Put a man in a situation in which he must kill to survive, and he will probably do it. Put a man in a situation in which he must live to survive, and that’s a different story. A story it is. A small one, thick and pungent. Idiot, they’ll scream at you. Blasphemer. Look at you, how you abuse yourself and the people you thought you knew. And for what? Maybe an excuse for that other life that you kept locked away from everyone, the plane tickets tucked away in a drawer under layers of poisonous text. Where will they take you, if you finally build up the courage to use them?

You may not know how to speak, and you may not know who you are, but you still know a few things. You know how to put one foot in front of the other, and you know how to keep the brim of your hat perpendicular to the shadows. You know how to rhyme, if you remember to try. So keep those feet and those lips moving, and maybe one day you’ll say something or arrive somewhere. And then, things will be the same, but you’ll be in a new town with a new mantra, and that’s more than the rest have managed to scrape together.

You don’t think you’ll find anything one day. There doesn’t seem to be anything to find, or at least anything worth finding. No, you won’t find anything. But if you don’t keep your eyes open then there wouldn’t be a point in walking so far. So if the meaning of walking is to discover the reason for walking, then that’s it, you’ve found it, and there’s no where else to go. So you have to keep walking.

Someone will ask you later on what you’ve found. It might be a stranger, or a lover, or the rarest of all, a friend. But no matter who asks, you won’t know how to say it. Maybe you’ll smile, or shake your head, maybe you’ll even laugh a little bit. And in a thousand different ways you’ll say it. No, nothing. And even if you had found something, could you have recognized it for what it was? And even if you could, would you be able to remember?

You’re getting old, I know. Your memory works well when you least need it to. That’s age. But long from now you’ll still remember how to walk, and you’ll remember how to keep the sun out of your eyes. And your lips, chapped and bleeding and caked with spite, maybe if you kept them moving they won’t have frozen off and they’ll be able to say something that no one can completely disprove. And you’ll stash that something away with those plane tickets you never got around to using and walk a little farther then fall asleep and dream of running, or sailing, or flying. Rising before the sun you’ll reach for the pen and the little notebook that sleeps beside you. Before and after the ink meets the page you won’t remember what you wanted to say.

But you’ll keep walking in the morning. Please, tell me you’ll still be walking. The road is cold and ready and the world has enough sleepers.

I am not dead. I would say, “I am very much alive,” but, you know how that goes.

When will I say something again . . . ? I don’t know! (Who cares!) Though, for a small hiccup-laugh, let me ask myself that very question right quick.

. . .

Hm.

. . .

Hm, yes! It has been decided that I will type many things when day returns to us again. There is much to be typed, for sure.

It will be typed tomorrow afternoon as the sun sets, for the sun is anxious to hide in this dark, dark months.

What will I say, what will I say? Oh!

Yes:

The mountains, the mourning of the dead.

The stars and the sounds of cars.

Please anticipate what will ultimately amount to a tidy pile of small rocks. This is all I have to offer you–whoever you are.

Let us hope that you’re a friend of mine.

My current project has been making a lot of sense lately. Maybe too much sense. I had a dream about it, last night. Not the story itself. Actually, it was just a dream about the words and the paper they were written on. I had journeyed to a stone circle in the midst of a field. Soft, green grass covered the cold soil, and hills layered with rock surrounded this ancient burial ground of sorts. It looked like Ireland, or home. I had gone there with everything I had thus far written, all the pages of my stupidest venture yet clutched in my trembling little fingers, to seek out the greatest writing guru in the world. I found him. He was dusting off one of the stones, looking at the characters carved into it. I said hello, and handed him what I had. He looked at it, flipped a few pages, laughed a little, and gave it back.

“Is it done?”

“No,” I said.

“Come back here when it’s done.”

The dream ended there, I suppose.

Today it started making so much sense I got angry and started a sister project. I decided, every bit of steam that builds up from this thing I’m going to funnel into a new work. It will be called The Lint People and it will not make sense.

Several paragraphs in it started making sense.

For fuck’s sake, it even MEANT something.

I got angry again, and went off to play Super Mario Bros. 3.

I am God damned tired.

Really dead-damned-dog-tired.

There is a mucus fog that keeps me from the only occupation that my genetic code prescribed to me: thinking. I can’t do it, God damn it, not lately.

I’ll knock out a few puzzling questions in the bath while chomping on a fat, water-soaked honeycrisp apple every now and then, but for the most part the well has been dry. It’s a real shame.

I put words to internet database in the dark of last night about laboring my body in unquenchable situations. These situations have greedily slurped me up, have not returned me to me, yet.

And who’s to say they ever will!

I’ll come across a cob-web-coughing dustbucket of a curmudgeon, skin drooping off of bone like rotten meat. They’ll say surly things and stir around in darkness. I want to tell them, hey, I fucking get you, man. I know that you want to die — and not because of any shit-ass human emotions — but because, fuck! You’re tired as hell! You’ve spent your whole life doing things that no one wants to do!

I don’t want to ride this ride any longer. In fact, I have a better idea:

I want to live on a planet that is a total of one hundred acres, filled with variegated landscape and every fruit and vegetable and vegetarian animal from the blue orb that I currently run around on. Carnivores are welcome, if they’re willing to play nice. No one has to die, we can just live there for the ever and ever. The only inhabitants are hand-picked diplomats that I’d known from the blue orb (and they are, of course, welcome to decline my invitation). The sun only disappears when we want it to (which will be appropriate when we want to have fires or catch fireflies (which are then immediately released)). Everyone will sit through a seminar taught by Carl Sagan on how to approach any situation with both rationality and heart. (In addition, Carl Sagan will also live on this planet.)

We won’t ever have to sleep, because there’s nothing to escape from, nothing that we can’t have.

We will spend our endless days picking fruits and vegetables and our endless nights writing novels and songs and catching fireflies (which are then immediately released). There will be no machinery. Clothing is optional. (I will be bashful around Albert Einstein only once before we accept each others’ bodies.)

Hey, all right! I want that to happen right now, actually.

Instead, I live on a planet where bottles of expensive fragranced water have titles. The bottle I have is called “Aloha.” On the back is a small drawing of a country that we forcibly took from peaceful natives and made into our fiftieth commonwealth, because forty-nine stars on a flag is just damned near impossible to look at without involuntarily displacing the contents of one’s stomach.

The bottle then goes on to insult our intelligence, tells us something that would not be foreign to a newborn infant seconds after leaving the womb of his mother:

“HAWAII: Aloha means both “goodbye” and “hello.” So, we wave aloha to odor and say aloha to freshness.”

Wow!

Wow!

That whole thing about me creating my own planet sounds pretty fucking fantastic, huh!

Friends, I am tired.

I will, at some point, in a less-exhaustive state, write about the Big Issue I have encountered lately. I mentioned it briefly in October. It is about how nothing is important without the perception of other beings, and fuck the perception of other beings, because those other beings are the worst beings of any beings that I know of: they are human beings.

I’ll bet that sounds like something a first-semester philosophy student discards of in the toilet, sure!

But . . . I will do that another time. I am, yes, too tired to do so now.

I keep bathing, keep dreaming, keep sipping tea and crunching on plump apples. It’s something of a collection of hobbies, everything I do. I would like to do more of what I want to do, but those wishes are best left to penniless psychopaths and silly-stupid ultra-wealthy slobs who sniff their wine and pretend to know anything (I serve these sorts all the time, don’t you know). That hurt — a lot, actually — to write that, just now.

Serve! Fucking, fuck!

I will have you know, my dear friends, that I have been masterminding this planet idea during many private baths while gorging on many red-yellow apples. I have a plan to make it exist in a crippled, sputtering form on the blue orb. It something of a hobby, to plan this thing. I won’t be able to control the weather, or never die, and my heroes will instead have to live in my head and bookshelf rather than across the hall (we would all live in a sprawling mansion in this planet of mine). “The Preliminary Education of Ryan Litton,” is spiraling to the dark below, so I’m planning, planning: I’m moving my body and my sentimental junk to a comfortable planet not far from the planet I live on now. You are welcome over for dinner. We won’t be eating any animals. You may not use my towels.

I have a thing about sharing towels.

(A towel will be provided to you, however.)

All of this will spark and explode and rumble to life in one revolution of the blue orb around the angry red star, more or less. I anticipate the movement of the planet and stars, if it means closing the gap between Now and The Big Plan.

It is, ahem, the only time I will lay down my sword and look away as The Future sweeps past me to take from me little parts of my body and mind and heart.

It’s going to be painful!

There will be months and months of not doing what I want to do, so that I may eventually do what I want to do for the ever and ever.

Hopefully that includes the lifting of the fog and the consumption of round fruits.

“I don’t know.”

That’s what I tell people, these days, when they ask me anything. I say solemnly, “I don’t know.”

Except when they ask if I’ve got the time. Then I say, “I don’t have the time.” They wince, I wince, we wince, we walk away.

Sometimes, sometimes: People will ask me, “What’s that wound on your arm?”

“Oh, this one? This wound here? Man,” I say, “I just don’t know.”

It’s healing, in case you were curious.

There is a one hundred percent chance that you weren’t.

It’s all pink and stormy and it has given birth to beautiful new hair follicles. This new hair is the color of my birth-hair. It’s brand new, I tell you.

I’m not sure why, though.

I check on it every night, just before I slowly descend into a nighttime mood, just before I descend to a warm place below pounds of feathers and microfiber. I have been pleased with its progress, fascinated with the speed of its work, and of the elasticity of its nature.

That’s new skin for you.

And I think now that I have been beaten and broken and torn and ripped at every point on my dermis, that maybe all of it is newer than it was when I was first endowed with skin. The cat scratches and chest scars and mysterious non-healing arm wounds have appeared and healed and reappeared and healed so many God damned times that I am utterly convinced that the protector of my bones and organs has an on-going newness to it, that it is always rushing to fill in holes and scrapes and scratches attained from Being Alive.

Being Alive!

I’ve been doing a lot of that, lately. I have been alive so much in the past few weeks in precisely none of the ways that I want to be. My body has been labored in places that are not the only two places that I ever want to be: my winter palace, for one, and a place called Nokesville, say. I want to be in those places because they are the only tiny boxes of existence that I can navigate in the third dimension where I might find everything I want out of life.

(If you were curious, they are: alonehood, non-sounds, the ability to legally be naked, no one to tell me what to do, close proximity to the library of my sentimental junk, comfort.)

None of that, recently. None of that at all.

And really, it’s a shame, because I am actually a real-life person when I can have all that I want out of life. It is so very little, friends. For fact: I have everything that the world could offer me, right here in my little home, in my little head; the future need not apply. I guess that makes me dangerous. The only other things that I want and cannot have were in my possession once, but are no longer mine for various cosmic reasons, and you know how that goes. It’s heavy, heavy stuff, really. And you just can’t take that with you.

. . . hm. Cosmic.

This business of laboring in slimy, unfortunate hovels: it comes to a temporary close very soon. I anticipate the arrival of Nothing. I crave Nothing.

When that day comes to pass, I can look upon it with black, black eyes and say to myself and no one else (while naked (and comfortable)): “Finally, Nothing.”

I will, of course, whisper the last part to myself and no one else: “(Temporarily.)”

I will whisper this, because there is a big chance that I may not even hear myself say it.

Maybe then it won’t be true.

Then again, I don’t know.

After the celebrated arrival of Nothing, the blissful acceptance of Nothing, behold: there is Something.

Which is, yes, the transportation of my body in three dimensions by way of a flying aluminum tube capable of transpacific travel.

There will be trains and hot springs and the viewing of a snow-capped inactive volcano. I anticipate all three, and little else. It will be eight hundred U.S. dollars ($) well-spent, I am certain, if I endowed with the opportunity to (temporarily) “indulge” in such crude luxuries.

And then it’s back to Nothing for a little while longer.

The misery of “stuff I have to do” will resume later this winter.

Ah.

I anticipate wounds if only for the healing of skin. This is all I can look forward to, these days.

It’s an exciting way to Be Alive, gentle friends.

The river must have overcome the confines of its banks during the night. Today it flows among the tree trunks, muddy and violent. I watch from the wooden footbridge. People pass by behind me holding umbrellas. Never liked umbrellas, myself. I’d rather feel it. Recently, I’ve found, movement has been more a matter of going away from things than to them. I don’t mind this so much. I’m used to this, especially in the winter. Winter is a time for late nights, steaming teas, and new musical discoveries. It was last winter when I found out who I wanted to be, and I found the music that would cradle me as I trudged through the snows of doubt. This winter, I’ll consider that destination with more scrutiny than ever, and what it means for me and my kind.

I’ve been moving away from things, and my steps are growing more measured, more confident. The great social nausea is blossoming in me again like a prudent flower in the autumn rains. Tired and dying it will adorn the hillside with a spark of rebellious color. I know what it means now. I know it is the gateway to self-discovery, to the great Going Under. And so down I shall go, inside myself. And looking outward as the air grows cold and the days short and spiteful, more and more I will see my own reflection. And with the first flake of snow, I hope, I will see the crystallization of my ideals. And the coming of age of what I consider to be the most important project of my life so far.

The moth, searching for the mountain flower. And the Two Person. Oh, that raging paradox of self and self love and self loathing, of tragedy and comedy! A binary of ones and twos! A being of two faces: the two theater masks of the authors that tower above my dying thoughts, a dead pixel on a screen fed by rusty vacuum tubes. The most beautiful thing. No longer can I allow my paths to be twisted and scenic and kind to my soles. My feet must be worn and bloody, my road straight and true. And as I search for the definition of truth and straightness, I can only dream of the days when I was but a cloud and a manifestation of the winds. Now I must fight those winds, once my dearest friends. Now they are obstacles and ugly ones, with no will of their own, that rain cruelty on the world when the pressures of gravity no longer allow them to hold their density. A sad twist of fate is this betrayal. The clouds are beautiful but they are pliant and vaporous. And to them I must be the ugly one, a staple on one corner of their rambling essays, a hammer of virtue, a tiny point of the greatest thickness. And one day I will have all I can possibly bear, and I will implode, and I will become a force bending the very fabric of time, from which not even light can escape. Then you fellow wanderers, you will be pulled to me, and I will be the one you move away from, until you find the strength to go toward your own triumph: your most beautiful thing.

Or so I like to think. But I’m not all of that. Not now. Not yet.

Not yet.

Slept for a long, long time last night; slept until “last night” became “today”.

Now “today” is “yesterday”. Fucking hell, time.

I haven’t been sleeping like a child, haven’t done so in many months. Sleep is now a blue-black period in between there and someplace else. I wake up and feel indifferent to the events that precede the breathless, godless unconsciousness of my poison-soaked body.

And poison–

This poison that I speak of is, more or less, infinite hunger.

God damned hungry over here, in my winter palace. Fucking feed me, why don’t you!

(That was a command to myself, yes.)

Hum-hum.

Hungry for a handful of somethings that no longer exist on this planet.

Hum-hum.

Sometimes, sometimes:

I stand languidly at the tippy-top of Federal Hill, and let my eyeballs roll by the neon and the water and the skyscrapers. I look and feel spooky. The wind throws my hair around, tosses it from side to side like pizza dough. It ends up looking spectacular, pointing upward toward heaven, or whatever.

Someone less interesting — someone that perhaps used to be myself — would say something here: “And this is what I think about . . .”

But, I will be frank with you, gentle reader: I think about damn near nothing at all. I sometimes think, “I look and feel spooky!” and I’m done with it. How I end up on Federal Hill four nights week, I don’t know. It’s a hell of a climb from where I approach the hill: no stairs or walkways for me, no ma’am. I jut up that bastard with fleshy lunges. I think, just a little bit, as I ascend the grassy backside of the slumbering creature: I look and feel spooky!

And I feel the fresh freshness of a Psychopath. It feels like home!

Which, yes, brings us back around:

I stand languidly at the top of Federal Hill.

How my muscles have any energy left to sap slurpingly from my boyish frame, I don’t know. It must be all the mashed rutabaga and acorn squash that I’ve been stuffing myself with lately. I’ve been eating a whole hell of a lot of creamy yellow vegetables, come to think of it.

It must be the mashed rutabaga an acorn squash, yeah.

Anyway: It’s dizzying up there. It’s dizzying to think about now, really. I think now also how a younger version of myself used to stare at flashy beautiful things at the top of Federal Hill. Those were some nice circumstances, back then. I’d love to own those circumstances today. Instead, I cart around this load of old, old bricks and broken light bulbs, yeah. Everything is black and white and odorless.

Yeah, I’d like to feel like that boy again.

I have his haircut and his stupid face and his death-pale flesh. But the tick-tocking on the inside of this old chest is tick-ticking in the direction of bad feelings and, frankly, hallucinogenic schizophrenia.

Maybe!

Hm, yes: My heart — once his — has been beating like an electromotive meatbag in the span of many months. It fops against this death-pale chest. It flumps when I think of how it used to fop, three years ago.

And how I need to inhabit the small, cozy space of that three-years-ago mind again. I live in it four times a week at the top of Federal Hill, staring at lovely lovelies and murky water while my tick-tocking organ jerks around inside of me like a ravenous turnip, brought to life with sorcery and moon-time psychosis.

And what I want also: To be in the little rooms of homes that fed me and taught me words and numbers. I would go there right now, even if it meant never stepping foot on the forehead of Federal Hill for the rest of my fop-flumping days. Oh, lord, would I ever.

I spoke with you, dear friend, in the deep-dark of last night, if you’ll recall, and I lead you through a corn field near a house of rooms I used to call Mine. What a walk! I have been on thousands of walks — more than half of them in the last five years, don’t you know — and that corn field walk, it was number sixteen in the Big List of Walks.

Number one is a secret.

Number three happened in a dream.

I almost had my teenage years taken away from me with number eight.

But number sixteen! Oh, oh, oh.

Number fifteen, if you must know, was the same exact walk in a non-lonesome sense. It was winter, and the night concluded with simple pleasures and circumstances that I would be delighted to inherent in the present moment.

I’d take those circumstances over the ones I found myself in three years ago. It goes without say that I’d take them over the ones I carry with me now.

You see, my mind worked differently back then.

And now it’s a whirling ball of egg yolk and acorn shells. Jesus God, is it ever.

Is it ever.

I break free around five thirty. The platypus had given me his keys several hours ago. I left a note on his door: “Thanks for the car, hit me up if you ever swing through Mexico.” I exit the building, and walk briskly through the autumn winds, out past the football field, then the soccer field. All the way to the parking lot. I find the car with the Colorado license plate, unlock it, and throw my bags in the back. I pop the trunk. A host of exotic beers reveal their gilded bottle caps. I push the boxes of alcohol aside and open the spare tire well. I take his small bag of poisonous plant bud and the twisted piece of glass used to inject smoke into human lungs and throw them in my backpack. He wanted that stuff back in his room, before I took off for the weekend. I turn on the car. These damn hybrids. No soul. No purr.

I escape the parking lot and drive back to the building. I walk back inside with the backpack. I do what needs to be done, and leave a second note on his door: “Snug items, in the top drawer.” I leave the building a second time. It’s Friday. People are getting ready to go out. People ask me where I’m off to. All I can do is shrug.

I drive off again, circling around the roadways of the convoluted town. I end up in front of a pale yellow castle. I slow as I see the wolf. He picks up his stuff, and hops in. His friend comes along too. He needs a ride to his car. I take him there. Then the wolf and I are off. We hit the interstate running, jazz pulsing through the grainy speakers, sucking on the embers of cancer.

The road moves quickly. Soon it has almost taken us home. I didn’t tell my parents I was coming, and I can’t say exactly why. I even made plans to not use my debit card on the brief trip, so I couldn’t be tracked.

As we creep through our hometown, the engine buzzing like an insect, I try to think of anyone I might want to see here. No names come up. No faces. The moon, however, shines on like a lone flower petal, whether anyone wanted to see it or not. I couldn’t tell what it was, at first. I thought that it couldn’t be the moon. It was too wide and daring and not as white as it used to be. What made the moon so orange, this night? Pollution? Bad tidings? Or the same thing that makes me so tired and nostalgic?

And what are you doing here? Why do you always end up in this rusty landfill of a village? Lord and Savior in Heaven, whose idea was this? Whose idea was I?

I think I’m writing this because I want to remember it all. Recently everything I remember has been like some worthless movie that has no moral to its story. One of the ones you come out of the theater after and you think that it was pretty weird but there were some memorable lines and some damn good acting but fucking hell I should have used that nine dollars for a couple gallons of gas or something. Just a movie. I even think up soundtracks for all the scenes. The scenes I can remember anyway. I can barely remember anything. My memory is like that milk you spilled on the floor and you don’t want to wipe it up, but if you don’t it will smell like death in your living room in a matter of hours. Trying to remember sections of my life is like bobbing for apples. It’s all one story, one sloppy amalgam of everything that’s happened bubbling in a leaking black cauldron.  Last night I was lying in bed, and I gave my mind specific instructions to find and review one scene, and one scene only, from not so long ago, and before I knew it I was drowning in the past, my memories using me as a punching bag, coming back in short painful bursts: left jab, right jab…

Roundhouse.

I couldn’t do it any longer and I needed to fall asleep. And I must have, at some point, because soon after that I woke up.

My memories seem kinder to me in the mornings, and kinder to me on paper. But in the end, no softer. It’s the difference between being beaten by a club or punctured by a needle. Call me a bastard, but I choose the needle, on the rare occasions when I am given the choice.

Just a quick shot, and it will all be over, my friends. A lethal injection. What’s in it? What does the murder? Just a little more of what you’ve already got.

Open up: out comes Psychobabble!

Yes!

I will click these keys like a heartbroken praying mantis, and I will tell you, dear children, of the great many things that my eyes have seen, and that my tongue has tasted.

And oh, it has tasted.

Tonight, I have tasted ash and cold fingers. It must be November, God damn it! I drove and drove and drove. The heat sputtered out of plastic vents like smokey-swirly perfume, crept up my leg and down my shirt. Never once did its flames reach my nose and hands. They were solid glass, no kidding.

My fingers were frozen stalks of celery locked to the steering wheel, my nose brass-button-shiny.

I was driving under the embryonic haze of November; the month had just been born six days before. It was an infant, bouncing along like a pumpkin ready to explode.

And, so: Psychobabble. It’s all I know how to say, these days.

Hours before I was to find myself piloting my flaming vessel, there was the sip-sipping of expensive tea and Psychobabble with the man who once turned to my mother with lust in his eyes. He said, “Drink this tea. It’s great tea. Expensive, too.”

Said I: “Certainly.”

I was, after all, not unaccustomed to drinking great, expensive tea.

When my mind stirred and deflated and erupted and splattered on the wall like pancake batter, I dropped my tea, spilled it all over my absolute favorite pair of regal slacks.

If you’ll recall, I went through hell to get those slacks.

I won’t, though. Recall, that is.

I dropped a blood-boiling cup of great, expensive tea on my own lap because I was inundated with colorful visions and the regaling of Psychobabble. It was simply too much at one time, and every part of me fluttered and fell.

And with it went the tea.

I should have finished that tea, I think now, instead of letting it burn these thighs of mine — for there were many cold moments to be lived in later that night.

If you’ll recall, the newborn November night would go on to freeze my fingertips and nose.

I left the home of my father and drove through roads that part deep forests. The sky was solid black. I drove on these roads under the starry solid black until I came upon a field of corn.

I got out and walked. The moon had dipped behind an ominous clan of trees and said good-night. I said, “Good-night to you, too.”

It was a shame that He left me, because I could not recall a time in my life when I’d seen the moon so large and so close, so yellow and angry. It was the color of tennis ball found in a puddle of mud. It dripped into the atmosphere, sleepy and warm.

I was, however, very cold. At least, the tips of my fingers and nose were.

I said: “Tough it out!” They obeyed like little children eager to earn dessert.

Dessert, as it turns out, was corn.

And this is when I hoped for tea and warm things. I hoped for them not to spill on my lap and burn the legs that help me walk, but to rest in my stomach like firewood and keep an old man lit up in the solid black starry nothing.

I stepped on dead corn and felt the crunch under my partially-animated legs. It was a satisfying sound. It sounded like stepping on the bones of dead kings. I stepped and crunched every which way, until the land ended and the corn gave way to untraceable nighttime. It was then I crunched in the direction of home. My fingertips clacked together like brittle piano keys. My nose hung from my face like a sloping glacier.

I piloted my vessel in the way of my winter palace. I said good-night to the fields that raised me. They were utterly silent in return.

I am still cold, but my fingers have found use. They are busied with my only occupation: I clack and clack this Psychobabble for you, dear children.

November already, huh. God damn. I’ll have to see about putting this nose to use. I think now that I will assign it to smell the incense the burns to the right of my skull. It smells . . . yes, it smells exactly like a woods stove burning happily. I am happy, too, with the knowledge that such incense exists. I am also a tired old man. November already. What a shit-shitting world, let me tell you.