I had, up until three years ago, lead a wonderfully vibrant fantasy life.

That life has since ended. It ceased to be, yes, three years ago.

Since that time, since The Fall, I have been living in shell craters filled with mustard gas, wheezing and panting and sweating out of my eyeballs. Dear friend!, it has not been a vibrant three years. It is a stinking, dull place I live in now; everything is sunken and deflated and filled with cockroaches. These cockroaches would be identified by cheery, yip-yipping pollyannas as members of the human race, who would then scold me for referring to my species-brothers as abhorrent insects. I would then squelch their irrepressible optimism with bile camouflaged as the language we both share, and I would be asked, quite bluntly, to take my opinions elsewhere, because there do exist good people and no one likes a cake-shitter.

And now I shit on your cake:

No, actually, I don’t think I will. I think that tonight I will speak harshly of myself. I’ve been hard on you, you gut-leaking, snot-sniffing, duffel-bag-filled-with-cigarette-smoke-smelling cockroaches.

I am a sorry man, which is not to suggest that I’m about to apologize for alluding to the fact that your guts leak. No, I am a battered, horrid sack of rotten turnips. I won’t apologize for that. Here I am!

I am writing to you because I know that despite my exhaustion, I must stay awake to say things. The solution to my weariness, of course, is to sleep; that I will not do. For, on the two-dimensional time-line that runs parallel to everything you and I do every single day, the next big event on my time-line is “go someplace I don’t want to be and do things I don’t want to do and make money I don’t want to have.” And after that, there will be hours to fill, and liquids to be consumed, and baths to be taken, and messages to be returned. Then we can do it all over again, and one of fifty-two is over, and number two of fifty-two begins, and we count on in this manner until we can look behind us and realize that we did little else with those fifty-two fragments of a greater whole than peck at the ground and say useless things. Every day, one of fifty-two begins again. There isn’t an end, no, but we call this “last year.” The year I drag myself through now is smoke and dim light. “Last year” will then feel identical to how I will feel tomorrow when I am scheduled to present my warm, movable body for living wages — someplace I don’t want to be.

Lord, I’m so tired.

I saw a worm sleeping on the sidewalk just the other day; he was sleeping forever. The ants had come out of the ground to take what they wanted as their own. They did so carelessly. The worm just lay there; it couldn’t move; it was dead. I thought about my own body being picked apart by vultures and cockroaches that are supposedly of the same genetic make-up as me. I thought of it rude how they did so while I am still here blinking and uttering tiny sentences in between storm clouds and chilly winds — and I am here, am I not? — and how each step is a fifteen-ton blast of ammunition and gunpowder, how every breath is a ragged lung excreting poison and laughing gas, how silence is a shameful friend. The ants crawled and chewed and hurried about.

And as the ants take what they will, I ask: was it not your body first, brother worm?

Lord, I’m so tired.

I’m so tired.

I want to apologize (not really) for the theme of this journal-thing, which, if you haven’t noticed, has for the last few months consisted largely of the following: friendlessness, loneliness, no-oneness, bicycles, delicious food, voyages to distant lands, bitterness, latent agony, surface-level agony, dreams, vague anger, vague sadness, ghostliness, et cetera.

Though, yeah, I’m not really sorry at all.

Just, you know.

When I get over some of this, maybe this stuff won’t be so boring! Hey, is this boring? Man, fuck you! I don’t care what you were about to say, even if it was “No!” and especially if it was a yawn!

I have considered lately that I may be happier (hah!) once I am away, away, away from this sludge-sucking ass-backwards state. I don’t know where I’ll go after that. Well! I do, actually, but I’m not sure for how long. You see, I’m returning to Virginia, of whom I am an indebted servant. I am a child of Virginia, no kidding! Maryland, this cursed liar’s den, this slime-shitting bastion of junkie dreams, well, it’s just not that fun of a place. I don’t know, I mean, I realize state boundaries are fickle, tenuous things that should be laughed at in healthy intervals, though I can’t help but feel dirtier once I cross the George Washington Memorial Parkway. As soon as my two-ton vehicle burrows itself into the dusky gloom of this face-hating, God-exploding nether-region, I feel a little sadder, a little more tired than I had been on Virginia soil only seconds prior, and then I realize I’m on my way home, and home is this place, and Jesus God, what a place!

What a place!

To be sure, Northern Virginia is no ghost-whispering Valhalla. It’s a stagnant shitpond in its own right, but it’s my stagnant shitpond. Curiously, it’s also the fastest-growing part of Virginia. How’s that for stagnant!

Maybe I should be specific: I love Nokesville. I could quantify my affinity of Nokesville in thousands of pages, though I won’t bore you. To be more precise — honest – I won’t bore myself. (I’ve got to stick with this whole no-friends thing, yeah?)

I am going back to Nokesville in less than a year. To this I say, “Well, all right.” Lord, what else is there to do?

If you’re just joining us (welcome!), I:

1) am never getting married

2) am never having children

3) don’t plan to buy a house (I’d sooner build one)

4) don’t plan to purchase anything that I don’t have the money to buy

That last part, number four, is very important, and is going to be extremely easy to stick to for the following reasons:

1) I am never getting married

2) I am never having children

3) I don’t plan to buy a house (I’d sooner build one (though, only if I could afford to do so, and even then, do I need to build a house?))

Hell, if it were up to me, I’d never have a job. And not because I’m lazy! I’ll explain this more some other time, maybe.

All I want — all I have ever wanted — is to be alive, to own a bicycle, and to be around my friends.

The first part has become increasingly difficult on account of the third part not being a possibility ever again.

However, I’m a week and a half away from purchasing a bicycle, so there’s that. There is, let us say, still hope.

Still hope for what, I don’t know!

Me?

Oh, lord no. I’m a shambled, gum-sticky, soupy-sad slug.

I am a stale, half-eaten croissant, I’ll have you know.

I have, at last count, six Real Friends. I’ve been reading a lot of Artistotle for lately, as I may have mentioned weeks ago, and he’s got this whole thing on friendship. It was fascinating! It was sad.

It was sad, because you-know-why.

Anyway, take a philosophy course, or something, because I’m sure as shit not going to explain it to you here. Basically, though, there are three types of friends, and only one of those types of friends matters. As I understand it, these are real friends. I have six of them. I don’t speak to most them, because they live someplace else.

That sounds like a lot, huh? Six! A lot of people would chew my throat out to have six friends!

Well, friend (hah!), it’s a complicated thing, and I won’t get into it now (I’ve got to uphold the “vague” theme, so here I will do just that).

(If your real name is John, and you are a cousin of mine, please take note: you are not part of that six. You exist outside of that six. This is how I understand it, anyway. As our Indian friends put it, a first cousin is a cousin-brother. Consider yourself that, cousin-brother. )

So: my companions are spread thin! When I see them, everything is okay. That’s how I know they are part of the Real Friends Six. That number, I imagine, might not ever go up. It can also never go down.

I mean, by my definition.

Most of them are dudes, so let’s talk about that for a second: no matter what stupid girl they end up dating, they’ll never turn to taffy; these dudes will never let the blue flame in them flicker and fade and strike up again a yellow flame. That would be terrifying. It can never happen: they’re Real Friends.

I could step away for ten years — or two sets of ten years, let’s make it twenty! — and to approach these men again would be a familiar breeze that only the grave could rob me of feeling!

And even then . . .

But: they’re not going to be around. I don’t anticipate their presence in my lives. We exist to each other only as apparitions to be missed and mourned and loved.

The rest of you scoundrels, the ones I spent my formative years with, the ones whose absence has gutted me, but has by no means ended me: farewell, good-bye. The fireworks have sparked and sputtered, have turned to ash in the air to spin downward into fog and skeletal remains of warm pictures to be played in the mind during tens of hours of sleep, in a fever dream, perhaps. You’re a seam never mended. Farewell!

And now something terribly important:

Dear Bicycle:

Please, stick around. Stay with me. Don’t leave like the others! I will take you on long rides, and clean the mud from your spokes. I want to be around you, to hold you, to talk to you. I’ll only be yours if you’ll have me. I’m begging you, Bicycle! You are my child! Let us riiiiiide!

Ahh-uh, I have a break in a week and a half. I don’t know why. Why do I have a break? I have no idea.

I am considering scoping out a place I want to live, which is Portland. One of the ILLUSIVE SIX lives there. It would be nice to hug this guy! Talk about bikes!

Portland, as far as an on-paper-analysis goes, sounds like an all right place: vegetarianism, BICYCLES, anti-corporate atmosphere!, energy conscious, year-round “October weather” (or, if you’re more comfortable with the colloquialisms, “hoodie weather”), close to Seattle, close to Vancouver. Hey! That sounds great!

Hey, I’d like to live there!

This, I think, is the step after move-back-to-Nokesville-and-save-money-for-a-while.

That or Vancouver.

Either way, it’s a five-hour drive to Portland from Vancouver, and a five-hour drive to Vancouver from Portland!

And two-and-a-half hours from Seattle! That means it is roughly half-way between the two!

Hey!!

That sounds great!

If you must know, I am also considering becoming a Canadian citizen for reasons I won’t get in to right now!

So many plans!

So little wants!

Wants are very manageable and affordable when you don’t have a whole damned lot of them, I’ll have you know, jerk.

San Francisco is in third place, behind Portland and Vancouver, for potential Places To Live. It is third because Californian taxes are high as hell. We’ll see how that goes!

I am practically tickled with leaving this shit-ass ass-shitting coast behind.

Bicycle! “October weather”!

Life is so amazing~~~!

Just kidding.

Oh, oh, oh.

Ambling through the watery sunshine of afternoon, I thought of nothing, and the wind replied in a comforting whisper that nothing thought of me.

Wow, what to talk about! I don’t even know!

Now that I’ve expelled those exclamation points from my system, we can get on with this thing — talk like adults and all that.

Dear reader, let’s get this out of the way as well. It’s not important to me, but maybe it’s important to you (it’s not important to you (okay, it’s sort of important to me): I am sitting at my dining room table. There is no light to speak of. In front of me burns Tibetan incense. I am wearing headphones, but I am not listening to any music.

Let’s fix that.

Ahh–

Ahh!

That’s ever so much better!

Ever so much!~~

The United States government is about to deposit roughly one thousand U.S. dollars into my bank account. I am going to buy a bike, and put the rest into savings.

I plan to ride this bike all over the damned place. It’s true what they say, you know. This is what they say: when you work out, you don’t ever need friends. Working out makes the bad stuff go away, flushes your system. The feeling lasts for as long as you’re working out.

I plan to work out all the time.

I’m going to get a rack installed behind the seat and everything. I don’t know what I’ll carry with me, but I want the ability to carry anything with me, whenever I want. I’ll bike whenever I start to deflate and breathe poisonous gas. I’ll bike whenever I feel like the only thing that can save me is riding a bike.

And maybe it is the only thing that can save me.

The other night I was alive, much as I am on any given night, I reckon. I’d just made brown jasmine rice and mixed in some diced onions, bell peppers (red, yellow and green), soy cheese, sweet corn, vegetarian chili, black beans, cabbage, what have you — when I got to talking with a man and a woman I talk to more than any other man and woman on the planet, I’m sorry to say. Which is to confide in you, dear reader, that they’re the only two people I ever talk to.

Anyway, I was wolfing down the only meal a man ever needs to eat when we got to talking, as people do, I guess, about things that have happened, and things that have happened that were better than anything that has happened in the last three and a half years of my drip-drop-soupy-sleepy life. This is not an uncommon thing to talk about for me, as I’m sure you’re well aware! (Sorry about the exclamation point.) Time has run out, and here I am on the other side — you know all that. I’m just punching in numbers and slobbering on my God damned t-shirt, nowadays. Sigh!!

You know, there were things we discussed that, surprisingly, even to me, I hadn’t thought about in a very, very long time. It was a night of unearthing lovely little phantoms in my brain, it was! Some of things we talked about, though mostly general and abstract and all that, I hadn’t thought about since they’d happened to me. Lord, oh lord! It was an ice cream coma, let me tell you — a real scraping of the brain. And I’m serious, here: I smiled so hard, so hard!, that my jerk face cracked. It hurt a little. I blame the dry winter air, sure, though gosh, it really did leave my face sore. It was a pleasant soreness, and I liken it to laughing so hard your stomach begins to quake. God, I haven’t had one of those in . . . three and a half years.

(Music was a good idea, by the way (I’m listening to music.).)

So: I am compelled to write out what exactly happened, and why and where and how everything broken down and collapsed. It helped explain to both the adults listening to me talk, and maybe more so to myself, actually!, why I’m flopping around on the ground — why I’m submerged in inky melancholy. Why, God help me, I’m huffing icy air and spitting out rotten eggs!

December two-thousand-six is when it ended, if you must know. Gone for the ever and ever! After that, a small minority rose to the occasion, fueled with stolen wine and enough naivete to bring down a zeppelin, and destroyed something, bit by bit, bone by stinking bone, that I had loved and nurtured since I’d come into my own many years before. Destroyed! Gone!

See, we were a nice enough group of dudes. I loved that. I loved that. There were, let us say, “core” members — nice enough dudes that had stuck around since the beginning, we founded the damned thing, for God’s sake!, only to have the keys relinquished when a couple of baby-faced jerks decided that they liked girls, and drinking alcohol, and inviting degenerates into our gooey atom! Things worked just fine before that, thank you very much.

Suddenly the whole dynamic had been washed away, and all that was left was a hobbling, bottom-feeding animal. What a fucking brute that thing was. It’s dead now, if you must know. And good God damned riddance, I say.

Maybe I’ll write about this history and place it here, to better understand it myself.

Suffice it to say, certain individuals — children, I’ll have you know — who held a very, very small role in things to begin with, ended up running it all into the ground. I guess that’s half-baked adulthood for you.

And now we’re all stranded on different islands, brandishing different weapons, wearing different faces on top of our faces, and polishing different trophies. For some of us, those weapons are butter knives and candlesticks. It’s fucking Clue over here, let me tell you. Others are polishing trophies that are, yes, human beings. They need help. They’re too stressed out to cope! They copulate with their own fucking nightmares, because they don’t have faces! (This makes perfect sense to me.)

Human beings as trophies! God, I feel like vomiting, I’m not even kidding.

I was reading Artistotle’s Nicomachean Ethics earlier today — or yesterday, I guess (my, my — the time!). There’s a book on friendship — Book VIII. Reading it was both intoxicating and horrifying. It felt like sipping wine and bleach out of the same glass. Most of my friendships, the ones that have turned to ash in my very hands, were farces, and ugly farces at that, toward the end. The real meaning behind any of them had melted and hardened into ugly stones. I carry those stones in my pocket. I’ll carry them with me for the rest of my life.

So, I’m buying a bike. It’ll be my new therapist, and my new best friend. Thanks for the stones, boys!

And I ride on!~~ (pedal, pedal, pedal!; huff, huff, huff!)

Eyes focused on his shoes, he walked briskly forward, watching the white column of his own breath form and reform over the flashes of gold in the concrete. Each footstep was placed squarely in front of the next, and even the slightest movements he made expertly concealed his splitting headache. It was to be a good day if it killed him.

The streetlights were off. No cars passed him by. The road was black and dry. He turned off the sidewalk and took a path perpendicular to the road. Within minutes he was surrounded by naked trees. There were thoughts in the air, fish composed of the rainbow transparency of soap bubbles. They were swimming between the knots of wood, seminal spirits impregnating the trees with dreams of motion. He reached out to grasp one of the creatures as it flowed by. His fingers slipped into a fist without resistance. He grunted and shook his head. They were not there. There was nothing there. It was a good day. It always had been.

The forest gave way, and the path opened up onto the grand lawn of a hidden conservatory. There were no students, no angry scribblers or passionate composers. The grass rose from the soil a sour yellow. Vines curled around proud columns. The girl approached from behind. It was her again. The one he had not quite remembered to forget. She spoke in a whisper into his ear, her favorite way to speak.

“Those ceilings were raised to protect students from the rain. And so the paint that flaked off from the top would have a long time to spin before it was walked on. But mostly to stop the rain.”

He listened. As soon as he heard her voice his fists had clenched and his headache had worsened.

His words tripped over one another as he said, “It’s been a long time between us.”

“The students left first,” she continued. “They wanted to feel the rain. Then the teachers left. They had forgotten what rain felt like. Aren’t you glad the skies are so clear, today?”

He could see the white cloud of her breath gliding by his cheek. Her words were patient, and they came smoothly from deep within her lungs. The muscles in his neck were straining against one another. Some of them wanted to see her face.

“Wouldn’t you forget you were falling, if you fell from high enough?” She laughed at her own question, and he could not hold back a pained smile. If her syllables were warm against his thoughts, her true laugh was a white iron.

“We all realized they had nothing to teach us,” she said. “Nothing that could be taught. So we left.”

“What about the door?” he asked.

She giggled.

“What door?” she said, playfully. He sighed.

“The door we were to walk through,” he said, and added after a pause, “together.”

She tried to hide a small gasp of surprise. She turned it into a yawn. But he had already heard what it was. There was a glint of triumph in his eyes. But it could have been the sun skipping off the moisture around the iris.

“You are such a bad liar,” she said, trying to sound bored. He began to walk away. She was offended now and nothing he said would reach her, so he would say nothing, his favorite thing to say.

He was halfway across the lawn when she called out, telling him to stop. He kept walking. She added please. Her tone was desperate. His pace was steady. Then she called his name. He stopped immediately and turned around. She was still, her arms at her side, far enough away that he could only make out the contours of her feminine form, the colors of her skin and hair and clothes, and the way her body shook as if assaulted by a current. He wanted to run to her. But it was never that simple.

“I’m sorry,” she called out.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he said back.

“I can’t keep dragging you through my stories. It’s killing you.”

“I’m alive,” he said.

“We’re dying,” she said.

“We’re alive,” he said.

“I wish I could understand you,” she said. He turned, and began walking again, slower this time.

“Where are you going?” she called after him. His pace quickened. Soon he was passing through a gap in the buildings of the conservatory. When he was confident that she could not see him anymore, he stopped. He had only been walking but he was out of breath. He sat on a nearby bench and tried to think of where to go next. He sighed, and looked up into the air.

The day was fading. Bloody sunshine saturated the western sky. He gazed into the distance. He let the colors soothe his headache. Then he stood up suddenly, and set off westward on the brick pathway. The sun was setting directly up ahead, so that the glow of the atmosphere seemed to emerge from the building that rose before him. He walked faster. He reached a door. He pulled it open and stepped in.

His eyes adjusted to the murky inside. There were rows upon rows of shelved books. A look of terror crossed his face, and he spun around and tried to open the door. It had locked behind him.

He began to run through the stacks, authors and titles falling behind him in frantic alphabetical succession. The words were too thick here. The language was dead and believed itself alive, forcing images and ideas and emotions to burst from the pages like vengeful ghosts from the grave. The black forms circled him like vultures. His legs were pumping acid into themselves and still the stacks went on. The vultures exploded into hundreds of bats. The bats into thousands of flies. His vision was clouding, and he could hear only the static of the insects whirling through the air in the delight of insanity. They began to crash against his body, biting and scratching at his exposed skin. A trail of blood was now marking his path through the shelves, as he made turn after turn in an attempt to elude his tormentors. Then he could not run anymore, and he began slamming his body against the walls of literature, smashing hundreds of insects at a time and mixing their blood with his. Soon he was soaked in gore and still the flies were coming. He fell to the floor, assuming the position in which he entered the world.

There was darkness. There was the distant echo of a dull explosion. There was the howling and the cold that took the place of the buzzing. There was light again. The flies and the gore had evaporated. Every part of his body sung with relief, and as he heard the laughter of the girl he had not quite remembered to forget, even his headache cleared away.

“I told you to stay away from my stories.”

He looked up into her eyes. She smiled down at him. His open wounds, forgotten completely, disappeared into scarless flesh. He tried to stand, but fell back to the floor.

“You’re still too weak,” she said. “Stay down for a while.”

He stayed down. He saw for the first time where they were. He had reached the end of the stacks, and here at the far side of the library, sunk into the brick wall, was an elegant purple door, decorated with lit candles and a leaf-green frame, and covered in thousands of tiny poetic inscriptions scrawled across at random like graffiti. Beside the door was a massive rupture in the brick wall through which poured a frigid wind. Night had fallen like a curtain of the deepest blue, and white pinpoints were beginning to burn through the folds.

“I gave you another way out,” she said. “Because we can’t both go through the door.”

“No,” he said.

She turned and walked up to the ancient threshold. He was writhing on the floor, trying to stand, crawling toward her, reaching out. She raised a small fist, and knocked three times.

“No!” he screamed.

A seam appeared in the middle of the door, and a faint golden light shone through. There was a creaking of rusty hinges as it swung open. He was regaining his strength. He was pulling himself up with the shelves, books tumbling down around him as he fell over himself, screaming her name over and over in a voice threatening to crack into falsetto. She turned toward him. For an instant he saw her in all her pure, modest beauty, framed against a night jungle swarming with fireflies. He was on his feet. She stepped backward into the wilderness. He stumbled forward. She smiled. He threw out his arms to her. The door slammed shut. His hands struck flat against the primeval wood.

He fell to his knees, breathing heavily. He stayed there for a time, his nose not an inch from the purple door, his body throbbing and his mind utterly silent. The candlelight danced in the cold wind from outside, and the shadows followed the flame’s childish whims. Unable even to summon tears from the oceans of violence within, he rose from the threshold, and walked through the fissure in the brick wall into the calm void of winter’s night.

In considering the worst seconds of my adult life, and I have so many to consider — they’re just seconds, after all, and I’ve got a lot of them — I have landed, flopped, against the checkerboard and from my mouth you will find something oozing, something black.

I stood up and drove around. It’s all I do — drive around.

Weeks ago I visited a dead girl in a cemetery where she sleeps in the ground, breathes with the planet. I pleaded with her to come back to life. Everyone’s lives would be a lot better if she would wake up. I pleaded, too, for a dead man in a city far away to get the bullets out of his head and come see me sometime. No one said anything. A cold wind blew, and I just sort of stood there and felt like a counterfeit jerk. My lungs were lined in cello strings and tinfoil balls. It was winter; it still is. It’s always going to be winter, as far as I can tell.

The dead girl didn’t end up coming back to life.

And neither did the dead man with bullets rattling around in his dead head.

When we put her in the planet to sleep forever, I knew that on that day — and I remember that day — the one where an innocent little girl went away from us, from everyone, and hid her face in the dirt — that jokes weren’t jokes, anymore, and little children had grown up into men — men who bury the dead.

I never did get to say good-bye to the other fellow.

Is he buried somewhere? I don’t know. Everyone’s buried somewhere, I reckon, in some sense or another.

The two of them have stopped growing, stopped existing. People still love them. People still think of them from time to time. It’s all we’ll ever do, I guess.

See: when the snow was falling — and it fell, let’s be clear — I was chained to the ground, again, hauling boxes around in my brain, again, firing electricity into warehouses filled with pictures that will never fade, only blur, and viewing worlds through eyes that should be in February, in 2010, in a little house near a harbor town that I once loved — and I’m not sure why — and presently despise — and I’m not sure why.

And how I am so envious of the little children in my head! I can’t get over it — being jealous over the minds of children.

I sometimes wonder, as I did when the snow fell — and it fell, let’s be clear — if I’ve simply overstuffed my head. I wonder, too, that if I’m having trouble laying down new memory, new abilities because my head is full, or if my attention is focused on all of those old boxes that I place here and there and put away for a while only to be taken out again, viewed again, each sweep of every memory overturned corroding it a little more, giving way to sunlight that frays its picture and ceases to be an image, but a paragraph that my mind assimilates into a picture.

I have this image in my head — and I have so many, don’t you know — of my father leaving me one night — like he did so often, don’t you know — and he tells me, “Son, don’t ever cry when I leave.” He lies, for some reason: “It’s all right.” He’s wearing a black robe — the one he always used to wear. It’s hanging on a hook in my bathroom, just upstairs, like the rags of corpse. I can put it on and think of him, and of that night. I’m sitting in his bed, and I don’t know where my mother is. I don’t know where my little sister is. The lights are dimmed low, and I don’t know why that is, either. He tells me not to cry. My memory is from an angle that would have been impossible for me to witness, as I can see myself. The perspective is from the other side of the bed. I sometimes dream like this — watching myself from a top-down perspective, or from the shadows. Is this memory just a paragraph of facts that my mind turns into a picture or a film to be replayed? And if I replay it enough, will it be twisted and bent and distorted? Surely, the paragraph remains: “I am sitting in my father’s bed, upright, crying because he’s leaving me, again. He’s wearing a black robe, and he tells me not to cry. I’m nine-years-old.”

I can recreate that image any number of ways.

And I find this is happening with everything, lately. Is the technology I’m buried in warping me, I don’t know . . .

I drive down old roads, sometimes, and I can think back on any number of times I’ve driven down those roads, but here I am on the other side! People are gone, trees have disappeared from where they once stood, looking, not hurting anyone — what the hell is going on? At the end of a road are the tattered remains of a sign that once hung — one that I tore down and gave to a man who was once my friend — and still is? — who put a pistol in his mouth and decided to turn the lights out, up there. And now no one is home, anymore, up there. He bled from every hole in his face, slumped there on the carpet and said good-bye in a horrifying way. Where are you, man?

And people are gone, yes — some of them are still alive, some of them. They’re growing human beings in their bodies, and they’re not sure why. They’re putting rings on the fingers of young girls or having rings placed on their fingers by young men, and they’re not sure why. They’re excited, maybe, that they’re finally living out fantasies of wearing their mother’s dress, and linking arms with their father, and smiling, and hoping and hoping that one day, maybe, a baby will grow inside of them, and they’ll give it a name and feed it and it’ll plump up like a bell pepper and it’ll have a name and a face and everything. Some of these bell peppers will become children and later small men who will light Tibetan incense and write essays in the dark on the floor of their little places of existence. Some of them will put pistols in their mouth. It’s a poisonous world.

Some of these people horrify me. I’m afraid to leave my house, sometimes. Maybe, someday, I’ll be too frightened to ever leave at all.

The reason is this: they’re half-baked. There’s a muscle, somewhere in their brains, that never quite plumped up. It withered on the vine, so to speak, and now there is only a space where something once existed. They’ll keep aging and buying things and stupidly, emptily loving women, only not really, because just what in the hell is that? Do they know? No! These people frighten me more than any explosive or ferocious dog or lurching shadow. They’re pantomiming and I’ve become ill — really — with all of this disingenuous make-believe. Maybe I’m being too vague, I know, though I don’t care to elaborate for fear or stirring dark forces. I’m in the business of staying put, of hunching down, here in this bunker, and not saying a damned word to anyone at all. So I won’t puncture any more holes into this thing, whatever it is, however small my holes are.

The only “real” people I’ve ever known are dead in the ground, maybe, or damn near close to it. And I’m just an old fool, shuffling around, shuffling around, for this is all I ever do.

I’m at my best in the morning.

But: when everyone is asleep, I’m a sad-soupy stain on the carpet. Black, oozing. I make myself sick, just thinking every night. I’m trapped, up here! I am banging on wood and metal until my fits are fucking bloody, you know! If I could burn the boxes and kick down the door, God damn you, I would. What a human being I’d be, then, I don’t know — maybe a better off one.

You God damn fools, I swear. I miss your guts.

And sometimes, at night, I think about how all the more painful corpses are when they are still animated, still walking around, still talking. I’ve never been to the grave of the man who loved a woman so much that he put a pistol in his mouth — died in her sight. He’s floating around up here, still alive, as far as I’m concerned. He can’t do anything else. He’s more alive to me than some of the living are, I reckon.

I still check up on the ghosts from my gone-dead life. Far too regularly for me to ever remove the purple-black smears from under my eyes, I’m afraid. It’s become such a sick habit, I really ought to stop. They’ve left behind little fragments that I hold on to, like the old pictures and artifacts from my dead family, still stored away in two closets in the bedroom above my head. I hold on to them just in case one of them wants something back in eternity, or the void, or the deep-dark-nothing. Who in the hell even knows. I’ll wait until we get there, if we ever get there.

I drive down dirt roads and think about the spider webs we create, and of the spider webs of long-gone people. Where are you? Where? I think of the children I grew up with, of girls I used to like — and just why did I? I can’t answer my own questions, even. The only thing that erupts from my mouth are smoke clouds, not answers. I visited this dead girl at a cemetery she now lives at, will live at until the sea gives up the dead, or whatever, if it ever does, and I listened to a song that I’ve listen to for a thousand sad drives, and black fireworks sputtered and sprayed behind my eyes and my hands went numb and I couldn’t breathe. It was amazing. The combination of ice and blackness and roaring engine and unanswered echo turned the hair on my body into spindles radiating electricity. I screamed in perfect harmony, and blood chugged around in the organ between my ears, and oh God! Oh God! I felt like accelerating until my car lifted off and ignited and exploded into ice shards and coal. God!

I crave this sort of thing! I do it alone. It’s all I do, now. It’s like masturbating for crazy people, I guess.

I’m crazy, I guess.

I miss you, whomever you are. Do you know you? I know you. I miss you. I’m crazy, you know that, but I’ll hold on to your things, should you ever want them back. Now, don’t cry. Don’t ever cry. It’ll be all right.

Last week: push-ups.

This week: push-ups.

Next week: push-ups.

I don’t have the energy, friends and foes.

Slipped on the pavement outside of my little home, busted my knee on the ice.

Came in, made a cup of green tea, ate an apple, took a bath — bruised and aching and bloody.

Sitting on the floor of my own bedroom, typing in the dark.

I guess I’m not in the right spirit to type up a another stupid joke that no one but me finds funny (see:  previous post).

Not in the mood to entertain myself (read: the purpose of this website)!

I’m ready for yet another night of horrifying fever dreams! Let’s do this!!

I will write in this place tomorrow, I will!

Awake in the morning, so that I may clothe this nude babe!

Awake in the morning, so that I may toil for the bossmaster. “Yes, sir! Yes!”

And return to my loft and drip ink onto fine paper!

. . . to be transcribed here, on this space-y space fabric. Yes, sir! Yes!

And now the bossmaster calls. Can you hear him call? Coo-coo! Coo-coo!

Away, away!

Away I go, sailors and little children–!; to that special place where Father can’t be heard yelling; to that sleepy place were stars are born and born.

*   *   *

“When you have grown to a point in your life when you may utter to me, ‘You were correct all along!’” wrote the Philosopher, “I will say to you, ‘Boy, I have grown to a point where being correct matters not to me!’”

Stage 1

Welcome to gate four. She’s sleeping on the carpeted floor of the terminal. I glance at the clock. Fifty minutes until six in the morning. Enough time for the album. I take the headphones and plug them into the laptop in front of me, and keep writing. About what, I’m not sure. About what I’m doing, right now. About this trip, or journey, or mistake, or adventure, or whatever you’d like to call it. Honestly I haven’t yet hit upon the right word. The execution of a whim is something that defines one’s character. I do know that. I think in this case it defines me as a romantic modernist. Or to put it another way, a masochist. But there’s an element of a normal person in me somewhere. I know this because that tiny little piece of me feels dirty and abused. I’ve fought that piece back a hundred times, one more won’t be difficult. It gets easier, in fact. Which makes that little piece feel even worse. The growth of insanity is exponential. You start out writing a short story or two, maybe running around in the woods singing to yourself, then pretty soon you’re booking flights hours before they occur and driving oversized vehicles to far away airports with an enigmatic human being (who is maybe even further down the path to insanity than you) sound asleep in the passenger’s seat.

So how did I get here? It all started with a truck, and a stick, and fragments of ice being chipped off the windshield by bare, shaking hands. No. It started with a phone call. No, not even that. It started with a graduate school audition. Further back. With a kiss. Further. With a fascination with children’s books. With jazz. With a birthday. With a kiss.

It’s no use tracing these things through labyrinths of decisions already made, just like it’s no use thinking through all the decisions that weren’t made. You’ll get hopelessly lost in either direction, I can promise you that. But one thing I can tell you is that it feels amazing having everything you need to survive in a backpack by your side. I often wonder how it would feel to have everything you own in that backpack. I hope to feel that someday, but I should be careful, wishing for something like that. But hell, wishing is the one place I don’t need to be careful, and I have no intention of doing so.

Then again, I did wish for this. Didn’t I?

My living has become as careless as my wishing. That must be the real danger.

Stage 2

In the first plane, I could see down to the ground. It was dark. The cities below were glitter scattered on a tabletop. It felt like I could reach down and brush it into the air with my fingertips.

The wing outside the window wobbles against turbulence. She’s looking out the window now. I’ve learned that she sleeps with her eyes open, a lot of the time. It must be tiring, seeing even while you sleep. As for me, I can’t sleep at all.

Everyone looks tired on a plane, and in an airport. Anyone you come across smiling broadly for over three seconds is immediately labeled as either a jackass or a stewardess. It’s strange how even in these lab-rat conditions no one can help judging the people around them, sizing them up as morons or business slaves or vacationers or staff or baseball fans or military or anything. I guess I fall in the first category.

Two small children just walked by. I had forgotten children existed. The air gains a certain freshness as they pass, but it fades quickly as their father leads them back to their seats.

No clouds to see. Just a light grey all around this roaring javelin of a machine. I wonder what it will be like, over there. I wonder what it was like, back there. I really can’t say anymore. Is this what I’ve been needing to jar me out of my sleepwalking existence? It seemed like it at first. But now I only feel deeper asleep than I ever was, slipping into a dream.

Waking up is just not in the cards. Not for a while now. So I’ll take what I’ve been given, and scour every inch of this preposterous rabbit hole.

Stage 3

I walked until my feet hurt. The library was a cathedral. I read The Communist Manifesto on the highest floor until I was falling asleep. I’m so tired now my vision expands with each inhalation and shrinks as I exhale. I haven’t slept in an amount of time that eludes me. I fail to understand where I am. I know no one in this town, not a single person. And I’ll be honest, I could get used to all of this. I’ve never felt so deep in a dream before, so far removed from my life.

I sat on that dock, listened to that album, watched all those cars across the bay flow over the bridge in a stream of white pinpoints. Then the album ended, and I listened to the lapping of the water against the wooden beams.

I’m hoping by the end of this, my mind, rather than throwing up its usual walls and mirrors to obstruct that which is true from reaching the other end of the wire, or even worse, reforging itself to be utterly desensitized to even something as absurd as this, will suffer some sort of implosion, and suddenly I will be in my life again instead of outside it. I can’t say that I need this to happen, because I’ve been living fine out here. But it’s about time I came home.

I’m not going home physically until I go home mentally.

That’s a lie, I’m going home Sunday no matter what. But I feel like something might actually happen, this time. I feel like what I’m reaching for, just this once, I may actually grasp before these days are done.

I’m not depressed right now. Just distant. Painfully distant from myself.

Merciful God.

Stage 4

The morning was kinder to me. I feel like myself today, whatever that means, even walking through such alien surroundings. Not entirely alien. Very human. I know these people, in a way. Their struggles are just as irrelevant, trivial, and self-afflicted as mine, and seem to them to be excruciatingly important. Just as mine seem to me.

I walked down from the campus’s towering hill and soon found myself on the lakeside. I spotted a trail of some kind and followed it. Freeways, built on concrete pillars thrusting out of the water, arched above me as I hiked through the wetlands on muddy pathways and floating platforms. The mountains were almost black against the sky, and were flecked with splotches of white. They loomed far out in the distance, and the clouds skimmed over them, children in the eyes of wise old men. I sunk into the amalgam of urban and natural and felt free and safe and even young.

After a while I found myself on the other side of the marsh that borders the lake, and in the midst of an arboretum. It was filled with colorful winter flowers and towering cedars. I sang a few songs as I walked in their shade. The sun was shining brightly through the clouds, and a light rain was falling. I was filled with a joyous melancholy. Sunlit rain is something I had forgotten could be.

Just like I have forgotten to be, for so long.

Or some such nonsense.

Stage 5

We fell asleep. I dreamed of ghosts congregating in our room, standing around the bed, watching us. They had no eyes. They were only fuzzy, three-dimensional shadows vaguely human in form, as if they could hardly remember what creatures they once resembled. One by one they waded into the bed, their legs moving effortlessly through the mattress and sheets. We lay there, clutching one another, and each time one of the ghosts passed through us, we shivered. They didn’t seem to mean us harm. I think they just wanted to feel alive again. And for the split second they passed through our dying bodies, perhaps they did feel alive, and the memories of life flooded their vaporous heads, while ours were filled with strange dreams of solemn visitors and green fields spotted with doors.

Stage 6

From the windows of the small prop plane the snow-drenched Blue Ridge looks like furry scoops of vanilla ice cream. I tell her this. She tells me I’m strange. I have no retort, comical or otherwise.

As it turned out, my Latin professor was on the same plane. She gives us a ride back. The three of us talk of language, then of music, then of government, then of the human purpose. I listen intently to the two of them, and try to listen to myself. The roads are clear, and the snow is clean and white. I’m home. And maybe more than just home. I feel quiet, strong. For a little while, maybe, I am the man that little boy wanted to be.

Backstage

That’s a pretty good script. But there’s still one question left. Should the movie be a comedy or a tragedy?

Ah, hell. A movie’s a movie. Sign the fucking contract.