People flooded the sidewalks. The Mayor had promised a parade. It had rained for three days after that, but now the skies were clear and bright and the evening sun cast a slow flame to the film of water on the road. A rhythmic tread was echoing off the walls of the buildings that lined the street, and the denizens of the city were nervously fumbling with the loose change in their pockets. The parade was coming.

All at once it burst into view.

M’s stretched to the horizon in the haze of daylight like a chain of crumbling mountains. Some were fiercely juggling little rubber balls in the likeness of decaying planets, while others drummed and blew on instruments of momentum to the steady tempo of their advance over the cobblestones. They shined like prophets, and the people cheered.

Somewhere at the rear of the parade moved an oddly silent creature. It was the letter U, slinking with reluctant footsteps behind the glorious procession. It was tired and slow, locked in a perpetual grief which was rivaled only by its forlorn sensitivity. The bowl of its shape was empty and warm.

Far above the splendor of the scene sailed the sun, its hot breath bathing the parade in power. It glowed with the wisdom of an ancient goddess. Staring into its blinding light, the crowd could distinguish the vague outline of a wide and all-embracing O.

A small child huddled in the throng, pressed to himself by the density of humanity. He reached deep into his pocket and pulled out a damp slip of paper. He unfolded it with the tenuous motion of his fingers, and stared into an image of the letter I, scrawled in elegant cursive. A spark of understanding seared behind his eyes, and it spread like a holy plague through the hearts of the people. In a sudden wave the mob reared up, each individual standing erect, and together they began to set the buildings on fire. As darkness fell, the parade marched on through a tempest of flame and shadow.

The city burned like the emblem of a forgotten creed, and the night shrank back in fear.

Your ramblings run obtuse to my own, and it’s no less painful to know it than to feel it. It’s taken me so long to compile a cypher for your coded poems and hand gestures, and now I just wish that they were gibberish again. Seeing through someone is seeing the fear of death behind their eyes. And now every time you speak I can feel that terror rise up like a black wave, extinguishing the little candle of love and truth that you keep so irresponsibly far away from yourself. You’d rather drown in salt and cold water than get burned by a pinch of hot wax. What the fuck did you do to yourself? I remember when there was a person somewhere underneath your twitching nerves. Or was it just that I didn’t understand?

I pray, to some grotesque entity I have no desire to behold, that it was more than that. I pray that you lost something precious on the long drive north to the great lakes, because the only alternative is that you never had it. So where did you trip and fall, where did all your faith seep out of you, slip out of your pocket like loose change? Was it all just pennies and nickels, not even worth the effort to stoop down and pick up and save? Or did it all just shrivel up and die without escaping the prison you built for it? Did you put out that sad old man’s fireplace without asking who he was or where he came from? He would have had so much to tell you. The two of us could have crouched at his feet like we were children again and listened to his far-fetched stories. But instead, when the winter of your soul polished the trees with ice, you let him die in his armchair, alone and forgotten.

And now it is your turn to be friendless and shivering. This is the dawn of your second childhood, and you will spend it trudging through a blizzard.

Good luck. Good luck.

Hum-ho. Hello, hello.

I was very excited tonight, and I’ll tell you why: there was an issue with the amount of gasoline in my car, which is to say that there wasn’t a whole lot in it! For me, this means leaving the house and listening to music on a dark, dark night. It means putting gasoline in my car. This is the most excited I’ve been in some time! Hooray!

You see, I live in a sort of purgatory here in Queen Mary’s Land. It’s not so bad. I don’t know why I’d be happy, either. I check my mail and grocery shop. I can smell the fresh-cut grass when it is freshly cut. I open the windows when I have heard rumors of warm breezes.

I have a relatively spacious parking space.

Some people seem content to live here forever. I am, of course, speaking of my affable neighbors! We are indifferent to each other, to be quite honest. We’re amiable with each other when the situation calls for it, and I’ve never had to complain about noise. So far as I know, they do not find my mouse-burp-quiet lifestyle to be stifling to their own television-watching lives! There are some thick walls in this community, I’ll be the first to say.

Well, let me also say that the mongrels across the street have been acting up a bit lately. Screaming and whatnot at all the wrong times, I tell you! Though, let us be clear: they are new neighbors. These people — yes, these people — live in the one house in my neighborhood that cannot, will not stay rented out. It’s a revolving door of jackasses and shit-throwers, to be sure. They never last long, so I don’t say a word. When they do leave the neighborhood forever, several persons of equal distaste for social etiquette move right on in. There must be something in the air over there, I say, that drives seemingly civilized members of this small community to scream and belch and sling fucks and shits this way and that every other weekend. I shrug and brush my teeth. This is purgatory, and no one said it wasn’t going to be slightly awful from time to time. It is by no means unlivable! Though, I have lived so long under these sleepy circumstances, and maybe my will has starved itself. My brain has, perhaps, gone the way of atrophy. To this I shrug and brush my teeth!

No, it’s okay, don’t worry! I am a perfect machine, these days. I brush my teeth at all the right times, take my meals at regular intervals, and I even viciously pump blood through my muscles four-to-five nights a week. You should see how I eat! My mother would be so proud of me, if she knew that I still exist!

My mind is not dribbly oatmeal pouring out my ears, no sir. It’s a ticking thing. It ticks! I feed it constantly with this here glow-y notebook of mine that serves as my pen and my mailbox and myself, in some other place (here!). Books are just banana peels to me, now. I suck out information and shovel it down my throat. This is an issue, because I’m running out of room, I’m not even kidding. Talk about oatmeal pouring out of my ears!

I apologize if I sound excited about anything in my life (listen to me, always apologizing! Who is this person?). To be truthful — yes, let us be truthful! — I am still the rotting sack of turnips that I’ve always been. Maybe it’s just all of this excitement built up in me on account of driving my car tonight. That almost never happens. I crave driving my car at night, though I have no place to go; I have been everywhere there is to be around here. Why, I used to have this boyhood fantasy that welled up in me several years ago, and here it is: that I might continue to drive north on Interstate 95, rather than exit into Baltimore via 395. Going north would mean ending up in New York City, of all places. Is this place better than Baltimore? I don’t know. I graded New York City once, though I can’t remember what I gave it — probably a D. It’s not such a great place. It has great things, sure. It doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t scream at me enough.

Baltimore — woo! What a place that is. I don’t have it in me to insult that place tonight. You may feel however you’d like about that location of human development without my pesky adjectives interfering with your cute little opinion!

Oh, yes: I never end up driving to New York City for reasons that remind me that I was born an elderly man, before I even had a chance to undo this senior affliction! Born an old man, look at that! What am I to do? I don’t know! Some fresh start at life that was.

The issue is this: I don’t want to pay for the tolls. To be more precise, I never have the money for tolls on me. I haven’t carried cash not once in my whole adult life. I’m a plastic man. (Though, no, I have never owned a credit card.)

To think, my escape is hindered by all of twenty or so dollars. If I may be sincere at this moment, I don’t believe that I particularly want to escape there. The city is a D by my standards (which are, to be fair, the harshest in town!). What in God’s name would I do in that stinking place, I wonder! Not a whole damned lot, that’s for damned sure.

So, I muck around here in my purgatory. I don’t go. I check the mail. I take out the garbage. I say inoffensive, perfunctory comments to anyone who pops my bubble. Some people, as I have said, are content to do this sort of thing for the ever and ever. I think I am quite done, thank you! When the very next December is upon me, I will turn in my little gold key and sort-of half-pray for my security deposit back (I am an ardent hygienist/maid, so I haven’t much to worry about, I imagine). I will check my mail for the last time. I will say good-bye to no one. No one will say good-bye to me!

After that, I will feel like this: ???

I will live here: ???

And I will drive to New York City, or someplace else. Anywhere will do!

I’ll have you know that, several years ago, when I had scarce an idea of what my adult-self would be like, I never once desired anything outside of what was already mine. Now I am in poverty, more or less, when one considers all that I did have and no longer possess. I’m not talking about stuff, child! You know what I mean — please, God, please: don’t allow me to divulge any further here. As you were maybe aware, we’ve had far enough of that in the past year. Let’s skate on by that! We’re someplace else now, up there.

My adult-self, as it turns out, wants for little else than to drive a vehicle at night all by himself. What a world, what a world. Is that all, really? It is, it is! That’s incredible, isn’t it? How do I want so little? Well, as I have said: I’ve already had all that I, a prototype of Ryan Donald Edward Litton, could realistically hope for in one lifetime. Driving my car when the planet spins itself toward the darkness of space is literally all I want right now — all I wanted tonight when that shamefully starved wish was granted.

That wonderment has since melted from my eyeballs. And now I will close shut the sockets where they are housed, and think of something! What I think of tonight, on this late, late night, is not up to me. It’s up to the swirling batter in my head. Think of wonderful things, thing-in-my-brain, thing-that-makes-me-me!

Please.

And here I say good-night with the foresight of knowing that there is no one out there to say good-night to me. Such is the way of purgatory!

Hum-ho. Good-night, good-night!

There was a spider who had made a web in corner of my home; I did not disturb him, I let him be. I spied him sleeping in that web he’d built, asked him to wake up, to speak to me!

Well, I puffed a little bit — a gust to shake his tiny home — and when he did not stir, I puffed and puffed a little more; but from his slumber he would not rise, and so I felt a little sad.

He hung in a mournful manner, his legs twisted and tangled in the thread of his own making; I pleaded with him to come back, to come home! — but still he would not move.

And so he hangs there still. He died at home, I think now. And why is that? I wonder, too. He’s a small creature, that’s for sure — brown and delicate, just hanging there.

There are no mummified remains of would-be meals, no flies bound in delicate fibers. This is no tomb; it is the final resting place of a little brown spider. He died alone in his home; he hangs there still.

Real jazz is mindless. By that I mean, real jazz is without mind. That’s when you know you’re a master, when you don’t have to think, and the notes just flow out of you naturally, and every vein and every nerve feels each note in the scale and you pick and choose based on searing guttural emotion. It’s temporal, too. The song lives and then the song dies, and if you feel something in between, consider yourself lucky. Sometimes these images flash into my head. A jazz trio with no arms, sitting there, cigarettes that they can’t light dangling from quivering lips. The pianist stares at his keys and wills them to sing and they never will. The drummer dreams of glorious fills he will never put into practice. The bassist leans against his hollow log of an instrument, praying for the strings to vibrate under calloused fingers he does not possess. I know this is real because I feel it. I feel the anguish and the foggy dreams of the dark room these three men inhabit, and I think to myself of the trinity. Mind, body, and soul.

The body is the drums. I have no doubts about that. Percussive movements. The carnal dissatisfaction forcing muscles to clench and then relax, driving the rhythm of the world. The drummer is the train moving up the mountain, slowing as it reaches the top, but still shoveling coal into that lump of machinery, belching fire and smoke. The drummer hastens the demise of the song with each blow. He is the body. I know this now.

The piano is the mind. Picking at each string indirectly by means of tiny hammers already set in place, stabbing at thoughts and ideas, a thin whine over the drone of the music. No new notes can the pianist make; they have all been played before. But he picks at them all the same, defining the ideology of the song, feeling out the chords of each number with disciplined fingers.

The bass, as we all know, is the soul. It is the chain of mountains in the misty background. It flows along with the ease and strength of a river. There are no frets on the classic stand-up bass. The finger placements define the sound on a microscopic level, and each note is just slightly different each time it is played. The bass drives the tides of emotion beneath a song. It can be fast and clever, or slow and patient, but it will always be cool, simple, contemplative.

I know their names, too. But there’s no need to talk about these things. The music is all in your head, anyway. Remember, they don’t have arms.

There wasn’t any music in my car on the drive home from Wherever. I rattled along on the highway and could only hear crushing waves of vehicles blasting by my own. I stared at the red lights ahead of me until my eyes cracked.

I left the highway and steered my dreadnought in the direction of “home”. I parked and sat there for a long while. Eventually, I called my father.

I asked him for help.

It was the first time this had happened in many years. He seemed surprised and honored and saddened to hear from me. There was a tremendous amount of emotion in his terse sentences; he felt a lot all at once. I said I felt nothing. He seemed to understand this.

I told him, pointing, though he couldn’t see, that I was sick of my neighbors and their enormous television. Their living room flashed in dead bursts of radiation. It made me sick. “Look!” I thought, still pointing, still just a voice on the other end of the phone. “Look at how disgusting all of this is!”

I told him that they never turned it off; they watched television, as far as I knew, every hour of every day.

Though I didn’t mention this, I thought about it: the first night they moved in, I welcomed them to the neighborhood. I said, “Welcome!” and a few other words that were appropriate and friendly. They stared at me with ice-bucket-cold hatred. My voice trailed off. They stepped inside and watched television.

Is this what it’s all about?, I wondered to my father, who seemed subdued by my melancholy. He replied with brilliant words. I felt a single, tremendous beat of the organ in my chest; it reverberated off of everything in between me and space. There was a lot of empty room in there; I was, after all, hollow.

And am I now just as well, I wonder!

I said good-bye and ended the conversation when I’d been adequately filled with energy. I hung up when I felt like I were able to blink again.

When I stepped inside the house, I bent over to keep a little friend of mine from running out the door. My head grazed the door frame. I felt a tiny slice creep across my head like a laser beam. I put an open palm on my swirling-sleepy head and brought it close to my eyes, which were beginning to blur and quiver with hollowness. My hand was covered in blood. I rinsed the gory mess from my hair and felt nothing.

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.