It hardly feels like spring. The wind has not stopped howling and screaming, and the highway is a ceaseless source of screeching and “haaaaaaaaaah”ing. Cars and trucks rocket down the highway on their way away from here. All I can hear — all I can ever hear — is the sound of people leaving the direction of my home. I want to go. I sleep at night and it sounds like a sad ocean, roaring and hissing. I wake up and I want to go. I want to get up and go.

My ear is bleeding.

I should be reading novels. It is that witching hour of novel-reading for me. I have with me here the plates I held food on not an hour ago. It was the same meal I consume every night at this precise hour: toasted cinnamon raisin bread with peanut butter on top and a bowl of apple cinnamon oatmeal. I wash it down with just-hot-enough green tea. I just barely burn my lips and throat as it twists around in my stomach and makes me feel calm and happy, but not too happy; I feel just-happy-enough. It’s not a lot of happiness.

It’s dark in here. I have only one light on. Nothing about this place feels swirling or haunted, just sleepy. It’s a sleepy place. I don’t feel sleepy. I’m wearing headphones and listening to silent musicians pluck and pick at their instruments. They don’t need to use their voices. I’m using my own to fill in the silent spaces, right here with you. I’m not thinking about anything, just stringing together sentences like it were the best possible use of my time. It’s okay. I like being here, writing these things. I don’t ever say a whole lot, I just write and write. That’s okay. It doesn’t bother me any.

I keep hearing that traffic, keep wanting to leave. It hardly feels like spring. Forty-five fucking degrees outside, and May is nipping at my heels. May is Saturday. Saturday is a day I don’t want to happen — not yet. Because then comes Sunday, and after that Monday. Another God damned Monday. Soon enough we’ll be right back to Thursday morning. God, Thursday morning. Are you kidding me? I’ve got another of those to make it through? Early Thursday morning. Thursday morning is a back-breaking killer. Whenever the day goes from Wednesday to Thursday, it means a long day. I don’t like long day that are long because I am preoccupied with with things I do not want to be doing. It’s almost time. I could sleep, and I should, but I won’t. Going to sleep means that it will finally be Thursday. Thursday morning means we’re slipping into Thursday. I put up with this day because it means Thursday night will show up at some point. No one ever expects me to be anywhere on Thursday night — or Friday (all of Friday) for that matter. That’s why Thursday night is great. But then there is the whole issue of Saturday, which is just behind Friday. Saturday means it’s almost Sunday, and Sunday means it’s almost Monday. This is exhausting.

I keep hearing that traffic, yes . . .

I have overcome irrational urges. I don’t do them, but I want to. I have an urge to follow the traffic wherever it is going, which is someplace else.

I really ought to put everything in storage and go away for a while. This self-imposed exile shit is shit. I am referring to the life I’m currently living. I have great friends (they’re made of paper and I read them and keep them on shelves), though, man, I want to go. Every time I visit my hometown, it feels so strange. I liken a trip to Virginia to being locked inside of a toy store overnight: at first it’s very fun, then it’s sort of creepy, and finally it just feels really sad and weird. I keep wanting to call for an adult to let me out. I feel like that a lot.

I should be doing push-ups.

Or reading this stack of novels (friends) I have. I want to fucking eat these books. But then, there’s that hissing of traffic again, forever swooshing down that long stretch of infinite highway, going and going . . .

You know:

Andy Warhol once said that he’d always felt he was watching television instead of living. When a gun-toting, man-hating psychopath blew a hole in his chest, he knew he was definitely watching television. Andy? Are you out there? Can you help me?

I have considered that maybe I need something — a bullet in the chest, maybe (this appears to work) — to confirm my suspicions: I’m just watching television. Maybe I’ve been reading too many philosophical texts on meaning and duty and feeling like such things are arbitrary and funny, even. Rolling that God damned boulder up the hill just to watch it roll down again. I haven’t been feeling like a free agent much lately, just an insect. I’m just a twerp, buzzing and whirring. I am no more distinguishable from a stupid-for-hunger insect than I am a human being who supposedly can do things, if he wants to. I want to, but I’m not moving. Why is that? The road would take me to New York City, if I wanted it to. I could go to Maine. Boston isn’t so far away. Why don’t I go there? I’d just end up feeling like a jerk, that’s why I don’t go. I’d sleep in my car in a parking lot and wish I’d stayed at home to write a bunch of pathetic stuff to put on the internet. I want to build campfires and walk down city streets. Right now, I’m just an insect in a pond, floundering and swearing at God.

And I do apologize for those harsh words, God.

God? Are you out there? Can you help me? (And is Andy Warhol with you?)

The channels switch, said Andy, but it’s all television.

It’s all television.

I really should be reading a book or pumping blood into my muscles.

Damn ear is bleeding. It’s okay, though. I don’t feel anything, anyway.

There was a thorny acoustic post-party soundlessness as the midnightmare jam session found itself flat against a wall of brick prisms. But this was no ordinarily functioning set of soundless moments. All over it was solid double-barreled rubber gasoline silence, and their fumbling minds filled it to the foaming glassy brim with fluffy burning garbage thoughts and cave cricket dreams. Violence dripped from their quaking lip-muscles in globs of thick mahogany bark to splatter on shaven bowling-alley wood floors, forming fractals of fungus and Cartesian graphs of the quality of fiberglass existence habits. Smoke curled in ghost breaths around the rotation of drunk ceiling blades. There were blank concrete walls with windows flown off to dance in the air millions of miles high. No gaps in this humanatural rock face. No entrances to be seen and one exit only.

Someone was running on the carpet walls. It was audible and terrifying, but it wasn’t worth their eye twitching. Only one object demanded their visual capacities to a degree worth humoring. It was a funnel of blue and black, promiscuously vacuuming the room of all bits of dust and debris and sloppy grape-skin and peanut shell casings. Clock hands bent around its rotating contours like I-beams of red hot radio towers, and bubbles of wolf-candy flesh were beginning to escape the faces of the persons who sat in brooding, rocking-chair amazement around the swirling vortex of nothing and all.

The pretzel tracks of train yachts began to assume shape out of the unfurling veins of moisture left in the atmosphere, and at the final echoing tick of the second hand possible to take them where they were not sure if they desired to go they made their decision, and they boarded those heaving locomotive monstrosities which bore them down under heaps of furry coal and across the border of the spinning cosmic volcano rift that had for reasons best left dumpster hidden spontaneously manifested itself in the midst of their grungy jail basement. As they first passed over the spherical spectrum horizon there were the flowing sensations of milk and flower petals swiftly carving soft terraces in the salt of their memories. Then this fume liquid was borne away by the vegetable winds of the underworld and their pasts stuck out like fresh lash welts, and it burned as nothing else ever could.

This was the gritty feeling that crunched underhoof for the remainder of their gruesome and mesmerizing tournament of adventures: rusty weather balloon memories deflating in purple sadness in the upper ionosphere crouched with painful potential behind drifting cauliflower scabs, all steamrolled into view by a scowling white blizzard flare held aloft without purpose of being so.

Deep in my pocket I carry the key to your heart. Everywhere I go I can reach in, and my fingers will be met with cold, jagged steel, and I will remember us. My first time was with you. I pray my last times will be with you. An insect, sleek and efficient. A chess master, calm and ingenious. A lioness, elegant and powerful. You are all that and more, and you know it with a humble knowing that rumbles deep inside you like a caged typhoon. The darkness is cut and cut through by your eyes, and the fog is thickened by your silent gaze. I guide you with a practiced and loving hand, and together we sail through night and day like a winged chariot. My thoughts are caught in the music that sings through your insides, and my ideas and my stories bounce again and again off your windows until they become one, and one secret. I build the banks with filthy hands, and you glide between them, the river of my dreams. Blue as all the ocean was in ages long gone by, the sun skips off your curves and shrinks in jealousy. The spin of your wheels is the purest of dances.

In the languages of ancients, your names were Flow, Swift, Rebellious, Violent, Strong, Rain, Primordial Water, and Sacred. Danube, I have loved you until I created in you a soul, and I will love you until the world has taken from me mine.

My God! Am I to slavishly write down every instance of supposed higher thought that whirls around in my head — every  “pop” and “blurp”, as it were? That’s how I’ve been feeling, anyway. I . . . don’t know what else I’m supposed to be doing with my time. Though, I will say that today has been one of the most productive days in recent memory, by which I mean to communicate that I didn’t do nothing.

I read a good chunk of a novel, for one. That always feels like a satisfying way in which to walk sullenly with Father Time. I’m expanding my vocabulary! That’s one way of looking at it, huh? You know, I catalog every new word I come across in a little notebook and look them all up later. I test myself on these new words for days. It’s the most exciting thing I ever do. I ain’t even kiddin’ when I say that when I’m jotting down wonderful new words and memorizing their parts of speech and definitions and all that, I am not at all envious of any one person doing any other thing on this planet. I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. I have said in the past that I have laughably cheap hobbies; I wasn’t kidding, was I!

Just the other night I had an attractive dinner with some of my few remaining friends. I had a vegetable entree with a sizable portion of rice and fried mushrooms and so on. As my friends spoke, and I listened (though I did some of my own speaking, to be sure), the discussion eventually circled the idea of grammar. I’m not sure why this was. Anyway, the friend to my immediate right was quick to inform me that she hated grammar, and had never bothered to learn it in her many years of schooling. Or, rather, she’d never been taught grammar. I told her, sister, I love grammar — especially syntax. She looked sort of ill when I said this — as though it were a vulgar thing to say. Maybe it was, I don’t know. She later complained about the garlic butter that had been used to sear her dead cow, though am I to really believe that my adoration for linguistic structure and word order was to blame for her supposed repulsion of what she assumed would be an appetizing way to produce energy in her body? I have much more pressing issues to concern myself with, so I’m just going to let this mystery alone.

I did a lot of novel-reading on this recent excursion — the very same one that lead me to dinner with ancient acquaintances. When the moon roared to life in the warbling black sky, I did so as well. I did this by doing the only other thing I ever do (when I’m not reading novels): I road my bicycle. I saw a snake and little rabbits and deer and everything. The snake was dead; he’d been hit by a careless automobile driver. I, on the other hand, was able to deftly zip around the corpse of my would-be fallen friend, and would have been able to do so just as nimbly if he’d been alive and not a corpse at all. I stopped to take a picture of the creature. This was before I knew it was dead. Once I examine the picture, I noticed the subtle gore on the snake’s underside. I did my best to send the snake off to wherever it is that the roadside deceased go off to, but I don’t think I did a very good job.

I pedaled up and down massive slopes of earth. I sucked in country air through my teeth. I gurgled icy water and pumped my leg muscles until they melted into taffy. I went to old places and thought of old things. My God, it was torture, going back to those old places. And here I am trying to drag myself out of those somber daydreams and into whatever it is that I’m going to do with myself for the next however-long-it-is-I-survive, and I was pedaling like a psychopath right back into my old thoughts. I can’t tell you how dark and cramped they’ve gotten. My mind houses many prostitutes, let me tell you. I hop in and out of time periods whenever I’d like with no apprehension or guilt. It’s getting to be really quite troublesome. Maybe I shouldn’t have ridden my bike to the arenas of my bygone existence, but I did. Oh, God, did I ever.

I returned home from my dinner affair and nostalgic spelunking to find a bed made up for me on the couch in my father’s basement. He — my father — once told me that he slept like a little child whenever he took a nap at his parents’ house. I found this to be the case as well. It was the first time I’d slept in my father’s house in almost four years. Mind you, I had, at one time, lived out my formative years in this very basement. But this place, though technically the very same location in space, was a very different place that night in some unspeakable way. It felt like the warm, cavernous dwelling that I’d once loved, only it wasn’t my warm, cavernous dwelling any longer. And just how in the fuck am I supposed to hold up my shambling body and hoist the twisted mess into the future if I’m still having thoughts like this!, is what drifted through my foggy head just before losing consciousness. I spent the next eight hours in an ethereal bubble. It was the best sleep I’ve had in four years; it was the sleep that children sleep. I hadn’t been a child in some time, is the thought I awoke to. I didn’t feel like moving or doing whatever it is that the non-dead do. I wanted to stay there and meditate on my springtime dreams, for this is the time of year when my dreams are the most informative, interesting, horrifying and realistic. My father called to me from upstairs, asking if I wanted tea, and later breakfast, and later anything I could ever desire. It was a nice thing to have happen to me, which is to say that I was thought about.

I turned down his charity and dressed myself in the dark. A long afternoon glanced through the windows and invited me to drain my head in the backyard. My bicycle waited patiently in the garage for nighttime to take over the sky.

You can’t always just go home. My home moves, and sometimes I can’t tell where it is. I haven’t been able to tell for a long time. I miss being so sure of myself. But if I had kept walking around like I trusted everyone, things would have turned out even worse than they have. I’m driving now, and words are running through my head like ants through soil. My mind is consumed by the entrails of a single question. Am I running away from something, or to something?

The difference between the two is huge. If I run to, I have a goal and a path to reach that goal, and the will to execute the plan is established. If I run from, I have no fixed destination, I am only avoiding a destination. So this is where I think I am now: I am avoiding having a destination. The consequences of this practice are extreme, vengeful, and murderous. And yet, on this pathless trek, there is a large part of me, maybe the best part of me, that expects to find a hidden route underneath the map. One that doesn’t take you straight to a certain location, but instead drags you through old and new places indiscriminately, showing you the same problems paired with the same solutions until patterns emerge and an equation can be distinguished.

But an equation is not my destination. Answers are not my destination. There’s the alpha and the omega, and if placing your faith in both is what gets you from one to the other, than more power to you. But I can’t settle for that. I have to find faith in who I am, and where I am. Unlike the infinite, we perceive these variables constantly. But strangely enough I find it is more difficult to have faith in something I can see than something I cannot. The odds and ends on the other sides of my mortality I can easily believe. God created the world. I can see that happening. The world will end in a ball of fire. That’s plausible.

But my own life? Where did this come from? This carcass I’ve dragged through so many events, some tragic, some trivial, some deeply emotional, and after all of it I still wake up the same person. It amazes me every morning. All the memories start coming out, the dream fades away, but the dream now has context, it has a main character who has duties and hates and loves and ideas; thorny, smoky ideas exploding in his brain one after the other. And up until then, everything is alright. But there’s one last revelation I go through each morning. That main character is me. The actions and thoughts are mine.

It’s the kind of paranoia you might experience around new people. You’re worried that they might be judging you, talking about you behind your back. Your confidence wavers if you start caring and wondering if they like you. But what if that stranger was yourself? You worry, do I like me? Then me replies, well I’m not sure, do I?

So do I like me? More often than find the answer when I look in the mirror, I become aware of a deeply rooted confusion. As if the me inside is at odds with the me in the mirror. But duality is boring. Duality is wrong. I am the one in the mirror, and although thinking may classify me as being, it does not classify me as anything else. Doing is what makes it real, what solidifies us between the alpha and the omega, and between each other as human beings.

I’m sick of jumping through hoops. The hoops of others I quit a long time ago, but the time has come to quit the hoops I’ve made for myself. I’m tired of the absolute. Nothing is absolute, none of the things I care about. I’ll find my way back into my body, and find my way back into my love of life, and somewhere in that love will be the holiest shrine of who I am, and I will bring my enemies as burnt offerings to its altar, even if they be pieces of myself.

I might not be back tonight. But keep the light on for me, in case I find my way home.

The man stood with the boy on a green, green stretch of land where trees and insects and furry animals and wonderful music resided. They surveyed the slope of the planet, and whispered quietly on where to build a simple structure. The purpose of their labor — and indeed, their very presence in this place — was to create a permanent shadow on a small section of the green, green stretch of land they lived on. There meals might be eaten, and old stories might be told.

The big red star in the sky was gentle that day, and provided light without stinging pain. From the forest came gusts of wind, which delighted the trees and insects and furry animals. The man and the boy were just as happy to hear and feel the wind, were overjoyed to be wrapped in the cool, snaking pockets of air that whistled through the leaves and kept perspiration from developing above their brows. They worked and worked.

The man told old stories, much as he would when the construction of their shadow-maker reached its conclusion, and the boy listened and laughed and felt happy and sometimes sad. There were stories about the boy when he was a much smaller boy, and he’d heard them many times before. Even so, there was an unusual freshness to the storytelling, and he was happy to hear them in that place, feeling what he felt, busy with his work. Spring, of all seasons, he thought, is a timeless one; its warmth often commanded the dust that had settled on his mind to stir and shake around. He felt wonderful and a little glum and awake and enriched and worn down and dizzy. Spring, he thought also, can make one feel many different ways at the very same time. He listened and listened.

And there were stories about learning colors at an early age (“My, how young you were! Just eight months on this planet and already dark blue had become distinguishable from just plain blue!”), stories about the other boys and girls who had lived and now lived away someplace else (“I miss them, I miss them! Every day I miss them–I do!”), stories about old friends — good friends — who now slept in the ground beside where the man and the boy did their labor (“Do you remember how she lifted her head that day — her very last day — and felt the last thing she’d ever feel on this planet?”).

The man and the boy looked at each other with bubbling eyes from which long-gone sorrow still encircled from time to time. The two of them turned to the old gravestone, which they’d both neglected to remember, despite being so close, and felt terrible for doing so. That is where she slept and would sleep forever and ever, they thought, and moving pictures flashed on the surface of their eyelids and danced along dusky paths of their tired minds. They dreamed and dreamed.

A friendly tree had stretched out its tiny arms above the old bricks and upturned earth where the little girl slept peacefully in the brown box they’d wrapped and placed her in many years before that day. “There’s our little girl, our little girl . . .” the man had managed to say on the day that she’d gone off to dream, on the day they’d entrusted the earth to watch over her for as long as the earth should exist.

“You remember that day, don’t you?” the man said to the boy now.

“Of course I do, Dad.”

The man and the boy were silent again. They turned to look at tiny patch of earth where she lay. A statue of a kneeling angel watched over the spot, hands forever clasped in quiet prayer as a languid breeze sailed through the trees, bringing with it the smell of lilacs. The small winds patted at the tree that covered the grave, and the big red star in the sky allowed spots of warm yellow light to flicker on the surface of the ground.

The boy lifted his head to catch the breeze, just as she had done so many years before. She would have liked this day, he thought. The man looked at the boy and smiled a sad smile for a long moment. His eyes were fathomless and full of joy and sorrow at the very same time. It was, after all, the season to feel many different things all at once. The man and the boy turned to their labor, still remembering old stories, still absorbing the warmth of the big red star. From then on, when the breeze roused them from their work, it would mean something different than it had before. They promised themselves to never forget why that was.

There are so many memories in cinnamon.

The taste is like the purging of illness or grime with a sharp pain, like the fizzing peroxide on your freshly scraped, bleeding knee from when you took that turn too fast on your bike and ate the gravel, or the aftershave searing your pores, cleaning them, like that time when you were so afraid to tell her you didn’t feel it anymore but then you told her and in one quick stride the deed was done and she was crying and you had already left, or the time you took her on your first date and threw a cinnamon stick in your mouth for good luck and good breath, and she thought it was funny or cute or something but really you just liked the taste and later you found out she liked the taste too, or the time when you had been chain smoking for weeks in an empty house and then your parents came home and you needed something in your mouth to chew on and it was the cinnamon sticks again, or the time you and your good friend were walking, long before he abandoned you because you didn’t want to become a Christian after his sister died, and someone came up and asked you what you were chewing on and your good friend told them it was a cinnamon stick, and told them about how you always chew on cinnamon sticks, and all you did was nod and keep walking, or the time when they pulled the splinter out of your thumb and it hurt like hell but then it was over so quickly, and the doctor with the kind face handed you the piece of wood that had caused you so much agony in a little orange pharmaceutical bottle and you took it home and looked inside the bottle and it looked like any sort of wood chip that could have been anywhere and if it weren’t for you running your hand on that billboard it would have been in the frame of the billboard, but it had somehow ended up under your thumbnail instead, and you took it home in that little plastic bottle and you opened the bottle and threw the splinter in the fire and in one little puff of smoke and memory it disappeared forever and you felt terrible about it later and you couldn’t sleep so well, or that time when you were on top of the church roof with the green tiles and the rock someone threw hit you square in the head and there was a moment of dullness, then sharp pain, then intense hatred for the boy who threw it even though he didn’t mean to hit you and you probably cried but you don’t remember, but the pain and the hatred were gone so quickly and then the ringing was in your ears for an hour or so and then it was fine, or the first time your mother bought you cinnamon sticks for your birthday and how she kept doing it after that, or the time that friend of yours who you used to go on aimless drives with for which you would usually just be silent and listen and that was what she liked about you, that time when she bought you a huge bottle of cinnamon syrup for Christmas, the kind they used in the coffee shop you two used to skip class and go to together, and just about every drink you had for the next month tasted like cinnamon, strong and hot and sweet like a holy fire consuming a field of sugar cane.

There are too many memories in cinnamon.

The boulders jutting out of the stream are massive and smooth. I hop from one to the other, a powerful elation flowing through me with each leap, each impact. For the rest of my life I will picture jumping between rocks in a river as a physical manifestation of heaven. I cross from one platform to the other as if they were put there for me. She crosses them more carefully, as if they are delicate or dangerous. She stands on one of the rocks and looks downstream. On either side of the flowing water the trees tower above the ferns like pagan totems. Our trail continues on the other side of the stream.

“I knew I should have brought my camera,” she says.

I tell her I don’t really like cameras.

“Why not?” she asks.

I tell her I like my own eyes better.

“But a picture of something like this is so valuable,” she said. “Look how beautiful it is. Don’t you want to remember it?”

I tell her I like how fleeting human memory is, or at least my own. How sometimes I forget whole days of my life and that’s okay. Or how I only remember a song or a color and it comes up again in a dream, and I wake up with a song in my head I’m not sure I have ever heard before. I tell her how I can look into a face I know very well and suddenly see it as if it is the first time seeing it, and notice new things, like how tired or kind a person looks.

“Don’t you want to remember this place?” she asked.

I won’t remember which rock or tree is where, which shades of green are on which plants, where the water is foam and where it is clear, where the path goes or why I am on it. But I will remember how it makes me feel. I tell her not to worry. I tell her I can’t forget anything. I tell her that the colors and the emotions of this moment will change me forever, and in that way I will always remember it, in every action or thought starting now.

“So really, you never forget anything,” she said, and laughed.

The day is too beautiful to discuss the full implications of such a thing. I let her go on about what angles she would use to capture the shafts of sunlight if she had her camera. Her voice mesmerizes me. Her tongue dances and rolls around each syllable. To me they are sounds, and not words. I let them sink into me. I feel them, like I feel the cool water rushing around my bare feet, like I feel the rustling of the tree branches up above, like I feel the browns and greens and grays of the forest around me, like I feel so far away from myself when I laugh or cry. The words are as foreign a language to me as the shapes of the clouds up above.

We walk on, and reach the uninhabited cabin we had set out for. We eat our lunch on rocks in the middle of a larger, slower river. I watch the insects skate across the surface of the water in quick spasms. There are too many miracles, here in the middle of the nowhere. It can overwhelm me.

After a while we walk back across the stones to shore. She sights a bright clearing deeper in the forest, and we work our way through the undergrowth toward the glare. We are blinded as we first stride into it, then our eyes adjust and we can see the small purple flowers held on spider-leg branches and the thick grasses and the blue of the sky.

With careful and silent skill, I have crafted myself into a safe haven of anonymity for all I see. A word or a color can sink as far into me as it ever can; it will find no meaning attached to itself. Just a current, an ambience, a holy lack of justification.

The warmth of the sun is on my face. I smoke my last cigarette under the redbuds, watching the bees scour the clusters of flowers on the branches. After a while I grow tired of souring the spring wind, and I grind the embers of tobacco into the dirt with disgust. We lay out on the grass together as the bees gather nectar, and when the sun begins to sink between the folds of the Blue Ridge, we rise and walk towards home in the orange haze of afternoon.

Oof! Must I continue on with this languid narrative? I will admit that I have grown quite tired of me in the last year, as I imagine you have as well! That’s why you’ve all gone away, yes? I suspect that you’re not exactly present to answer that lonesome question.

I’m pulling this thing along at an ass’s pace, let me tell you. What a sorry rope that connects the two of us, my story and I. It’s practically drooping, sagging, dragging on the ground. But, practice, practice. I’m practicing for something. And it’s also good exercise, typing up all of this nonsense for absolutely no one in particular to read. Often when I meet up with old, old acquaintances, they feel compelled to have me know that they have not read a word of anything I have written in many months, and are dreadfully sorry to have to verbally confirm such a thing. I am, of course, no worse off hearing this, and am in fact delighted to know that they were an audience of mine, an audience at all!, at some point in time. Whether or not they will ever read anything I write again is never quite discussed, though it is assumed in the earnestness of their apology that they will, at some darksome hour of existence, drag their eyes across my ho-hum scribblings and pretend that it wasn’t the absolute worst thing they’d ever filled an hour with. I can only hope for such good fortune to come my way! Hooray, hooray!

So, much as I do every now and again, I am reaffirming the emptiness of this place. Puff. I’m expelling air, nodding my head: I am well aware! There are very few delusions in my life, however delusional though I am indeed. I am under the impression that this whole talking-to-myself-on-the-internet thing is simply a small affliction in the scheme of my greater illness. And there’s no need to be polite about it, friend: I am very ill. There are no delusions there.

Or maybe none of this is real at all? Hmm. What an interesting thought!

Oh, so, the narrative: today was Sunday, but it was one I was required to pay attention to.

Sunday is typically the day I acquire wealth in return for doing very little manual labor. I am, yes, paid fine wages to act as a chimpanzee might. It’s not a bad gig, I will have you know. As my recreation does not swell beyond quiet times with fantastic literature and hot beverages, I have very little need for money, as one might imagine. Sunday is, as we say, the day money is made — which is a real shame, considering it’s the Sabbath. I ask sincerely that the Lord not frown upon the arrangement of my activities. I am reluctant to do anything at all in the first place, and it just so happens that Sunday is one day that my sad occupations are kept at bay. Pity me, pity me.

This Sunday was Easter, which is an elusive holiday indeed. It’s always shifting about! I am not ever able to, as the Russians say, sit on Easter’s tail. So, it goes without saying (though I will say it, thank you very much) that I had completely forgotten the significance of this Sunday, this today, until someone told me that it’s important and that I would be wise to remember why. I hadn’t forgotten the relevancy of the day, I said, just what day I was supposed to remember is relevant in the first place! As it turns out, that day was today.

Families all over this fire-eating state had not forgotten what today was all about, I soon realized. I watched them eat their lunches and there were many hugs and lovely glances exchanged between happy members of happy families. I felt a little odd seeing all of this, as I have never once experienced even the slightest breeze of normalcy as far as families go. I have long-since accepted the idea, for instance, that I will never again see both my mother and father in the same room. And they’re both alive and kicking, at that. What a world I live in! I watched fathers hug and hold their twenty-something-year-old daughters like they were still little girls. It wasn’t strange to see at all. Grandparents were amidst the springtime holiday cheering, and it all looked so healthy. Though, to my warped, rained-on, left-to-die mind, this seemingly normal behavior looked downright puzzling. I will be the first to admit that the idea of a happy family coming off as something twisted and foreign to my thoughts is just a little sick. However, I will remind you that, delusional though I may be, I have already pointed out that I have an illness. We can attribute these discolored thoughts to that belching sickness that lives on inside of me.

I, of course, dismissed my callous thoughts and at once felt whatever good is left in me burble in my empty chest and exit as a hushed little noise through my nostrils as I did what it is I am paid to do, which as I have stated previously, is nothing that a chimpanzee would find at all too taxing to accomplish. I must have had a distant look in my otherwise swamp-murky eyes, because I was eyeballed by the happy families as a mild curiosity. Just what is that boy thinking about, they perhaps thought, and why is he spilling water all over the God damned floor?

It was true: my meandering, choppy thoughts led me to perform my duties poorly. I couldn’t even manage a straight pour. How knotted up I was! How I searched internally for signs of life. How I wished for a cohesive family unit.

And just what is Easter to me now? I am sad to report that it is Sunday. What Easter was in the long ago, I don’t know exactly. I recall wearing uncomfortable clothing and receiving baskets colored every pastel shade imaginable. I am reminded now how much I enjoyed thrusting my little hands in the plastic green hay that lined my virgin-white basket, unearthing every last little chocolate egg with my curious fingers. And just who gave me that basket? At the time, it was a friendly spirit that appeared in the spring and left colorful gifts for little children. This spirit was, of course, my family. That spirit evaporated a long time ago.

Unmask yourself, Easter Bunny! I shout today. Unmask yourself and have lunch with me on a Sunday that is different from all other Sundays. I would very much like to eat with you. We don’t need to argue or bicker or dismantle the importance of our relationship. If it mattered to you, you’d say something to me. Say something, dammit! Everyone else gets to wear uncomfortable clothing and share meals with their Easter Bunnies.

I–oh. It’s this illness of mine, I swear. I should close my eyes and my mouth as well. We’ll all be healthier, that way. It’s Monday, now. No need to worry about yesterday. Has the day really ended already? Oh, well. There are many Sundays to look forward to until this one rolls around again, whenever that is. Easter, you heartless brigand! I will find and enjoy you yet.

Jiminy Christmas! I got a bicycle!

I have yet to name it. I’m also not certain of its gender, if it even has one.

Okay, enough with the cute stuff. Although, if you don’t mind, I’m going to continue talking about my bicycle. “My bicycle” is such an extraordinary thing for me to be able to say, finally. It makes me feel like maybe it wasn’t so bad that my parents haphazardly decided to procreate more than two decades ago. (My, my — the time.)

I first encountered this exact bicycle — this magnificent device of self-propulsion — about a year ago, when I stayed with my dear cousin in his sprawling rural estate in the fog of summer. His parents and my aunt and uncle were vacationing all over this grand country of ours, and I was invited, quite warmly, to drive and drive until I reached this cousin of mine. The plan was to say things to each other, be in the presence of one another. I had not done this with any notable human beings (outside of my immediate acquaintances, that is) in some time. I was delighted, even excited, to be able to do this. We were both adults! It was the first time that had ever happened before.

We’re getting to the bicycle, yes, but I want to quickly say that I slept on the couch in the dim comfort of the basement, much as I have for the past decade and then some. A lot had happened in that basement before I settled there last summer, though things had certainly changed, people had left, some had vanished, and that room was just a room where a lot of somethings had once happened, long ago, and probably wouldn’t ever again — at least, outside of my soundless slumbering, which, if I may be candid with you, I hope will continue for at least another few years (one can only pray).

How precisely temperate it was down there! I was saddened at first to be surrounded by old art projects and cities made out of Lego bricks that my dear, dear cousins (and few remaining friends) had made so long ago, which still exist down there like a capsule of childhood warmness. We had grown up, the little boys had gone home. Oh, how dreadful to think upon this! I settled down on the couch and thought of all of the birthday parties and Thanksgivings and Christmases and chance tomfoolery that had taken place in that small space. It had gone away, gone away. And I sat there scratching the stubble on my face — the sound of grizzled hair protruding from my chin and cheeks a reminder of the ever-moving minute hand, and of manhood, and of being lost in one’s own body.

I settled down with my creature comforts — in this case, cotton pants for easy living, and a portable glowing box where fantasy was made possible on command. I was sucked in to fantasy. Eventually I slept, much as I always do, and something rare happened to my brain: it dreamed. Oh, did it ever. I thought of that room some more. How tortured I was! The undulating sadness awoke me from memories of little boys being little boys, and I found myself in the very same room where my dreams had taken place, a solitary man with hair growing out of his face. I rubbed my hand across my chin and felt the burn of being alive, of being a man, and of being a man who is alive and hadn’t shaven in several days.

My cousin, then just become a man, approached me, a man, and said something about riding bicycles. I thought that sounded fantastic. I hopped on an old mountain bike and dragged it down the road while my surprisingly nimble blood-relative zipped along like he were swinging from clouds. We road into town and had a swell time. People looked at us and whispering things to each other. As a new bike owner, I have come to understand that this is a common thing. People look and talk to each other, eyes still fixed on you, grins unfurling like shoe strings, as though it were God damned entertaining.

There was something going on at my cousin’s sprawling rural estate later that night — people were arriving, friends, I wager, to sit around and do what it is that teenagers do — so we road home. I asked him, “May I ride your bicycle?” It was a slick little thing, jet-black and starving. He said, of course, go right ahead. And there were people on the way, so he stayed behind. Anyway, I wouldn’t have wished that mountain bike on him, so it was best I went in alone. And alone I went in!

What a fucking cobra that thing is. I was striking at the ground like a psychopath, riding through traffic and coasting along at enormous speeds. I did laps around the entire city, maybe three or four times. I must have clocked twenty miles at the end of my commute to Anywhere. Lord, what a bicycle!

Later on, people arrived, just as we’d been expecting, and I said some things to them, though I don’t think anyone bothered to listen, and hell if I blame them. I was a stinking onion, that night. Just some old guy with a three-foot ponytail (though, to be accurate, it was closer to a bun). I held a beer and played pretend — look at me! I’m just like you! That didn’t end up working out. That stuff tasted like hell. And anyway, all I wanted to do was ride that bike again. I wanted to cut through the atmosphere and end up in space. So, I put down that cylindrical container that housed the foulest of beverages and road away, away. I went another ten-to-twenty miles in the direction of enlightenment. I ended up on small town streets where people stared and giggled and whispered at my means of locomotion. I was unable to detect anything of particular comic value in my own movements, and so I left them to say whatever it is that people say while I tensed my muscles and smiled until my teeth dried out. It may have been all the endorphins being dumped into my bloodstream, I don’t know, but I decided then that I didn’t want to ever not be riding a bicycle.

When I left my cousin’s house the next night, it was raining so hard that all I wanted to do was curl up in that basement — oh, that basement, my little home, I thought — and drown in my pocket fantasy. I wanted to go someplace else and not leave that place. But I left, I did. I don’t know why. The thought of driving at night has always pulled me along, and so I was pulled along. It rained and rained. It was fat, heavy rain. It was rain that did not want me to drive.

When I got home, there were three paperback novels waiting for me. I’d forgotten that I’d ordered them the week before. I ate those books. They stood no chance in the shadow of my fathomless curiosity and thirst for something meaningful to do. I spent the rest of the summer reading novels. Without any friends left, novels were all I had to do. It felt like time well spent. And anyway, I made friends in my books. Fall came, and I walked around. I spent the whole winter sitting on the floor and pretending to be comfortable with my life. I forgot about that bicycle for a long while.

Until last week!

I had just completed a clinical trial for something or another, and was awarded with a check that would cover my entire bicycling investment. As I am a sad man living under enviable circumstances and hating every bloodless moment of it, the decision to purchase the exact bicycle that my cousin had all but let me go crazy on almost a year ago was a decision that took precisely three seconds to reach conclusion: I was going to buy that fucking bicycle. And I did, I did!

I have said in past, maybe, that when I do push-ups, I never need friends. Again, maybe we can shake the hands of the lovely chemicals that parachute into my system as soon as blood starts zipping through the tunnels inside of me. After all, the same can be said about the first six months of dating someone new  (this is science, okay): serotonin and dopamine levels are through the roof. That’s why dudes and girls become super attached to one another, and feel like they can’t live without one another: homemade drugs, brewed right inside the human body. So, the next time you think you really love your significant other (and you’ve only been together for so many months), think again! It’s all chemicals, man!

But this is different, I think! I really love this bike. Maybe more than any one person I can think of (that’s sort of a joke). This thing takes me places, and all I have to do is ask. And, shit, I’m doing half the work. Since I purchased it, I’ve ridden every single day — sometimes twice a day, no matter how cold it gets (and it’s been chilly, let me tell you), and no matter how black the night appears. On the contrary, I prefer to ride at night. It feels like tunneling through a starry dream. The chemicals and thoughts and feelings that flood my body are some of the best chemicals and thoughts and feelings that my body has ever had the pleasure to both produce and process — ever.

Any moment I feel overwhelmed by my lifestyle and the planet I live on, I just hop on the seat and laugh and laugh. See: I don’t put anything in my body that shouldn’t be there in the first place, and I sure as hell don’t watch television. So what am I to do! How do I “zone out”?

“My bicycle, that’s how,” is what I say, now. I even make my bicycle a how and not a what. This thing is a solution for everything, I tell you.

Soon, I think, I will link up with this cousin of mine, and we will ride our identical bicycles through small town city streets. I need a month or two to bulk up my quadriceps, that’s all! Already I can feel them gorging on blood and bad dreams. It’s such a wonderfully comforting feeling, feeding my thighs with crap I don’t want anymore. Eat up! Ahh!

Which is to say that, yes, I’m feeling a little woozy right now. My blood is being funneled to my legs, har har! It’s all this riding, I say. My legs are tired, my mind feels like soggy cereal. I will sleep until the question, “Is it all right to go outside and ride my bike?” is a thunderous “FUCK YEAH” from the heavens. I think that will be tomorrow! I go now to see to it that tomorrow happens faster than it is happening right now.