4/18/15
The new body felt good. It had a few kinks here and there. Hemorrhoids and dandruff, but overall… fit. Useful. Usable. Would prove worth the effort at recombination. Surely at least acceptable, felt far better than the one put to bed some thirty years ago. So much better. Tumorous and decrepit and becoming nearly nonfunctional. To be reborn into something so useful…
Who was that pretty girl that lived over the tattoo parlor? Hey again. Every whiff is a God-given vitality, ambrosia like a memory birthed fully formed from a skull placated and forgotten.
Three pints destroy the world.
“It comes in pints?”
“Not here. Not in this country. Here’s to coming back from death yet again. Cheers.”
10/3/19
There are several ways to argue the constitution of a thing which is real. None of them are any less pretentious than the rest. But some are messy. In an effort to avoid mess, and pretentiousness, I’m going to take it as read that, for instance, John Oliver is a real British man. He has the effeminate sensibilities of a British man. The terrible taste in alcoholic beverages and dime-store meat-slash-pork products of a British man. He would probably be insufferably smug were he to sit in Parliament, just like any real Queen-fearing British man should be. If he were Labor, he’d probably have a bad haircut too.
All of that said, this marks the removal of a significant burden from my back, as I now get to say, with cosmic certainty, that he is a real thing possessed of innate qualities that, at times, might prove useful, to someone, somewhere. Maybe. I can be certain that here we have a man who can pronounce Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov five times fast with no slip of the tongue or crack of the smile, can be goaded by crafty writers into baking a room-sized layer cake, can unabashedly self-deprecate in order to prevaricate on any legitimate comments about the character of his tie-selecting capability. The man doesn’t know how to dress himself. Or apparently pay other people to dress him properly.
And frankly, I’m happy to have such luxury, because to write such a silly little man into existence, to pluck him from whole cloth and set him down in a world where he has to pronounce…what was that name again? in myriad ways so as to delight and entertain an audience with the same running joke that is so soon becoming as stale as a layer cake left in a room just its size, well it would just be so much work.
10/3/19
The money was in the envelope. The envelope was on the table. It had been sitting there since last Wednesday. It was three-hundred dollars, this year’s and last year’s quota of what Lucy called her “Feel-Good Tax” when she was feeling less serious, and “my penance” when she thought of the places the money was headed.
But her annual donation, of which half was made up of last year’s unsent donation – the interest of guilt now added to the present sympathy’s principal – sat there on the table. Waiting to go where it might be needed, where it might be of use, waiting for someone to care.
9/30/19
“She wasn’t here last night.”
“She must have been held up. It’s been a busy season.”
“Yeah. We were down on support though. We could have really used her.”
“Well, yeah. Of course, if everyone would just do their jobs, we wouldn’t have to rely on someone with a life to get it done.”
“I suppose so. Those kids have got to be a a handful. I’d help her out if I could.”
“Eh. I think the biggest problem we run into is lack of preparation. Nobody is ever ready.”
“Have you heard from her today? Do you know if she’ll be on?”
“Nah, I haven’t heard anything. Do you think my cape is too blue?”
“I’ll send her a text.”
9/18/19
I’m very afraid. Afraid that this is likely going to be the end for me. Afraid that this will be the instance that loses me my job, my wife, family, career. Life? Who knows?
But that doesn’t matter. That’s the bit that makes us different. You, you leave yourself completely helpless to that fear, unable to move, unable to think, whereas I, I take it and use it, hone it, sculpt it into something useful, something…effective.
You would do the same with but a wrinkle’s vicissitude in personality. But that’s where it all falls apart, yeah? Maybe some mindfulness meditation would do you good. Maybe an effort at less thinking instead of more thinking. While I can sit here and tell you that fear is good for you, that it is something to be harnessed, ridden, like a mustang or a bull, until you can squeeze every drop of energy out of it, leave it drenched in spent anxiety, you wouldn’t listen.
You wouldn’t listen and if you did listen you wouldn’t learn. You would take it to heart, maybe, on a good day. You would repeat it as a mantra or some silly platitude in your writing. But you wouldn’t really understand the value of a mantra, of giving up and letting go.
So yes, I am very afraid. But I simply don’t have the time to truly explain to you why it doesn’t matter.
9/6/19
There is no wrong and no right. There is only what feels good. This is the first thing they tell me when I wake up in the baths each day, and the last thing I hear when I inevitably die.
An project focusing on sensory deprivation and overexposure had been the initial impetus for these experiments gone awry, this alternately nocturnal and blinding existence that had left some of us too crazy to cohere, but none in a state suitable for death. At least a death that took. We were mice. Undying mice.
In the early days of my confinement, I can’t say I dreamed of escape, thought of anything like that. Now, sitting here, with this cookie, this coffee, or there, at my job, with shovel and table saw, I find it hard to think of anything but that day, that day I did it. That day that began as the last day I died.
8/31/19
It wasn’t the sort of place to be visited at night. You could hardly see your way through to it in the daylight. Three-hundred feet from the road? Twenty, maybe? You could still hear cars from time to time when cars bothered to come that way. It seemed some sort of dell, this natural skate park. Dirt ramps winding up tree trunks, sliding down roots, every direction marked with packed earth as hard and smooth as worn-down stone.
Of course there was never any water here. The trees served as both roof and warden to anything locked down here. Sunlight was not welcome. Visitors were not welcome.
There were escape routes though. Bike trails and paths that veered off into nothings and places unknown in any light, but led eventually – some of them anyway – back to a manifestation of illuminated civilization. Or some reasonable facsimile. Some dirt road that eventually paused to concrete and streetlights and left that little cage beautiful and terrifying and to be discovered again some day, surely, by some smiling prisoner.
8/21/19
There’s a reason I don’t go in deep waters, only swim in pools, places where I can see the bottom, never take bubble baths, only showers, and couldn’t be forced into a sewer at gunpoint. A very good reason, with billions of scaly, dead-eyed reasons if something happened to this one – eggs, flour, frying pan maybe.
So when I opened my door, stepped down to the street, actually finally paid attention to my surroundings, I lost my shit. Some kind of trout or bass or, hell, I don’t know the difference, big as life, swung around, bumping me in the nose, staring me dead in the eye.
The man behind the fish made a noise and apologized immediately, setting the piscine-covered box on the sidewalk and giving my fright context, if not immediate relief. “Guy upstairs ordered these aquariums. How the hell we’re goin’ to get them up there, I dunno. The super here can’t get the damned elevators goin’?”
“He can’t keep the lights on half the time.” I breathed out and chuckled. “You look like you need a hand.”
8/19/19
The problem with movies is that what should’a happened, what would’a happened, is usually not as interesting as what does happen. Sure, Guy Ritchie wants you to believe every dumb gypsy that looks suspiciously like Brad Pitt has an Ace or a Joker in his pocket, up his sleeve. Or maybe, oh what’s the damned Tarot… the Fool?
But if a bloodthirsty gangster burns down your house in the middle of the woods, you’re probably not going to get revenge. You’re going to get shot in the back of the head. And then fed to the fuckin’ pigs. Bang.