I am going to talk about comfort.

I’ve been thinking about comfort a lot, recently. It bubbles over this old man’s wormy mind.

And it squirms, it squirms. Lord, does it squirm. Maybe I don’t talk so much, these days, I don’t know. Maybe I’m mostly thinking.

Just who would I talk to, anyway? I don’t know! If I’m not in my tucked away in my fortress in the forest by the highway, I am in another place. And in that place, there isn’t a soul to talk to. Sometimes I talk to myself. It’s riveting!

But–

There are souls in this other place, this realm of education, sure, but none of them approachable. Running around doing things of self-important necessity.

When I’m in this place, it’s comforting in a mildly electrocuting sort of way. I blame the season. When I see my own reflection in the glasswork of a door I am about to open, it’s startling. It’s comforting, yes! — but in a different way than the place I inhabit. I see a person that I looked like, have always looked like. So much has been ripped and pulled from, rewired and flushed and worn down, built up again as a new creature. And to think! It has all taken place under the flesh and bones of one single individual, one that doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of anything . . . the creature that is myself. (And you as well, friend.)

What an unnerving series of events!

I haven’t been “home” in a while. I say this because this may the reason I am so devastatingly starved for comfort as of late. Or maybe it’s the season.

And it is Autumn, isn’t it?

It’s comforting.

But like so much of this curse that sticks to my brain like chewing gum, I see only the raincloud over all of it.

The leaves look beautiful, all red and yellow and orange — but this means the temporary death of the tree.

I am in my grandmother’s house, and I think, sadly, How much longer will this place exist as it has always existed?

I am running out of time.

I question the utterance of such a thing, but if I am to be honest with myself (and thank you for that, Ryan (no problem, Ryan)), I will say here in this place that on more than one occasion my car has found itself parked in the middle of my high school parking lot with all of the windows down, no matter the crispness of the air of cruelty of the wind, Perfect Music slithering out of decade-old sound system. In this place I am shell shocked and spooky-minded. It’s feels so subtly perverse.

I do this because I can see everything.

A word on my memory, before we continue: I am, to some degree, obsessive compulsive. It’s a lovely curse. Sometimes I am angry at it. I am, sometimes, obsessively angry at it. I am obsessively ironic about it!

I catalog everything. It’s all up there. I have an incredible memory. It is not a gift! As I have said, it is a curse more than anything . . .

I have a deep-dark mind. It’s full of sounds and pictures and shapes. When I am in a place where these sounds and pictures and shapes were first cataloged, I can replay them like stop-motion nightmares. I can watch events take place in that parking lot, envision memories in that building.

And so I park my car in this place, sometimes. I let the films play out until the reel catches on fire, and I collapse into a fever dream.

This fever dream occurs roughly three-hundred-and-sixty-five times a year.

Just the other night, in fact, I found that my abilities had been strengthened to a godlike, intrusively intimate degree. It was disastrous. I lay there in my winter bed, piled under a two-ton load of cotton and feathers, picturing kaleidoscope details layered upon lollipop details. Disgustingly specific days popped into my mind like bacteria. I was in-between-sleeping for two hours! Lord Almighty, what a night. I woke up and wondered where I was, and why I felt sluggish and full of saw dust and bad feelings.

I felt goop-y and yarn-y. I unraveled into adult sleep. I woke up and did what every human being does every single day: nothing. Or, if that makes you feel bad about the false sense of accomplishment that you have perhaps endowed yourself with because That’s What You’re Supposed To Do: I woke up and did a lot of things that ultimately do not mean anything at all.

I felt very little of anything!

I thought of everything.

Today I was sitting in my oversize windowsill, thinking of things that I had been thinking about in the weeks before. I simply haven’t had any time to spend a good hour pondering nonsense.

It was the perfect opportunity to do so: It was Friday.

It had been a perfect Friday, too, because I wasn’t required to do anything with my mind or body that I didn’t want to happen.

A moving truck had backed into a space next to the vehicle that I have driven tens of thousands of miles in. I thought of some of those miles. They had been good ones, those miles.

My neighbor was moving. I have seen his face only twice. The first time was when he came to my door and asked me, of all people, why there weren’t any parking spaces. I pointed to my then-neighbors across the street, a loathsome pack of stinking corpses who were able to speak and walk around, as if they were human beings with identities and lives. It was miraculous. I hated every single one of them.

The second time, I saw him standing half-naked in his living room watching cartoons. The blinds were open. I shrugged and read my mail.

He’s in his mid-thirties, drives a Mercedes. He’s a nice enough man, maybe.

Anyway: The movers were doing things of little surprise to me; they moved things that had been accumulated by just one human being.

It boggles the mind, how much shit we can afford.

One of the movers, a jack-toothed man in a paint-smeared hooded sweatshirt, he held in his hand a stand that one would presumably holster a Christmas tree in.

My neighbor, the underwear-wearing cartoon-watching Mercedes owner, is a mid-thirties professional who hates not having a parking space. He never brings women home, doesn’t have any chocolate-bar-munching little creatures imparted with half of his genetic makeup living with him. He’s all alone in this big black world, content to barely clothe himself for the benefit of his owl-eyed neighbors. And he has a Christmas tree stand.

I pictured him buying a Christmas tree for himself, pictured him decorating it with lights and singing bells. He must of known, just as I do now, that gifts weren’t going to materialized under that tree at the end of December, yet he put up a tree nevertheless. It felt good to him. It felt comforting and nice and warm.

Something about that made sense to me. I felt like hugging him, if he were fully clothed when this happened. It was such a human thing to have that Christmas tree stand. And here I trumpet the inevitable doom of my species, yet so weighted and breezy am I with the idea of a piece of plastic that keeps a tree upright.

I’m going to write something this week about how every person and every event in human history has been completely pointless in the grand scheme of everything. Yet so very few feel this way! I’m digging into the core of the planet on this one. You may end up feeling worthless. Please anticipate it! I say this because maybe the Christmas tree isn’t comfort to him (we must guess alternative motives, after all, if were are to be true sociologist wizards). Maybe this Christmas tree is something he feels like he has to have, in which case I do not relate to him at all. I have spent many tens of months removing all of the dog shit from the life. Why do I celebrate this inane holiday? Why am not drinking everything out of the carton? What can I do to reduce the percentage of my life that is made to be miserable over the circumstances of stupid people whom I used to be well acquainted with?

When I had answered all of these questions, I was two-hundred-and-sixteen pounds lighter, so to speak, and living under reasonable circumstances. I also ended up friendless, though best of all, retired in my twenties. So, it all worked out in the end.

Though I am fascinated still with this idea of comfort.

The tower at the top of my palace is a museum of happy events that have been scarred by black vines, though I appreciate the feeling of the place. It reminds me, constantly, that I used to exist before the moment I inhabit now. I need this reminder, no kidding. Sometimes I hallucinate, and I’ll swear that I passed my mom at the gas station. Three days ago I nearly crashed the mobile bomb that I pilot to this place of education that I attend, because I thought that Death was walking across a field toward me. It ended up being a woman wrapped in black rags and cloth, and maybe that was a hallucination, too, I don’t know. She ended up not being interested in my activities, anyway, so there’s that.

The thing is, if I don’t have anything to comfort me, I literally begin to lose my mind, and my face becomes a swirling snowy plane with two dripping black smears for eyes. As I have said, I’ll see it in a reflection, and it’s downright scary when I can’t identify with the boyish face staring back at me, eyes dripping and dropping with big black streaks.

Maybe I should see a doctor!

For now I will sleep under cotton and feathers . . . Should my new-found time-traveling abilities comfort me in my sleep again, you’ll be the second to know.

And in these nighttime thoughts I will consider whether or not I feel comfortable with a tree in my living room. Am I doing this because I’ve always done this, or do I anticipate any real pleasure being derived from the presence of a needle-bearing evergreen coniferous in the ballroom of my starlit palace?

One season at a time, old man. There are still trees outside the palace, I am sure, and they cling still to their variegated leaves like sweaty lottery tickets.

. . . hm.

It’s starting to get frightening.