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.

In the year now behind me, I traveled to twelve states, thirty-six cities and one other country.

And I’m bored to hell with all of it!

Let us see, Ryan (me), if we can’t do better in this new decade (even though, technically, the new decade doesn’t begin for another year).

Okay, I say.

I have roughly two free round-trip flights to any city in the continental United States. I think that maybe I will go to Boston and San Francisco. Maybe Portland. I want to go to Portland.

Do I want to go to Portland more than Boston or San Francisco? I don’t know! I’ve seen Boston before, sure, but there’s something going on there in March, so hell, maybe I’ll see Boston again.

I have a weekend excursion in Lexington in March, too. There I will see my two cousins and a handful of other Very Important people in my life. There are so few, these days!

The government is about to pay me one-thousand U.S. dollars for being a non-dependent school-going citizen, so maybe I’ll go to a foreign country this year. Not Japan, okay! Perhaps I will go to Vienna, or Graz! Who knows!

Come to think of it, I have a girl-cousin in Graz. Her name is Susi. I have no idea if she reads any of this garbage. I can only hope that she doesn’t — for her sake.

Okay, sorry: enough with this going-places-doing-things talk. I’m awfully sad to have to talk about this stuff, but it’s been bubbling around in my head the last few days, because all I’ve had to do is think and sit around. There is, I will have you know, roughly three feet of powder-soft snow on the ground, just outside my bedroom window. I contemplated jumping from that window and landing in aforementioned powder-soft snow, though really, how am I to hop onto an airplane with crutches? How unsavory! I dashed this dream and instead made pesto-filled tortellini complimented with diced bell peppers and a whole onion! It was fantastic. I think I’ll have it again real soon.

I really need to find another room in the house to do this. I get in the same two-in-the-morning mindset when I sit down to write this stuff. Here I am, at the very end of my bed, soggy with midnight gloom, thinking of dead friends again. It’s the same thing, man. The same thing every night! I have a lot of stuff I write and never do anything with, because it just sounds like I’m trudging through sludge, and maybe I’m not comfortable with revealing that. So, it’s just sitting on a sever somewhere in California, waiting to be digested as sticky malaise. Maybe I’ll do something with the junk I keep in my attic, so to speak, but maybe not.

Though I must say, it’s a nice idea that I’ll be paid for writing stupid crap like this next week. I’m tickled silly with the idea!

That was a lie, actually. I don’t really care. I know all of it is going to be minced to hell to adhere to the standard that everything that is going into the newspaper must be odorless and colorless and hive-mind. Well, hey! I’m not the one filling out the checks, do I don’t give a good God damn what happens to the mindless slop that I’ll be typing up in ten-to-fifteen seconds!

I’m just being a jerk on purpose. Man. Okay, I’ll stop.

I’m not really interested in paychecks with my name on them, or newspaper articles with my name on them. If they allow me to write under a pen name, I’ll gladly do it. I schedule to think of something wonderful to call myself in the bath tomorrow. See, I don’t have anything to do tomorrow, because there is three feet of damned snow on the ground.

I shoveled my walkway like a psychopath yesterday. I felt like a real American out there — it felt awful.

You can’t walk for ten steps without having a heart attack out there, I swear. I’m probably long-dead and haven’t yet realized it. I’m probably just a faceless ghoul clattering away at the keys on a laptop, and my corpse is frozen stiff under a mound of godless ice, just outside my bedroom window. That’s probably what happened.

I really should jump out of that window, come to think of it.

Maybe not.

I want to go to more states and countries this year — probably shouldn’t risk a broken neck.

I only ever want to go anywhere because if I keep doing the same thing for so long, I’ll end up turning the knife on myself when I cut the bell peppers to sprinkle onto my pesto-filled tortellini dinner. I’d better not put myself in a position where that is my only option!

Then again, might be dead!

Do the dead haunt planes? I don’t know. Someone, somewhere has had a heart attack on a plane, I don’t doubt it.

God, I really need to stop this!

I need to start writing in the living room!

Or from planes!

No, no — only jerks write from planes. What a jerk thing to do, write on a plane.

See, really, I’m going to stop this right now. Even I don’t give a fat, slobbering fuck about what I’m doing every day, or what I have done, or plan to do. I’ve got this whole “don’t be disingenuous” thing going on from now until I’m dead (am I dead?), so it would be detrimental to my, uh, mental health to continue to pelt you, whomever you are, with information about what career I want (hah!), or where I intend to live (nowhere), or whatever. Whatever, man!

Whatever!

Jumping out of the window right this secon–

lol

By God, the weather has been fooling with me quite a bit in the past few weeks!

Make up your damned mind, says I.

See: Just last week, I tell you, it was damn near blistering outside. I checked my mail in a t-shirt! It’s the only time I ever go outside when Old Man Winter is breathing down my neck. It used to be, in the summertime months, that I would stroll around the neighborhood in pants that felt like pajamas (corduroys, folks), munching on a Gala apple like a deep-breathing fiend. The neighbors never said much about it — they never say anything about anything, come to think of it. The old man two rows down would suck down his cigarette and glare at me like he hated my shape, or the music of my teeth. He’d sit there, arms crossed, seething with hatred at the fact that a post-war baby has his own townhouse, and by God, checks his own mail!

That was then, though. Now, who in hell knows what’s going on outside. There was seven inches of the powdery white stuff on the ground, just two days ago. The sun has had its way with most of the leftovers, and the snowplow man has done what the snowplow man does best — covered it in chemicals and sand and mixed it all together with every shade of Hell! It looks like the streets have mounds of coal just piled up every which way. Snow really only looks fantastic when it has first fallen, huh?

And now Dante has walked into my living quarters to inform me that it is to snow tomorrow night, for God’s sake! And again on Friday night. A few showers, he says, and it will continue into Sunday morning. That sounds positively fantastic, I say! Now, will there be a hurricane and a few God damned tornadoes thrown in midweek just for the hell of it? The weather seems to think this sort of flip-flopping behavior is perfectly acceptable!

It was almost sixty degrees just one week ago, and then the rains came rushing in and washed our sunny days away. Now it’s just snowy and warped. This geographical dot on the planet has no idea what to do with itself, and it’s making me shit-bricking confused as well. I’m confused!

Before I stop talking about the weather — the only thing that uninteresting people ever talk about with uninteresting people (whom they barely even know on any meaningful level of human companionship), I just want to again remark that I’m delighted at the recent snowfall. Dante has told me — and I’m just going to have to believe him, here — that he thinks it may be a significant amount of snowfall. I consider five inches to be significant, because it pushes me into a place of thinking that warns me, calmly, in a tranquil voice, that I shouldn’t leave the house, because what in the hell else are you going to do other than stay home, jackass? and that it’s perfectly acceptable if I put on oatmeal-colored clothing and sip tea from the center of my bed while wrapped in a microfiber blanket, enjoying imaginary worlds on my television. This is all I ever want out of a weekend, man. When it snows, what the hell else matters other than what is available to you in your home?

I think that having six-to-twelve inches of crunchy water on the ground is reason enough to just be. Every time it snows, and how relatively rare this is, someone I know (and I know so few, these days) utters something deplorable about “being bored” and “man, this blows!” Hey, fuck you! Pick up a book, asshole! Do some push-ups!

People like that take their girlfriends to Applebees and offer to pay for the meal, like they’re doing them a God damned favor!

People like that look at themselves in the mirror and think their facial hair looks pretty decent, when they can’t really even grow facial hair!

People like that only like music because the lyrics are dimly, vaguely related to the things going on in their own lives!

Snow is great! Snow is a valid excuse to shut down many of the overhead processes in the brain and just be in a place that you want to be! Sheesh, and here we’ve got these mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers saying that they’d rather take their girlfriends to Applebees, because Applebees has “date meals” on the menu. What a crock of shit, I say. You may as well dress yourself a burlap sack with arm and leg holes if you think that sounds better than slowly, warmly digesting various forms of beautiful art and warm beverages from the center of a queen-size bed.

These people, man!

And now Dante has informed me that maybe, just maybe, I’m getting a little too worked up, here. This is a side-effect of friendless loneliness, he says. He’s rummaging through the garbage as I say this, and I’m the one with the problem! The little guy isn’t even trying to eat garbage, God help him, he just likes the sound paper bags make when you fold them with your hands. (I reuse paper grocery bags to line my trashcans.) And Dante, well — he’s got little hands. That’s a lot of folding he could potentially do, and you don’t have to tell him that. Together with his brother Virgil, they’ve been opening and closing the door to my living quarters for the last two weeks. I keep it shut to trap the heat in — it’s been snowing, don’t you know — but they just won’t have it!

I’m the one with the problem. Tsch!

Applebees. Tsch!

Here’s a nice thing that happened recently, and didn’t involve either the weather or people whom I don’t like: a dear friend came up to visit me. Oh, joy!

We played Demon’s Souls for a whole day and a half, I tell you. It had been hell to find that game. It was on clearance at some big store that carries everything and isn’t Wal-Mart, so I called and drove and finally tracked it down in a town called White Marsh, just north of Baltimore. Maryland is, by and large, a marshy place, I figure. I’m not sure what the titular “white” is denoting other than the dominate race of the slack-jawed yokels who live there. It was the only store in the whole damned state to even carry the game in the first place, let alone clearance it out! I wanted to have it in time for this dear friend, who ended up loving every second of our gloomy excursion together. I ended up driving up to White Marsh through Baltimore’s sludge-dripping ozone in order to avoid what would have been four dollars in tolls. It’s not exactly a “deal” when you have to pay for tolls, let me tell you.

So: Demon’s Souls acquired, I drove home and anxiously waited for this friend to show up. He ended up gifting me a succulent fruit that may have been a peach and a box of cookies, kindly donated on account of my birthday by his beehive-hair-having grandmother. She’s a lovely woman. I’ll . . . have to write her a thank-you note. I have a lot of these to fill out, actually — for the first time in a very, very long time, somehow, miraculously, generally everyone remembered that one time I was born, and that I still exist. How pleasant of them to recall little ol’ me!

For the love of Christ on the cross, Dante, either stay in my room or leave!

He has just come in the door huffing and puffing. He doesn’t have hips in the traditional sense (he’s a quadrupedal and all), though I imagine if he did, he’d have his little hands on them right about now. He’s flustered, I’m sure, because I’m writing instead of stroking his head and saying his two favorite words: “food” and “hungry”. He knows “hungry” because I always ask him, “Are you hungry?” just before feeding him whatever it is that he eats (God only knows, really). I am sorry, I have to said to him, I cannot feed you right now, as I’m writing something for no one to read!

Anyway: this friend of mine — this dear, dear friend (friends become quite dear when you have so few of them!), he enjoyed the hell out of Demon’s Souls. I would be doing you a disservice if I told you that I didn’t, too!

Really, we were giggling and passing the controller back and forth like little children. It was one of the best moments of 2010 — and I’ve already had my fair share of things to do in this new year we’ve living in right now. We were just so gum-sticky crazy to play that game. It felt marvelous.

I hope to see that rat bastard again soon, I do. We’ll continue our despondent story together. Until then, I think that I will continue to have overwrought correspondence with his brother. I am enjoying this relaying of ideas and language! With the one I have the slaying of ghost-knights and fire lizards, and with the other I have an information overload sitting in my inbox every other day! I’m a happy man, all things considered.

Maybe that last sentence was a joke.

And anyway, maybe it’s partially true if viewed in the context of these woefully infrequent sparks of human interaction. Maybe I do feel dandy when I’m slaying or talking with these brothers! And I say “infrequent” because the other colors of my existence are damp and shady. I’m going to do something about that real soon. My only solutions thus far have been 1) do push-ups until muscle failure, 2) gurgle too-delicious-to-be-real protein shakes (blended with four to five ice cubes, one banana (sometimes two) and a boastful amount of peanut butter), 3) read exciting literature post-muscle-pump and 4) hell, play Demon’s Souls. It just doesn’t feel right playing it alone, though. I get sort of frightened all by myself. There’s scary stuff in that game, okay!

I think I’ll go to sleep now. I end a lot of these things with some sort of indication that I no longer feel like being awake (see: alive), if only for a handful of hours. I’ll be alive again tomorrow, maybe. I say “maybe” because, hey, who knows! It could snow again and I might not realize it, and if it’s enough snow, maybe my roof with collapse and I’ll be buried in an icy tomb. That sounds like an all right way to go, if we may be honest with one another. The weather has been so restless lately that I would only be a little shocked and only a little frightened if it snowed so much that my modern home and it’s modern roof could not tolerate the weight of the snow resting on the ceiling of my bedroom in a would-be freak snowstorm.

Now I know what to pray for tonight!

Who knows if I’m even kidding about such things, nowadays.