made of wax. Seriously man, I aint gonna lie -- these things were ugly little fuckers. But I made them, and I kept them, and some of them still sit around, made. Some nights, I could imagine them staring at me, thin membranes in place of eyes that focused upon me through the walls of the dark. It wasn’t scary; they were mine. But these days, it’s not something I’d like to think about. It had come to a point where I harbored a general feeling of distaste toward sleep, if only as a means of self-preservation. These days, when I don’t sleep, I simply stay awake.

It’s refreshing, really.
Right now, right where I am, I can listen to the rain spatter down onto concrete outside the window over my shoulder. If I were to close my eyes and fall gently, elegantly asleep, the sound of the sky-water would drift away from me, sinking into the depths of my mind as I pull away from the sensations of the world, the ones that I actually make some attempt to understand. If I so wished it, I could step out into the wee hours, feeling my toes get wet behind the insufficient covering of my not-wool socks as I step forwards to nowheres. In particular, these nowheres seem to be. Nowhere and nothing at all. At three in the morn, most things turn out to be meaningless. But still -- I could go, if I wanted to. There’s something to be said for that.

Hey, I could probably hit up the doughnut shoppe!

After all, they’re one of the few sorts of establishments that has the unmitigated audacity to actually stay open past 1:00 AM in the (apparently?) sleepy city of Los Angeles. They’ve given me options, on those nights reminiscent of my youth; the nights where I could do nothing more than stare into walls that began to bleed by way of sheer youthful resolve, as a brain stayed open far past the point where it would feasibly remain useful. It started then, and it’s lasted until now. Long days and longer nights. Sometimes, your head forces you to live like that. To live through that. And sometimes, sometimes, sometimes…in some Stockholm sort of way, it’s what you learn to love.

I love the sounds of the world, while it exists throughout the night. When the sun shines, the sound doesn’t…feel..quite the same. It doesn’t touch the edge of your earlobe in as nearly a delicate manner, not when the general people mill about, unlike the starlight sublimation where the world is like a secret. Know what I mean?

Of course you do. You’ve heard it, you’ve seen it, you’ve felt it, sometime or another. I know you have. And so do you.

I hate sleeping. I hate missing chances to catch knowledge on the wind.

So it was really kind of shocking to learn that I’ve got sleep in me. Because lately, I’ve felt awfully tired. And moreso than ever before, I’ve found myself needing sleep. Long days, and longer nights. I come home with eyes that feel so heavy, it feels like I’ll need drag chutes on my eyelids to keep them from crashing down hard and curling themselves under and around my eyeballs by way of momentum, stretching out sheets of flesh and leaving me totally blind when morning light comes my way. I suppose these things happen, to people who make their dues along the way. Things change. Eyes close. Yet even so, I still hate it when I need to lay myself down. But even now -- now I lay me down to sleep. Et cetera.

Here’s the part where I would usually say, “And so on”. I tend to repeat myself like that. Sometimes as a part of constructing some kind of a whole with this little bimonthly word excursion, but mostly just because I have a tendency to forget what it is I’ve said in the past. It’s rare that I’ll read these, before I toss them into the world. I know them in snippets, the little bits that I focused on, the ones that I can really remember. Like the days in the waking world. You look at the bits while you can, during the virtuoso beats where you manage to keep your eyes open, and you let them affect you how they will. Most of the time, it’s the best we can do. Some of the time, it helps us pass by.

About a week ago, I was ill.
I’m better now, save for the occasional coughing fit that leaves me huddled on the floor like a wounded animal, trying to claw out my lungs with bony fingers while gossamer threads of goo cling to my lips, catching the edges of light. Before that, it was a little worse. I was walking death. I couldn’t sleep.

And yes, right then, I wanted it. Granted, it was more due to practicality as opposed to any real, any solemn desire to close my eyes…but even so, sleep was what I wanted. I wanted it to help me feel better, so that I could stop chugging low-grade drugstore Theraflu knockoffs which caused my body to become little more than a furnace, offsetting the temporary moments of respite with a burning forehead and a body made of nothing but unsettling sweat.

So there I was, sitting in the dark. Twelve years old, even though I’m not quite there anymore. When those seconds are ticking by, it really doesn’t matter, not the years before. In that place, everything feels the same. I could feel the eyes of the garish wax staring me down, wondering what to make of the hands that made them, just like it had been in those old times. This went on and on.

It was after four days had passed that someone offered me an out. Nothing terrible, nothing severe. It was simply something to take the vestiges of panic out of the edges of my thoughts, where they seemed to be clawing themselves into my eyes; it was something that might help me sleep. Alprazolam’s the name. Tiny and white. In the palm of one’s hand, they almost seem to glow. And I turned them down. I had to. I closed that hand and saw their flash slip away as they were taken from the light.

To me, it’s the only thing that made sense.

Now, I’ll have no one mistaking me: I have no patience for supposedly dynamic treatises speaking about advantages of organic foods, holistic medicines, the glorious ways of the rich earth, the old mind, the natural world. The ways that were set by people gone by. The ways set by people who died. Horribly. From a lack of real medicine, from a lack of nutritious food, from a lack of things that truly exist in a world that has gotten better. We’re alive. We’re older. We know things are out there. These days, we know where to look.

But that doesn’t change the fact that some things are ours. Our sleep and our sleeplessness. The sweat on our brow. The pain that has us choking back a grimace. These are the things that sometimes help us grow, that teach us how we might be strong when we need it, how we might be ready when trials come our way.

Whether I like it or not, my sleep is my own. And to give it up, to take my control of it out of my hands, out of my eyes, to give it away to something like that, something so small and white…it feels a bit like losing. It feels a lot like giving up. When things like that begin, I often wonder where they’ll end.

Where my spine meets my neck, I carry my burdens, as do we all. I carry them, even as they grow slick from the falling of the rain that I can still hear cascading behind me. I hate sleeping, I really do. But I still won‘t give it up. After all, every so often, there’ll be an unkind night where I won’t seem to feel that hate quite so deeply.

On that day, my rest will be my own.

A bloody business, wot wot.

It only takes a little bit. Just the smallest, the faintest, the tiniest amount. Right now on the back of my hand, I can glimpse the blood. It’s barely any; it’s nothing, even. Yet there it is, oozing idly in an altogether orderly fashion that fits right along with the fact that these spontaneous bleeds come year after year, time after time. Sometimes, my hands bleed. It’s the air that does it.

And the cold, yeah. Yeah. If I tense the muscles that bind my knuckles together, I can see them move beneath the layers of skin. I can see my bones hiding, teasing my blood from beneath the surface of me. Everything moving, all these things -- anythings, plentythings, manythings -- working themselves around, waiting to be skinned out of layers of epidural that are not particularly deep. Not deep enough, anyhow. It’s strange, seeing how easily things can be set free. Sometimes, it only takes the air.

You see it all around.
In things that you care for, in things that you wish you could push down on, keeping that fair bit of pressure going, so that you might…so that you might…so that you might be able to keep them the same, keep them charged with delicate hues of warm color for just an instant more. Before they tense, before they slacken, before you feel their hands stop feeling like hands. You stop seeing movement beneath the layers. You stop seeing it anywhere. It happens all the time. It only takes a little. Or a lot. It’s hard to know, with things like this.

Holy shit, I’ve got a headache.
And that means not a thing. So!

It’s time to keep it moving, keep it fluctuating; as per the standard, we here are going to keep going with this little bit of business, so that by the time we get to the end of my standard allotment of two-pages-or-some-such-maybe-a-little-more-if-I-feel-particularly-perspicacious, we (you, of course, and I as well) will feel a fraction better about the days to come. It’s a tall order, especially for people who don’t exist, and for just one guy who rarely bothers with anything of consequence other than the mass of hours that he puts toward an output that isn’t particularly meaningful, that still manages to be satisfying on a functional level. It’s good work. I like it. But work like that, it doesn’t show blood.

If you were to peel back the layers of such things, you wouldn’t find any blood, and you wouldn’t find any tears of meaningful resolution; you wouldn’t find the liquids of thought that form pools inside mountain caverns, dark and silent and endlessly deep. No blood. Just sweat, dripping from the brows of me and mine.

So much sweat, staining everything I can see. Sometimes, it feels like it may be all that you need. But then, the air comes rushing over. With it, comes the cold. And then nothing more than looking at the back of my chalk-colored knuckles reminds me of the world out there, the things that I know, the people that I’ve felt, the people who have fallen, the people who have traveled with epic strides, the days that have felt like reality in the haze of similarity that surrounds the rest.

Sometimes, you’re reminded of things that bleed. You see the red cells for what they are, in front of your eyes coursing through the halls and filling everything with warmth and hope and dread. You see how people live. Way of the World. Right?

Earlier in this very week, something happened.
Not to me; I was off to the side, standing quiet and watching cautiously as I held a transparent plastic cup of delicious Goldfish crackers. Some people made a mistake, which turned into a series of mistakes, which turned into an acre of tasks, which turned into a kind of seething resentment that made a hissing sound as it moved through the office, filling all spaces as if it were sentient steam. There I was, off to the side. Hands still intact, eyes wide. Waiting to see what would come to be.

Things came to be. There were occurrences, yes indeedy-do. And in the aftermath of it all, that still managed to somehow be before it all began, someone sat directly next to me, ready to perform a task. There was work to be done, and we were going to do it, anger be damned, confusion be thrown to the pit of despair. It was the right thing to do, and I respected this person who had the will to do it. So then: we worked.

The countless machines around us hummed their oblivious hum, and the office as a whole went on coursing about, unaware that one of its veins had been laid bare. Blood changes color in the open air. There we were, there we sat. We didn’t say a word about the things that felt like they were happening around us, even if they were actually locked behind thin office doors. We just worked on, the person in question pulling a sweatshirt tight, while I doused my discomfort with fish-shaped cheddar goodness. It was there, in that moment, that something was said. I’m not quite sure why it was spoken, and I’m even less sure as to why it was spoken to me: The pair of us had never been particularly close. But I suppose that’s what it was; it was something to do with proximity, the way that a dying man might reach out to the person closest by, gripping onto the leg of their fatigues, pulling them down to the dirt that’s suddenly metamorphosed into crimson mud. It was a shot in the dark, looking for something, somewhere. From someone. Beat the drum slowly, play the fife lowly. The streets of Laredo grew cold as the clay. Solace, and fairness, and the things in between.

“I’m probably getting fired today. Over this.”

It was the kind of sentence that can steal the sound from a room. Uttered quietly, privately, almost as if it weren’t meant to be heard. Yet it was heard -- and in its wake, all sound went away. Not the air. The sound. Speeches, those steal the air. When someone begins shouting with propaganda force, drawing all of the breath in the room to them, so they might hold it to their breast, squeezing it tightly in order to spur themselves on, growing louder and prouder and more magnificent by the second; taking the room to a place beyond breath, where thought and beauty are the only things that are known, until all of the people suddenly feel the air that they provided rushing back towards them with the strength of a gale, turning around their bodies, pushing them up, up, up -- pushing them to the point where all they can do is stand and clap. When the air goes, the blood stays quiet. When the sound goes, all you can hear is the blood in your ears.

I practically choked on Goldfish smiles. Right now, just the thought of that seemingly bioluminescent orange turns my stomach. Because there was…there, there was a person. A person with cheeks flushed by pumping blood, trying to warm away the cold of the situation with a sweater and handful of words. Trying to talk to me, to reveal the situation. Setting it free, throwing it at the mercy of the world. If I had said anything at that moment, it would probably have sounded like, “I are NOT function OF words.” Whatever I might have said, it wouldn’t have been the thing to say.

Because the right thing to say belongs in a different world. I’ve spent the majority of this small gathering of pages talking about the blood in the hand, the blood in the pocket, the things that churn within our bodies, the things that set themselves free. When we see them out there, they let us remember something fundamental, something true. We see our fragility, we see our beauty, we see how we’re the same. The blood in our veins puts us at the mercy of the world. And there you have it: The world as a whole is an unfair place.

People go to work, people work hard. People get thrown under the bus. People get up in the morning, people brush their teeth. People get reprimanded for the faults they cannot change. And so it is, and so it always will be, and that’s not such a terrible thing. The world is unfair, such as chaos demands. Shikata ga nai.

But that’s the trick, you see. The world is an unfair place; that much will always be certain, and that much I will never even try to deny. But people…but people…but people have no right to throw fairness at the mercy of the cold. This is our planet, our world where we live; we have to do what we must. We should treat others not as we want to be treated, but as we should be treated. We have to live in the world.

So take a moment. Stand up, stretch, and go step outside. Close the door behind you, letting the sounds of your living facility be locked away from your ears, for just a fraction of a moment of your day. And while you stand there, close your eyes. Close your eyes and listen to the world around. There are people out there, with blood pulsing in their hearts, rushing through their veins. There are cars out there, churning and burning fuel, forcing themselves down roadways like energetic cells. There’s a world of lives, all of whom deserve a moment to bleed. All of whom will get it, whenever that time comes by. It’s the way of the world. There they shall be, eyes pointing at the stars, body losing color.
When the time comes, what are they going to curse?

The world?
Or its people?

What do they bleed for?

A Roman Goddess (Juno is).

It only took a few clicks forward into Juno’s initial succession of color-moderated shots before something…before something altogether striking happened. For me, at least.

Before everything began good and not quite proper, before the screenplay sets forth upon its trek of fingersnap dialogue and human conditions; while the majority of the audience members were still sitting back and taking care to properly situate themselves within the frames of deep blue seats, I saw something that really, truly, utterly endeared itself to me.
It got to me.

There sits a boy, there stands a girl. She approaches him, small creases forming on the sides of her mouth, marks of effort formed by hard-earned smiles. They come close. So close that all we can see are mouths surrounded by soft skin, mouths that don’t quite touch, mouths that are just taking a careful moment to breathe heavy and warm.

I see this, and I remember.
There sat a boy, and there stood a girl. The boy was me, the girl was she. Coming together in a series of moments that seem altogether separate while being all together, a myriad of feelings forever encapsulated into a series of steaming breaths. Moments in close-up. Bright eyes, close to mine; quick glances toward the door, in case her lesbian mother might burst in with the hope of catching an untrustworthy boy in the act; mouths on mouths, mouths not on mouths; fingers sliding over smooth spaces, common places that we still could not see from the proximity of our interaction; finally, a sweet voice uttering “Hi,” into the depths of my ear, a word dripping with sweat that tasted sweeter to my ear than that word ever has had the right to be. Yes. We were in love, she and I -- as simply and sweetly and completely as it gets. We were just another pair of ridiculous youngsters, but it was love.

First loves are in soft-focus.

And they are close. And there it was. There was my past, the way that it cannot help but be remembered. After that?
There were jokes.

That’s the beauty of it, you see. Because of all the elements that turn this screenplay by the indefatigable Diablo Cody (copywriter turned stripper turned blogger turned biographer turned screenwriter) into an act of wizardry, the part that makes it so goddamned watchable is that even if it didn’t bother with dredging up slivers of pastlife that make the pretentious blathering of Quarterlife seem as loaded and grating as they actually are, the words present in Juno would still get around to making me laugh like a H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S S-I-M-I-L-E when the receptionist at the Abortion Clinic leans in to discreetly reveal that boysenberry-flavored condoms make her boyfriend’s dick “smell like pie.”
Nothin’ says lovin’ / Like somethin’ from the oven.

Which brings us to the baby.
As I appear to not have previously mentioned, the titular character of this earnest little snark-bomb of a movie happens to be exceedingly pregnant for most of the running time. However, separating it from the recent swell of surprisingly high-quality comedies about women who are with child when they would rather not be (the charming Waitress, and the hilarious Knocked Up) Juno manages to differentiate itself: It’s not actually about the baby at all. It’s not quite about motherhood or fatherhood, not quite about buying diapers and cribs, not quite about the choices that we make. It’s about the things that we actually do, when presented with choices that we didn’t make ourselves. With jokes.
And with truth.

Earlier in this year that ends with a series of ferocious films (No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood come immediately to mind), I had the pleasure of seeing a film that was so, so, so…genuine, in the way that it conveyed human speech-interaction-emotion, the way that it wove it with music and spoke its feelings in such a way that gave us a beautiful taste of something real. Once, that movie was called. It was something special. Juno is something else altogether, but something about the pairing of them…

While Once stood from the pack by being entirely genuine, Juno earns its praise in a similar, yet significantly different manner: by being unwaveringly honest.

There’s ferocity in that, as well. Because while finding traces of reality in the world might be somewhat difficult whilst being distracted by the gaggle of golden colored runners who are continually running through the frame, while girls in high school don’t generally have such silvered tongues that they employ in the midst of Diablo Cody’s charming vulgarity, while the tone of the movie stretches us past the breaking point of things that we might call reality…it never plays a false note. It’s always true, no matter what happens, no matter what words we hear from inside the sizable expanse of Juno’s brain. Yes, even while she’s calling people “douchepackers”. It’s fierce, truth such as this.

It feels right amidst the rest of things, and it breathes warmly into the room of the theatre, bringing with it such a sense of the world and the people in it that when we come to the final, unbroken shot of the movie -- when we came to that, I stared, transfixed, at one of the most romantic images that I’ve seen in a good, long, time. It was like it was reaching out to me, one final gesture, taking a moment to whisper into my ear.

“Hi.”










-ADDENDUM-

At the request of my friend Jorge, I state this here for no particular reason: Skeet, skeet, skeet. Make it rain.

Take that how you will.

A traveling companion

.Thursday.

partially written on
a discarded gum wrapper, a bookstore receipt...and yeah, that's another bookstore receipt

I am going somewhere.
One of the odder aspects of traveling is that all the details become disturbingly real. Your eyes seem to grab hold of everything around, picking up data with the sense of immaculate detail of a bargain bin scanner. Clear – but sometimes, the edges blur. It makes you wonder where you really are. How you fit.

So I look. My prying eyes trying to pluck words out of the venerable air, grabbing sentences from any source that manages to grace me the path of my veiled brown eyes without the tender embrace of context to make any knowledge the slightest bit whole.

The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears, or the sea.

“Your father was a bastard (section unseen) as swift
and sure

you only pick the best
Love,

They're all that I can hold onto, right now. My head feels heavy, my eyes lidded, pulling me down into a tired world. Even as the taste of burningly excessive caffeine still mingles with the tartness of aircraft cranberry juice on the back of my tongue, I feel myself start to drift; outside of me, things keep on keeping the fuck on. My compatriot and I are shushed by a curly haired dynamo, as she apparently took offense at our having the audacity to speak on the subject of dead dogs in the presence of a six year old boy that we couldn't see. I can see him, now. He's holding something. A book, one that supposedly teaches young minds with a one/two punch of words and colorful stickers.

It's about pirates.

He sits still like a hummingbird, as boys (and boyish men) are known to sometimes do. His mother shields him from the context of unpleasant truths that are going on in the world, as she concurrently denies him the context of the murderous plunderers that he has chosen to idolize. No history, no knowledge of Edward Teach carving men into paste as he sailed wild across watery expanses in Queen Anne's Revenge. No fresh context for the world. It just seems a wee bit sad, that's all.
That's all.

The sky roars on outside, letting horrifying images of dried-out hillsides that somehow manage to terminate into epic towers of smoke drift right on by, while the sound of our velocity through the thinness of the upward air makes it difficult to speak. To connect, in any cheerful manner. I want to reach out, to touch...to stretch out my shivering legs. Yet it cannot be done, not yet. For better or worse, the free range words are all. They might do, for now.


.Friday.

partially written on
a previously forgotten piece of work-related notation, a receipt for a box of jasmine green tea, and an old note that was to remind me that I was in dire need of a haircut

Yet again, yet again, I find myself happily getting lost on darkened streets.

Now: It's around 1:17 in the illustrious AM. My friend and I are seated in a curiously warm 24 hour eating-type-joint, where alongside me a boisterous trucker is getting over his drunk by jawing with the staff about the quality of the food. He wants me to try the Chicken Parmesan.

Before: We were out there. Striding carefully like a pair of spectral wisps, afraid to disturb the quiet stillness of the night. It's out there, all around us. Descending from on high like a fluid pressure that does little more than sweep through the streets, completely covering all things. Making it denser. Pressing down. In fact, I might as well say it – in this town, the level of quiet is quite nearly disquieting.

Even for me, even for I, even for the sort of person that I am. The sort of person who has built a sense of personal peace on turns of phrase that are echoed out across the space of empty lanes, orange city lights buzzing down with nothing if not approval. But this...nothing is out here, nothing more than the sudden explosive flash of headlights from down the road; nothing more than towering cranes, swaying lightly against a death-black sky. Nothing but street lamps that suddenly die as we try to walk beneath the oasis of their glow. Not even a flicker. Just gone.

It happened twice.

Now, again: Coffee hot, lights warm. Flames erupting on the other side of the counter, causing a somewhat snarky waiter to announce “Fire!” in a crowded restaurant, yet not in any way that would incite a stampede of people suddenly trying to claw through the solid walls to the get to the quiet air outside, shoving each other out of the way, looking to crush faces into the backs of heads if only to save their own sorry skins. No, it merely flares up, casting temporary illumination upon our faces. This place might be a little bit fantastic.

Let the morning come.

-&-
Holy fuck! they have some amazing water pressure in this joint.
-&-

Out of the door, down the elevator, out of the building, down the street; it didn't take long, not at all. We're pacing along with a torrential downpour of other sorts of folks, making our winding way through an epic room. Elsewhere, across it all, I can hear the sound of this places favored ultra-caffeinated Guarana beverage being tossed away, the glass bottles sending hollow echoes towards our ears. The sound of it makes us shudder, the first time. Echoes that move like ripples that have forced their way across a stream.

It 's a quick move across the space, all things considered. Passing by ropes, stretched out to serve as guiding arms; passing by gleaming windows, tall like pillars; passing by an old man named Stacy, who looks over us disapprovingly as we chat about things that us whippersnappers tend to talk about; passing by people. So many people.

Places like this always make me feel kind of strange.
I can watch colors bleed out at me from every corner, attached to a host of people that carry with them various tastes, stories and smells. I can watch the things that they do, the games that they play. I can play the games myself. And I do. It's fun, discovering cell-shaded bits where I can construct people with devastating facial hair, and playing dynamic shooters that make it obvious that the developers really have a big wanger for Michael Mann. This place isn't quiet.

In the midst of everything else, I'm sitting back, watching a pair of people connect. Not in any fanciful, sweeping romantic gesture kind of a way – they're just sitting together. A girl and a fella, perched together on the thin bench that finds its place in front of a polished black piano. It gleams. It reflects their faces, as he sits there and teaches her how to play. Neither face is, neither face is smiling. But it seems right, whatever it might be.

He takes his leave and she sits there, alone, feeling out Zelda themes with the tips of her fingers. I ask her to play a specific song, the one that represents the only horse that I ever gave a damn about, never mind that it was never real. I sit beside her and listen to the surprisingly powerful trill of her voice as she tries to pull the song out of her memory. I sit beside her and watch the movement of her fingers as they stride carefully across the ivory. It doesn't mean much of anything, the song or our idle chatter. Yet it seems right, whatever it might be.

I also bought some T-shirts.
So that's nice.


.Saturday.

partially written on
a receipt for bulletproof chicken, some sort of prematurely faded slip from the Seattle airport, a stub from “Superbad,” and proof that I bought a muffin on 08/07/07

I am staring George Orwell in the eye.
He has a charming face, one that – despite the sunken lines of hard-won ideals and hard-thought ideas – still manages to look through layers of time: To affect me with his state of whimsy. It's a bit depressing, actually. Not any fault to the creator of ol' Winston Smith, of course. No, the feeling was there before I popped into this bookstore in search of....something, I dunno. But even in here, it's too bleeding loud.
And even right now, it occurs to me that I'm getting ahead of myself.
So then.

This morning, the world began beneath a gray sky. I proceeded to shower and failed to shave, and then stepped into the elevator, only to find myself dominating the middle of a pack of senior citizens. All of them staring, as if I were about to try and hungrily, viciously tear my way through the un-trodden path of their flesh. As appetizing an idea as that was, I instead turned to them and asked that faithful old question: “Why do you suppose that no one reads John Gardner anymore?”

Empty smiles, blank stares.
They didn’t remember him. These days, fewer and fewer do.
It wasn’t long after that, that I was sitting on a cold, hard floor, reading about the frost. That same room, the room of high ceilings and clinking glass. It was a somewhat troublesome place to be. On that cold floor, alone.

There were others there, of course; the world of the winding line that stretches farther than the coasts is nothing new, certainly not to me. There were people on my left, throwing down the blue sparks on the handhelds in their hands (obviously), while the people on my right were chatting in hushed, excited tones about the prospect of the music that was to come, occasionally letting loose an echo of a laugh. And behind me? In the part of the line that had curved its way around, the nature of the thing creating a place beyond my little spot? They were playing Family Feud. It was on a VAIO, one that had clearly seen a season or two.

I said nothing, to no one.
This was somewhat out of character. My old habit in lines like this, in situations like this, is the somewhat dubious procedure (that is to say: Yes, I realize that this is fucked up) of moving through lines like this with the simple act of conversation. I would walk forward a bit, drawn to some sort of something on a someone’s somewhatsamawhozit, and through the act of speaking about it, and then other things, blend into that portion of the line. And then again. And again. And so on.

Rather prickish, you might say. I’d agree, too. But I’d probably still do it. But this time, it wasn’t being done. I just sat there. On that cold, hard floor. Waiting for something to happen.

Whatever did happen on the in-between, my friend and I made it through the day. We listened to a charmingly adorable French-Canadian man talk about historical accuracy in regards to murderous crusaders in the streets of Ancient Jerusalem, and then watched him endear himself to us by way of offhand comments directed toward his creation. We watched something that we’d forgotten about, that still had the ability to make us laugh. We rested our backs against cold, hard concrete. It was the most comfortable concrete that we’d ever experienced.

Whatever happened, we ended up here. In this place, sitting silently as we stare at the opened bottles of Black Cherry soda that are rested right before our eyes. George Orwell looking over us, wondering what to make of this pair of sour blokes. With all of this going on around us, we -- the pair of us, yes -- still feel a stretch away. Looking for something to connect with, so that it might bring us toward the noise, meld us into its psychotic rhythm in a way that makes the pounding in our heads vanish into the depths of the ether. It reminds me of the other night.

Back when we had set ourselves adrift on the streets, waiting to collide with something, anything within the night that fell thick around us like a fog. No one out, few things awake. We wandered into the nearest light source beside us, a sex shoppe/adult bookstore. The door was open.

We talked, a bit. We had a small chat with the lovely tattooed lady behind the counter, who greeted us with a pleasant smile and shared our view on the state of people floating across the streets. No one to see, out there in the cold. No one to go to, to strangely revel in the act of being alone. It was a pleasant diversion, I can say that for sure.

No such luck, right now. Back here with Orwell, back in the world where the normally quiet confines of a bookstore manages to somehow be loud enough to grate at my damnable ears. So with that in mind, the only true solution? Make it fucking louder.

“If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”
A hero of mine once said that, in the middle of one of his well-trodden talks. We shall see, denizens of the intratubes. We shall see. After all -- I’m a young man, yet.

-&-
We saw.



.Sunday.

partially written on
the receipt from a Pizza Hut where I once saw the truly horrifying attempt of a customer trying to hit on the girl behind the counter

Well, here I am. There’s a window in front of me. Looking through it, I can watch the leaves on a paltry sidewalk-tree shiver against a slight wind. I can watch the people similarly planted outside the glass, whose conversation I cannot summarize, seeing as I never bothered learning to read lips.
Other things.

There go the people, walking on by. Making their casual strides as a tallish gent sits in a franchise that he’s actually none too fond of, but, well….they have chairs. Old habits, I suppose.

I

it’s a place

that

face

pancakes

Sgt. Pepper

across the path
b
y
t
h
e
park

REEL MISSING

















all ate the knuckle-grease pizza, as Blue Planet made colorful observations about marvelous things in the world behind us. Within it, all things seemed to glow.

It was a time, to be sure.


.Monday.

partially written on
something far too faded to make out. But something was there, once.

Outside, the expanse of the sea is a vision of blue.
The blue is so deep that it hurts.
The vast, unchanging uniformity of it.
The sea is best when it’s caught in a storm.
No storms here.
Not for me, anyway.
I have yet to feel Seattle rain.
And I have wanted to.
Honest and true, I wanted to.
It seems that the more I miss it, the less likely it becomes.
Another getting lost in the vast uniformity of time gone by.

It makes me think of the woman sitting beside me, her small hands creased and freckled with age. When we took off, her hand was resting on her throat, as if it were holding back her breath. Her eyes were still like stone. She’d seen it all before. She probably will again. But it makes you wonder: What did she see, the first time her eyes looked out over that stretch of narrow runway, while the Earth roared by outside? What did she feel, when she first looked down to see the frightening blue of the sea?

I cannot keep from questioning the history of weathered hands. I can look over at them, at her. She’s reading something. The pages are set aglow in the arches of light.

was sich seinem Blick

It’s all I can manage to see. It’s not much that I can comprehend. After all: It’s not my life.
Mine is not hers, and mine is not the places that I have been. We move around through hosts of places, gathering things that we tuck away at the back of our minds, so that we might find some use for them in the future that we wish to face. They can give perspective, that much is certain. But the places don’t always make us. We do that ourselves.

And we are, for the moment, home.