This world is a temporary parking place. Cardboard seas and canvas skies. Muslin trees. Melodies played in penny arcades. Honky tonk parades. I look into the neon for guidance and I realize. Nothing is real. Not even me.
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Hi, buddyhead.
I think of all the things I can say about 2008, that I can be thankful that this is the year that we met. We were once strangers and now, I can't imagine a day without you. I hope that I've become an OK dad. I never really wanted to be a dad, really, and I think this is the closest that I will ever come, but I hope you won't hold it against me someday. Somedays, I look into your big brown eyes and the world, just for a second, feels like an alright place to live. Thank you.
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Her good looks could've sailed a ship, but her will alone could've sunk it.
Looking out along the hole that used to be where I poured the blood and sweat of my early 20s, where most of my neck and knee really are, I lost got lost in the revelry of nostalgia. That is, until someone tried to steal my car. Then, I just started screaming babble and left them hanging on as I drove away as fast as I could.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Diamonds on my windshield, like the song goes. The air is so brittle my breath hangs in it like the last chance someone gives just before they throw in the towel. I watched two people embrace on the side street and it lasted too long and the tears froze in their eyes and I couldn't bear to watch it any more.
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My fingers are the kind of cold that feels like heat. They don't feel like typing or telling you anything any more. They hurt, they just want to be wrapped in gloves and thrust in the pockets of the sweatshirt I am wearing. But my fingers are all I have and they have their job and I push them and tell them to shut the fuck up, I don't care that they burn, because there is work to be done.
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Monday, December 22, 2008
No one is going to miss me when I'm gone. Because I have faded slowly, so slowly, that no one ever realized. And one day, you'll turn around and wonder what ever became of me, and I have become nothing. I have disappeared and even I won't be able to write my way back. I will segue into hazy drunken memories and half remembered tales and that is where I want to be, where I can't disappoint people any more or make mistakes. I want to be finite fiction, one book, not this seemingly endless parody that my life has become. I want to sleep for the rest of my life and when my coma starts, I want that plug pulled in minutes. I want to seep beneath the icy floes and feel my legs and arms stop working and to just be numb. To be everyone else. To not be cursed with this need to please and care and worry and give. I wish I was an asshole. I wish people hated me with all their hearts and no matter how hard the other half of me tries, the real me keeps making up for him.
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Destroy All Monsters
I watched them destroy Tokyo at 1 AM in your glasses. Youngstown broadcasted the footage. I cheered for Gamera. I cheered for Megalon. I wished I was a big monster and didn't have emotions any more, once I grew up. I would eat a city. I would fight aliens. I would not worry. Roar.
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Monday, November 24, 2008
They sang seranades out under the strobe lights. They tried to divine the nature of love through Motown and the British Invasion but they all failed to win the war. Late at night driving home, they clutch their chests and realize they have become the things that they have always hated. They numb that bitter realization with coldness and liquids and smoke and whatever else they can get their sweaty little hands on. In the night, it seems like the sun won't ever come up. And at times, on nights when the aisles are your playground or swings feel like airships under you that can take you far away from towns where the end of the world feels like it's already happened, you welcome the playful all night the moon is so bright it could be the sun feeling of it all. And on other nights, your face will press against the coldness of the window's glass and you'll wish that the sun would rise and kill every vampire, stamp out every sin and that you'll be dust in the sunlight.
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Did you know that I have a super power? Yes. I have the power to influence the next song I hear in public. I say, “Hey, it would be cool if the next song they played was “Tin Soldier” by Martika.” And then they will play it. I try and not use my power for evil, but sometimes, I just like to hear “Heart of Soul” by T’Pau.
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The moon hangs out above your alley. The night air holds its jaw as I vault the fence and saunter my way across the street, trying to look like I'm not running and never playing catchup. Scattered seeds and breadcrumbs leave the blackbirds scrambling through traffic. Gravel voices sing hymns to the downtrodden inside my ears, every ringtone blasting the chill evening with the song of another lost chance. Every text message a paean to grasping and reaching and always being a step away, an obstacle between you, distance or time or things that cannot fit into your spreadsheets and word processing .txt files, nor .doc either. Every crowd is a canvas to search for eyes looking back at me, for ears listening to me, for the laughter that I struggle to hold in my brain. The train's doors open and accept me in their whooshing embrace and I wish to become a stuck in time paradox polaroid, compressed and detonated from the inside out. I want my eyes to close and when they open, I don't remember who I am any more. I don't just want to forget who I am. I just want to have never been.
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Quarter to three. Feedback. Drumbeats. Broken heads, hearts, hands. I know that I will never find the right sound and yet I try, I seek it, I explore it, I become the me that I am not. Automatic me. The robot. Numbers swirl in my head and I try and add it up and it all ends up never matching. No map works. The atlas is folded against my emergency brake but it will never take me to what I want to hear. Cover bands try and fail and fall away. The bass isn't the same, the handclaps aren't there. I'm a rock vet on the wings and ribs festival circuit trying to chase dragons and place lightning into bottles. Fireflies get stuck in my hair and beard and my face glows, positively, with luminescent incandescent failure.
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I think that the best music for bowling is music that has nothing to do with bowling. Then again, there aren’t many songs about bowling. But I mean, there is nothing like throwing a gutter ball while Nick Cave is singing about girls who have broken his heart. “There are some things that love won’t allow/I held her hand, but I don't hold it now.” Well, she’s nobody’s baby now. And my fingers hurt from hurling this multiple colored ball down an alley at unforgiving and sadly still upright pins.
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Tuesday, November 18, 2008
He keeps racing. He keeps trying. He will never win. He will never move ahead another place. He will always be stuck right where he is. But he doesn't know that. So please don't tell him. Please don't crush his world into bits. Please allow him to think that he can win. Please allow him to think that life has purpose and meaning or he will just spend the rest of his days wishing that he was dead. Allow him the dream of this race and the goal that will never be reached.
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Even children learn to take their hand off a hot stove when they burn their hands. Me, I just keep setting my hand on fire again and again, hoping against hope that this time, my hand won't blister and crack and peel. It takes some degree of courage, or is that stupidity, to be right back there again and set yourself aflame. And I have no one to complain to when my hand hurts. I can't even cry about it any more. I just stare at the worthless husk that has become my hand and try and remember when I could write and draw and create and that all seemed to mean something.
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Stolen time. Messages passed back and forth. Folded pieces of paper. One hundred point bonus. Flat bed. Southern sky. Ink makes words dance. Snap plastic tiles down. Tonight it's a full paper moon. Tonight, you'll fall asleep on a bed of California stars. This evening, some god was kind enough to set this world aside. Tonight, it's all triple world scores.
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We have been watching you for some time. That's what they pay us to do. Then, we go home to our cube farms and sleep, allowing the next shift to watch us. We are in your mailbox, behind your house, inside your TV machine, in the sky, inside every money machine and hidden in the lamppost. We watch your sad life and try and forget ours as we fingers carrot sticks wet and slick from condensation, one at a time stolen from a ziploc bag.
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The night is here and the sky is filled with billowing tufts of ice and snow and the world becomes a fleeting white vision. I'll drive into it head on, foot descending on the gas pedal, knowing this turn is impossible to pull off. Look up into the almost evening and scream back at the radio, "Primer gray is the color when you're done dying." Windows down, precipitation inside my car, stuffed full of clothes and garbage and destris. You have no idea where you are going sometimes and your shortcuts all become longcuts and someday you're gonna fall asleep at the wheel, I swear.
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I assume that with two neighborhood bars so close to one another, there exists some sort of Cheers versus Gary's Olde Towne Tavern war. Over softball. Or something like that. At least I would like to think that. Instead, I'm sure, people show up as soon as they open and drink what's left of their life away.
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the world you think you know is an elaborate dream
I look at my reflection from time to time but it is not me. I've kept looking for truth but found that I'll never find the woods while I am hiding in the trees. You can cover the truth up, you can craft your own conspiracies, but at the heart of it all, you are your own octopus leaving reporters dead in blood-stained bathtubs.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The other night I watched Singles. There is a scene in the beginning where Bridget Fonda's (Janet) character talks about how 23 is the last time you can be silly and how 23 used to seem so old. I saw this movie when I was 20, back then, and 23 seemed so old. And now, I'm 36 and 23 seems so long ago. I've been through some shit since then, basically. So I watched Singles with this kind of time machine warped message sending back to young me-ism. So, I would have liked to have entertained maybe even amused, but instead I was in a miasma of self-reflection, which is about as much fun as it sounds. I don't think I'll watch this movie again, is what I am saying.
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Friday, November 07, 2008
I want to be religious without being religious. I want to feel something other than anger or ennui or poinelessness. I want life to be more than it is. Some people lose themselves in politics. Others in church. I find it at times in music. I find it at times when I can't stand up. But I have given up on everything and given up everything and I sit here in my wooden desk prison and can't wait for an imaginary 90 minutes to end when the truth is that I could get up and leave whenever the fuck I wanted. But I'll still sit here with my imaginary chains. I mean, let's face it, time isn't even real. We invented it. And we became slaves to it. We invented money. And became slaves to it. I assume we invented religion, too. We create our walls. I know I made mine. We make our prisons.
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Our homes aren't our homes. They are four walls that contain us, that's all. They hold our things and give us a place to keep out things. They don't have any connection. At the end of the day, whether it's a couch or a bed, or some nights, the floor, it just doesn't matter where we sleep. I can only speak for me, but my home is not here. It's somewhere else, somewhen else. I don't eben know if my home exists. The only home I've ever known was wooden floors on the top of a hill in a house that didn't belong in any set time. We walked there, stumbled, really, until we fell asleep on the front lawn. And when when we woke up, we saw that the walls were just a facade and that the back was peeling and falling and crumbling. But there are no rules of construction, or, well, reality in the place where I sleep. There's giant swings in the front yard and pirate ships in the tree and I never have trouble sleeping.
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
I wish that I could tell you something that would make it all make sense. But I don't have the words because they don't make them. Someday you're gonna throw everything you have into a bag and you're gonna die to the rest of the world. No one will know where you have been. And this is good preparation for that, I guess. You will leave no footprints in the snow. You will take the long way home to a place that never really did exist and spent time with people who never really existed. You will become fiction, you will become history, you will become extinct. Which is just the way you always wanted it.
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Monday, November 03, 2008
Somedays, tomorrow seems do far away. But today, it seems like it is only a day away. I have spent my life counting down time. Six months penciled in a calendar more than once. I waited for dates to see if I could survive. I planned on not being here this long. But right now, I'm pretty cool with the fact that the sun is going to rise tomorrow and I'll be right where I am. Sometimes I even pen things into my datebook.
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The skies get dark early but inside my room, I feel like it's bright sunlight. I have ideas and schemes and places I would rather be. But it's ok for now. Now, it's time to consolidate and think up ideas, because when the road is open, it will feel that much more special with the wind in my hair. I will know that it has been earned. And I will never come back home.
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Tonight is trick or treat. Some kids will come by and take candy and I will rot their teeth with it. They will place out large plastic buckets and I will fill it. I used to look forward to this holiday so much that I staked out every store looking for the perfect costume. Today, I stood in K-Mart and looked around and realized that Halloween had passed me by and we were standing in Christmas. And this year, we're gonna cancel Christmas. Don't we promise to do that every year? Let's just cancel all holidays and chain our legs to desks we don't want to be at. Fuck it. But tonight? Tonight I will hand out candy.
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There is going to be some gray and I'm going to adjust my percentages and I'm trying to adjust my hue and saturation and then I'll be there, inside the colors, gone from the world of CMYK and RGB and existing simply in the nice and easy two colors which are not colors at all. They are the absence ad presence of all colors. But I don't want to get into a long drawn out discussion about the color choices that define my existence, because I won't even be visible in the world of mixed tones and complementary color choices. I will fall and fall and fall and fall and fall forever and laugh out loud so loud it will haunt your every fucking dream.
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"Born to lose and destined to fail," the lyrics scream in my headphones, the only outlet of safety from a world of loudness and confusion. I am a little edgier, I gave up on all the things that were supposed to make it easier to get through and have decided to just do it on my own. I feel like the world's safety net, but I am confident in the fact that I have none of my own and that soon, I will do the little dance that I love so much. I will go into that night like its my last, with the hope that it isn't and the lack of caring that makes me me.
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Another when I was young story.
I used to keep my smut under the bed in a zebra striped gym bag. In college, I dated a girl at home and she asked once, "How many breasts have you seen naked?" I replied, in what I thought was a coy manner, "Probably a million." Of course, I meant in magazines. She said, "Oh, I bet you keep your smut under your bed." She busted into the house before I could stop her and flipped out. "I thought I was good enough for you," she pleaded. "They are old ones," I said. I lied. I mean, if old issues are from last week. I think I am the shittiest liar ever. So...short story long, I ended up outside burning them one by one while she watched. I burned my hands really bad trying to save one. Such is the story of my life.
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If I have learned anything from Death Race 2000, and yes, I have, thank you for asking, it's that the President should have the most awesome car on the road. And this should be his car. Also, I wish Frankenstein was up for election, because I trust a fictional person who has been built from the body of dead race car drivers than the two idiots running.
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Monday, October 27, 2008
Walking to the car when
walking didn't seem all that
important or fun
Looking up to the sun
but there is none
when it's two oh seven am
Squall whine scream
white noise in black sky
hum under fake light source
It's the kind of night
where doing something stupid in hindsight
feels right in second guess
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