A man adrift in a metaphorical sea; A Moon proves himself to be decent, while still being an asshole; A Triage.

*

Part The 1st:

Looking up, he sees an expanse akin to the face of revelation.
Bright and shining, cold and alive. He thinks that he might look down, look away; perhaps toward his own chest, so that he might watch as it bobs up and down beneath the surface of warm, salty water. If he were to look hard enough, he thinks, he might even see how fast his heart is beating; the way it sends a driving tremor up through the surface of his skin, making a tiny, precious ripple in the sea. But he won’t look. He can’t.
He knows it, too.

There are stars above his head. More than he had ever known with his dullard eyes, taking command of the world there-was-to-know by way of white fires in the sky and blurry doppelgängers in the reflective surface of the gently swaying water. The darkness is here, but the light is all around. He thinks it’s peaceful. It barely moves.
He thinks it’s frightening. It is lonely and devastating.
He thinks it’s quiet. It is.
Oh, it is.

He closes his eyes and tries to listen. There is little wind, right now, and the sounds of the waves are negligible at best. He wishes that they would come down hard, that they would crash around him as if he were the screaming heart of a gale -- he wishes that this was not this place. He wishes that there were motion, right here, right now. He wishes there were things to see. There are, of course. But he wishes nonetheless.

He opens his eyes once more, and looks around. Looking up, he considers those stars again, the way they have meaning in their meaningless fashion. He wishes he could be calm, he wishes many, many, many things. The man pushes his head beneath the surface, and listens to the echo of the sea.


Curtains fall across the scene.

*
*

SCENE TWO.

(There is NOTHING here. Nothing at all. A man, a FELLOW is sitting there in the harsh spot of the single light. As he sits there, he looks up…he looks…he looks up. And then, as if it were natural -- because it is natural -- THE MOON descends from the sky and sits down next to him, glowing with luminous sadness. The fellow turns and gives the moon the slightest of non-committal nods.)

THE FELLOW: Well then.

THE MOON: I suppose so.

THE FELLOW: Is there anything that might be done?

THE MOON: I suppose so.

(He looks over in an irritated fashion, as it would appear that the moon is kind of an asshole. Naturally.)

THE FELLOW: You’re kind of an asshole.

THE MOON: Naturally.

(The moon pulls some beef jerky out of the depths of one of his moon-pockets, and begins to gnaw on it as if he were trying to chew on the cow while it was still wrapped in the hide.

He offers some to the fellow, who DECLINES. Naturally.
The moon shrugs, and throws the remainder of the jerky towards the audience, where it misses all who are seated, instead landing with an audibly wet PLOP in a warm sea. The sea may or may not be surrounded by an uncanny field of stars.)

THE MOON: This is foolishness, you realize.

THE FELLOW: That much I can work out, yes.

THE MOON: I could ask you why, but that would make me the fool as well.

THE FELLOW: You’re not wrong.

THE MOON: I never am.

THE FELLOW: How arrogant.

THE MOON: Naturally. Comes with the territory.

THE FELLOW: Oh?

THE MOON: Such is the way of the boundless sky.

THE FELLOW: Oh.

(Beat.)

THE FELLOW: Is there anything to do?

THE MOON: Not that you could manage, no. After all, there is no actual situation -- no actual problem, no actual trouble. No actual earth-shattering revelation. You and I are sitting here on a pleasant evening, looking out over faces who will never be real, but will always be beautiful.

(The moon gestures outward, sending his own light out against the pressure of the spot-light shine. The light suddenly shorts and bursts, sending the lighting technician diving away, shielding his face from the sparks. The technician’s name is Allen, and you would think him a pleasant enough guy were you to meet him. But you won’t. He’s a lovely man, but this isn’t his. Even if it would be more interesting that way.

The only light is that which the moon provides. His glow is what remains.)

THE MOON: It’s nice, you know. And you’re tired.

THE FELLOW: I am.

THE MOON: You are.

THE FELLOW: Is there anything for it?

THE MOON: Sleep, you dullard.

THE FELLOW: Other than that.

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just…

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just that…

THE MOON: No.

THE FELLOW: It’s just that I cannot find a way to abide this. This. This looking up and out and around. Constant vigilance is no way to manage living, especially if there is nothing out there that I might see. Looking towards the uncertainty, staring at it, hoping…hoping that it might collapse into a singularity, if only because that crushing nothing is at least a something.

THE MOON: A black hole is nothing luminous, chap.

THE FELLOW: Not remotely, no.

(He looks down, towards his chest.)

THE FELLOW: But it moves you. It gets you moving.

(The moon sighs, and the force of it is uncanny. Everyone in the audience finds themselves trembling at their very core, as if their nerves were suddenly twisting and writhing like the desperate, frenzied dance of a man set ablaze.

The moon does not reach out, does not try to pat the fellow atop his head.
But that’s alright.)

THE MOON: A body doesn’t stop moving. Not til the end, anyway.

THE FELLOW: But…where’s it going to go?

THE MOON: Somewhere, fellow. There’s nothing more than that.

(They sit there, together. Alone.)

*
*
*

Where I am right now, is a great many places. I’m in my old coffee shop once again, looking over at some unknown who is staring down The Pickwick Papers with an intensity that suggests it troubles him, as his hand grasps his coffee cup and occasionally trembles. There are new paintings on the inside, and out there you can see a fire truck funeral, lorded over by a man in full-Scottish regalia playing the bag’d pipes. It’s a day.

But there are other places, underneath the underneath. Places of wondering, places of question, places of past. Places of inquisition, places of stress, places of unknowing. Places of ticking clocks and pleasant eyes. The places we consider, again and again.
Past and Present and Yet To Come.

There’s a lot to say, you know. About these things, these places, these worries and considerations. About what it means to me, and to the lot of us. About what really constitutes a moment, and what is simply the ephemera that sparkles us towards giddiness without granting us any truth. About the differences. About what we know.
But then again…

There’s something to be said for letting them lie.
Here I am, I think. In the quibbling, maddening, silly places, the wondering bothering irritating place. One finds this place via caustic inertia, the kind that begins in neurotic nervousness, the kind that only ceases when all comes crumbling down. And that...that is no way to move, not towards a place of worth and mirth and gently endearing calls, not the world of hearts and heads and fluctuating voices. That's not how to live, jolly chaps. Constant vigilance is only going to make you weary. So. Hm.

So, yeah.

So stop.
Right now.

Right?

A dream and a dream and a concert and a fall.

Earlier this week, I had a dream.
It happens, I guess, and it wasn’t much to write home about: Just a simply-structured situation where I found myself at my old grade-school, suffering my nervous ticks through a one page test on transitive verbs in my 8th grade math class, all with my current boss playing the role of teacher. Not much happened.

But still. I remembered it.
That’d be the odd thing. For me, at least. Because it’s not something that’s done. It’s not something that I really do, as if my conscious thoughts were trying to create a buffer zone, a dense wall built of spittle and tar and chunks of dried-out bread, building it high to keep my subconscious and my open eyes in a place where they can cohabitate, but not coexist. It’s rare, truly rare that I remember my dreams.

Earlier this week, I had a dream.
Another one. A second one. And…and I remembered it.
It was stranger, this one. Longer, and stranger, and far more dangerous. Still, in the end, after all of it -- after the sudden screeching halt of my cars tires, and the sudden dive behind the barricade on the suspended bridge; after the excessive debris came crashing towards damnation upon the Earth, and the entering without breaking but still without asking; after the garbage can full of hot urine, and the solemn summation outside of a screen door where I sat next to a mustachioed police officer while being calmed by the gentle lapping sounds of the sea -- not much happened. There were some wacky circumstances, but I got out alright. Except afterwards, I remembered.

Again. I remembered again. And as I said, this time, it felt far more dangerous.
I expressed this sentiment to someone, the very next day. Not just the explanation of the events -- because again, while amusing, it wasn’t exactly a holy terror riding roughshod across my mindscape, laying waste to all thoughts that I could ever hope to have. It was the way that I felt afterward, in the new light of day. It was the memory that did it, the memory remember-ed. When I felt my temples that morning, they seemed dense and malignant, as if a tooth were rotting inside. So I told someone. I told someone about my nervousness, about this transparent ghost from my subconscious, the one that found itself transubstantiating into a solid thought under the glow of fluorescent work-approved bulbs, the one that used its new weight to lay heavily upon my blade of nerves, not caring as it began to cut deeper. My friend, she told me to wonder, “Why?”

Why feel that way?
Why worry about dreams made solid, even if they rarely choose to make themselves known? Why care about newsreels cut and color-timed by random happenstance in the depths of the subconscious, burdens let loose in a dark room for the sole purpose of a safety-net for sanity, helping me and you and I along a guide rail so that we might fare better in our waking hours?

That’s…that’s a damn fine question, I tell you what.
So damn fine, that as is our custom, the answer is hard to find.

I know that for a long time, I’ve found myself wary of dreams. Both kinds: The thoughts of the resting night, and the aspirations of the driving day. One because they represented thoughts that could never really be realized, ideas that existed only in chaotic realms, sometimes to be harnessed by other ideals, but never really there as a solid benefit, never helping nor harming in the way that me and you and I have grown to appreciate, in a world of consistently better things. They’re just…there. And for a man that hates sleeping, it always feels better if the act doesn’t leave things behind.

As for the other?
Because of what I’ve seen them do. Human beings wearing themselves down past flesh and into bone due to the misjudged, sometimes misguided desire to consider themselves as human doings. People should keep trying, of that I’ve no doubt, but still… “Dreams shouldn’t control you. You should control them.”
Sometimes, it’s alright to be content. Maybe.

Maybe.
Maybe I was thinking about that, while at a show last night. About those ghosts of the subconscious sticking like spurs underneath my ribs, striking me more with the sudden metallic cold than the scent of my blood in the air. About those fateful aspirations, the kind that lay waste to men that sometimes might be construed as Good. John Darnielle was playing, as he is wont to do. And as I was watching him, Miss Kaki King was watching that mans back. Eyes riveted to that space, fingers moving in the dim light, as if she were seeing the future unfold on that dark patch of cloth. Who knew what her aspirations held, and who knew what her subconscious wanted her to think; who knew that the force of that room bursting with energy and love and sensation and thoughtless, fruitless, thankless desire were enough to strike someone down where they stood?

Someone was struck down.

A woman, a girl fell in front of me, her body going limp in a flash of time that couldn’t even be considered a second, sending her falling, crashing, dropping down onto the surface of my knees. I caught her; a reflex action. A cradling action, bringing her down to the floor, trying to figure out what was going on without losing hold of the sudden weight that had been brought upon me. This happened to me, once before. A girl got drunk and fell on my head, as I was squatting down to give the lengths of my legs a rest. On that previous night, she laughed, and I silently rolled my eyes and went the way that I knew was mine. I thought that this happened to me, once before. This night…not quite. I was wrong. Looking at her face, I knew I was wrong. Hearing her boyfriend’s voice, I knew I was wrong. Her eyes weren’t moving. They just stared straight ahead, as if they were made of glass. I snapped my fingers, dropped my sweater upon the ground as I tried to get a better grip, moved my knee underneath her to support her weight, all while the lad she knew was calling into her face, trying desperately to get a reaction, to get some sort of action, to see some indication that sparks were still flying in the engine of her heart. As I held her, I felt something wet expanding on my knee, and without any clarity of vision connecting the thoughts, I found myself in a moment where she was dead. Whether it was true or not, I couldn’t really say, but to me… Her skin was so pale.

Like rice paper wrapped tight around a spring roll, showing the immobile pink and blue underneath. Her eyes still didn’t move, even as colored lights still rained down upon us, the various hues giving her skin an illusion of a life song that made clarity all but impossible in the situation that we were presented with. In my arms, was a ghost. No Conscious, no Subconscious, no nothing left to worry about. As I glanced up to see that the person who had accompanied me for an evening of musical revelry was dialing the appropriate numbers, the girl’s friend who was a boy and I set to work cradling her within the womb of our arms, trying to carry her back towards life. Pallbearers, working in reverse, drawing her back from her supposed grave as best as we could.

Around the edge of the crowd, they cleared the way; they parted easily without a word. The music played on.

We stumbled outside, propped the limp form up in a chair, shouted with clear, directed voices, waved an LA Weekly in her face, trying to force air toward her as it is done in the moving pictures, brought out cold water, rubbed it around her eyes, felt the bass pumping through the wall of the club, waiting for the siren to begin making its way down the boulevard, hoping to see a lucid spark, trying to figure out a new motion, one that would serve the right purpose, bringing this situation to a place that we could manage. A place where there were no ghosts, and no subconscious. Just open minds, and thoughts singing aloud, clear as bells of brass.

She came back to us. Frankly, suddenly, immediately. As if someone had flipped a switch, her voice came to her mouth, and she wondered aloud just what the hell had happened, her eyes moving freely while surrounded by skin that was still so, so pale. As the siren began to reach our ears, I looked down and saw the dark patch of dampness on my knee that was growing chill in the night air. It was what had supported her, her lower extremities, back when it was bad back in there. She had urinated on me.

In her more lucid state, she thanked my friend and I. She shook my hand, and asked my name, which I happily gave. I’ve forgotten hers. I’ll never see her, and I’ll never remember her name. Just how my mind works. She got questioned by the FDLA about her health as well as food/alcohol consumption, while my friend and I stood off to the side. Eventually, she signed herself off, and her lad and she wandered off to a place where they would eventually discover that his car had been towed. But before that was revealed, it was just my friend and I, left alone out there in the night. When all was said, and all was done, I noticed my coat resting in a bundle on the edge of a sign by the door. I still don’t know how it got there.

So then. All that we’re told inside our heads, all of the horrors that erupt in the spaces of our dreams, all of the wishes that tear us apart like screws driving into meat; well, they are important. Like so many things that I know that scare me, that I know I don’t desire, sleep and wishes and the sun on my face…I know that I need them, sometimes. I hate those ghosts, fading in and out. But even with that said, I think that I know something else. In my lucid mind, in the thoughts that I make for myself, formed with the clarity of cold air and buzzing light.

Dreams -- Dreams cannot tell you what you are.
And they can’t -- they can’t tell you what you’ll do.
As horrid as your mind might make you feel, in the real world, you might still do the right thing. You might not.

But hey…there’s a chance. Whether you dream it or not.

***
*
***

In the process of writing this, I found that I had fallen asleep. There I was, listening to live recordings made of .m4a formatted audio through individual Quicktime windows, when all of a sudden my eyes were open. Daylight was setting the room aglow through the diffusion field of my thick curtain, keeping it bright, but keeping it soft. Night/Day. One to the other, no time in between. When my head rose up, there was no fear, and no uncertainty. Although logic regarding sleep cycles state otherwise, as far as I could recall, there were no dreams.

It felt good, crossing that divide. Quick and clean, solemn and steady.
So perhaps that’s it…moreso than any deep seated contradictions, or fears that give way to the Right Thing in a pinch. It’s might just be a desire to step away from that yawning black pit, taking it as a fresh start every morn. Here are our thoughts. We’ve made it, me and you and I. Our eyes are open, and there are things to see and say.

I am refreshed, and I am ready, with no baggage of the night before weighing me down. Duty-free. This is how a day should begin.

And today, I'm glad it has.

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 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 sullen series of segmented snippets.

First…

The air was crackling, electricity flying through it carelessly, as if it belonged there, not looking for any grounding. It crackled alongside the rain that fell, the two of them locked into each other through some kind of bizarre symbiosis, mutually giving each other purpose, purpose as well as life. They were both alive, both always moving, one falling, one flying. Neither cared about anything else, only seeking to continue their carefree existence. It was in this place, that the men had fallen silent.

…and then…

He was trying to make it work. It was hard, suffering through mornings. Wading through people and their stares. He would try to say what he thought should be said. He did alright. Some of the time. He didn’t know about other times. The person would walk to the bathroom. Or outside. He would get there and look up at the ceiling or the sky. Didn’t matter which. Then he would spit out all that he could. He’d hoped that no one would notice this. If they did, no one told him. He would hack it all out and then walk back into their world. He was home in the dead of night.

…followed by…

His eyes were bad, but he tried. He would lean back as if trying to appear relaxed (for the benefit of anyone who might have casually walked on by), while in reality his muscles were as taut as those of a moonlit tiger; both of them waiting, waiting, waiting for their moment. Milton only wished for things that soared across the sky.

…continued with…

I force myself to remember those things. Sitting here on the hilltop, looking over at my friend Walter, shivering from a cold that none else can feel, but all can understand. Remember those times when the world thought it was wallowing, wading through a knee-deep refuse of horror and discomfort, problems with the air and the water and the feelings and the lives and the people. People snapping down their freshly delivered morning papers, spouting off lines about the abuse and the mistrust and the anger and the deception and the real, honest to golly truth. Mothers marching down the streets, holding signs up in the air, shouting that their children are under attack by the vagrancy and the lies and the vulgarity and the depravity and the hatred. I force myself to remember. But really, I remember the children themselves.

…interrupted with…

P.S.
You can also be kind of a cunt.

…resuscitated by…

“Do you trust me?” Her voice was clear. It didn’t waver.
“Of course I do.” My voice was dry. It crackled out of my mouth, sounding as if I’d been gargling buckets of sand. I didn’t want to sound that way. I wanted to sound like I was standing tall, a man to be counted on. I’m not normally that way, and I’m usually ok with that. Usually. She was looking into my eyes.
I couldn’t look away. My face was locked in, focusing on those two tiny little dots, finding that center as easily as one might trip and fall. And fall I did, I couldn’t help it, my mind falling right down, losing myself simply because she wanted me to.

…connected to…

She was a journalist, you see. A journalist, fair and true. Not one who stood before a cameraman, feverishly checking her hair only seconds before informing everyone on a nationwide network that the building behind her, clearly burning to the naked eye, was on fire. No, she was a true journalist, in every sense of the word.
As he would learn over the course of time, she was a person who had known what it was like to be cast to the icy cold concrete floor of some godforsaken shit-hole of an African schoolhouse, all in the hopes of finding the words of the current insurgent military leader who had been holding his armaments in a house built for learning. If you knew her well enough, you could ask her to tell you a story, and she could then paint a portrait of the time that she had spent with one of the worlds greatest living authors, watching a great man wither away physically while listening to the sound of a once tightly wound bag of thought being torn apart at its innermost seams. And if you had the stomach to listen, she would eventually tell you how it felt to hold the hand of someone who was falling, falling, falling, until the very last moment where his thoughts finally burst open like an already wounded animal splitting apart on jagged rocks. She had felt him go. And she had only let herself cry once the story had finally been done.

…passed on with…

There were trees, where we were. More trees than I was used to. It felt like we were driving down a stretch of classical Americana, Mary-Jean singing silently to herself as she adjusted the wheel with casual, subtle motions. She held her cigarette close inside the car, afraid that she might toss it out onto a patch of incendiary leaves. What a shame that would be. I can just picture it: A single glowing spark from that little tube glowing just a little brighter than the rest of its brethren, its soft orange light hot enough to ruin a patch of the world. Dry leaves, resting for a moment before the next gust of wind carried on with their journey down the road. That single, hungry spark. I wonder what it would be like, driving down this tranquil lane, if all the world were heat and fury.

…and so…

The sheet of darkness covered me, black as the face of perdition.

…anon…

But now, for all that were there to witness it, there was only silence.

…so that’s something.

Right?

A rhetorical question.

Sometimes, there are sallow afternoons.

Where you notice a delicate throb at the back of your head, too small to really take action against, but large enough to occasionally strike you with its pulse, making you shift uncomfortably in your seat. Where your throat closes up, and you can taste something sour creeping in around the edges of your mouth, despite the fact that all you’ve had was water. You remember the water. The water was cold and sweet.

Where you sit silent, and still, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and wonder, and don’t really wonder about anything worth wondering about. At the end of it.

To-night, under the cover a fresh evening, I went out and bought a bottle of Cool Mint Listerine™ at a 7-11. The man behind the counter -- a man with tired, yellowing eyes -- put the Cool Mint Listerine™ into a tiny, nondescript paper bag that made it seem as if I had bought a tiny, nondescript bottle of scotch. I didn’t think much of it, until I found my way back home. People looking at me, and it, and then making subtle decisions about the life they saw in front of them. For whatever reason, it irked me just a little. The headache at the back of my noggin struck at a sharper 45 degree angle, and I blinked my eyes with a tremendous force brought on apropos of extravagant similes.

All in all, there’s not much to go on. Just another one of those days, as they say. We and you and I, we’ve all been in a place that sits in a position less than the place that we usually hope to be. In our heads, in our minds. In our moods. Sallow days, burning sickly and sweet in the wavering heat of mid-afternoon sun. Days that will surely move on by, like the rest of those things that get easily placed into metaphors of tidal fluctuations. Meaningless, stupid, pointless worries, about a host of meaningless, standard, ridiculous things. There’s nothing to talk about.

So let us talk about something.

Or rather, let me ask you something; something which needs no answer, despite the fact that the host of people who may or may not exist, who may or may not read this website, who may or may not be people that I know; despite the fact that such (existent?) people might actually have an answer that might be declared, the sort of thing that could be enthusiastically thrown out like leaflets into the drift of the common air.

I ask you, compatriots of the electronic variety:

What do you have?

What’s that thing, that illustrious thing that you break out on the already-mentioned-twice days that are colored sickly yellow, the thing that you look over with muddled thoughts with the hope that things are going to be made clear? What’s that thing, the thing that sits in the bottom of some dusty old drawer that is rarely ever opened, seeing as it is only to be opened during those trying times of thought and life where it’s really, truly, genuinely, actually needed?

What do you have when you need something?
What’s the talisman of your life?

I myself have a thing or two. A precious book that has been mentioned within the e-pages as lost, but has now -- at long, long, long last -- been graciously found. A picture that gives me help towards a memory, when I find that I need to remember. When I need to remember more clearly than usual.

And I have a letter.
It’s a formal letter. It was written by a formal someone, serving a formal purpose, one which had been done for other members (but not all, mind you) of my peers. It was something that I asked for, something that I had to wait for. But more than anything else, it’s something which means something to a someone. To me.

It’s about me. It’s someone else, speaking about the things that I have done, and the things that I might do. It was someone I respect, someone who explained how to stand tall despite the fact that he happened to be rather short; someone who could take your shimmering confidence away with nothing more than a wayward glance. If he wanted to, that is.

I have this letter.
It’s there, alongside other things, when I need it.

Where do your feelings go, world-at-large?
What do you have?