doldrums

nothing to do. while the white world outside lays still. tap fingers, move toes. crack neck and cough and swallow. drink orange gatorade. smoke a bowl of fine grape diesel. tick off seconds on the clock. what's next what's next. if you don't think too hard about it it'll happen. if you don't think. a watched pot does not boil. boils slower. seems to. anyway.

i get asked by this girl i work with. tell me a story, she says, and she doesn't want me to tell her a story like Tom Nero. she wants a funny, sick, perverse or entertaining tale. she wants a blockbuster and i want to tell arthouse. she asks me what i'm reading and i tell her it's Ulysses. she has never heard of it. i show her some and she shakes her head. her forehead abruptly furrows downward. she doesn't know. doesn't much care.

so there too. standing. wasting time while the people chew contentedly. chew and drink. masticate and gorge. margarita, glass of water. rocks - no salt. most people don't say rocks, but this one did. says it so quick it's like a little switchblade coming out of her mouth. her companion - middle-aged, barn coat, wisping white hair and aviator-frame bifocals - purses his jowls (or tries) and orders a non-alcoholic beer. she is agitated. fingers and toes, tapping. biting around her nails, the skin, tugging with first her dextral incisor, then the sinistral. her eyes lock on the old man. he is full of rheum and coughs like a bellows. i have the image of Stephen Dedalus and his room full of students in my head. discussing the Pyrrhic victory. it is not easy to read James Joyce in that room. i try anyway. once i even lay it out so that someone can see. this is vain and causes me to turn gray on the inside, just slightly, and later out of guilt tuck it away. ashamed.

a cigarette, every hour. more standing, close-mouthed, but at least i'm outside. i like the cold. relish it. the gradual numbing of my ungloved fingers, the sting of an impish wind lashing at my bare face. some people walk eyes down, neck bent, hooded and gloved. older folk do. walk slowly over grayed-out rises of ice and tamped-down snow, clutching to one another as though they were enduring their own private earthquake.

she laughs at me and tries to rile me up while we are in that stasis of customers. we lean against the station and keep our eyes on our tables. she tries to tickle me but i'm not ticklish. she whispers, low, menacing, in my ear, "fuck you." but i can't help it and i laugh. she could mean it. she could hate my guts. but it's unlikely. i drift into an alternate world where what i fear is real and unravel the consequences and ramifications. it is entertaining for a second but ultimately i abandon it.

they say only boring people get bored. i have heard that humans are the only thing to experience boredom. some people glamourize it and give it a stage name: "ennui," or "accidie." which makes it sound less banal, i think. a tinge of Keats in the sound. a fragile sigh.

it is a slow night and the bartender's been playing cannonball adderley for a while now. it's pleasant. there is a dull uproar which swells and falls like waves from the intoxicated crowd at the bar. they are all friends, or at least, they seem to be. the roar and thud and smash of the kitchen, a tumult of frenzied activity. i imagine it as a pit of wild dogs, all howling and snarling and raging against their short chains. i know that this is hyperbolic but i enjoy the image anyway. i am aware of every sound. when the hush of closing sweeps the floor, we carry out our duties. fill the sauces. called 'marrying' them. replace the napkins, switch the menus. i am tired and so is she. we can - both of us - taste the alcohol sparking in our mouths, feel it white-hot in our skulls.

we will turn the lights up and do one last sweep. sit in a makeshift counting-house, multiply and subtract and divide.

end up drunk and high and white-faced in the yellow wash of the desk light. enumerate all the things i could be doing but which i am not. not just in this one night, no. in my whole life. from now to finish. feel like an elastic band and can see one in my mind's eye, collapsing, tautening, collapsing again. then the deluge of exhaustion, tumbling down like Jericho. breath suddenly deeper, as though my body's pneumatics are forcing me to sleep, urging, inveigling. one more cigarette. standing. thinking. the muffled tick of my shitty watch, sharp and martinet-like in the dark. the stars above and their vague intimations. standing in the gray waste of days-old snow and thin, brittle tree-branches. count the bricks on the building in front of me. put the cigarette out. return indoors. sleep. always, at the end, sleep.

bees

last night i dreamed i became a beehive. i moved in and became a beehive in your house, and you were horrified at the stench - the sweet cloying stench. we lived by the sea, but the salt water did nothing to combat it. i was about to burst, and you ran away crying. in the old wooden house by the sea. my cracked & swollen face gave birth to a thousand angry bees.

yesterday, while sitting out smoking a cigarette, i came upon the conclusion that what i thought has been a noble pursuit up until now has actually been not only detrimental to my life & the pursuit of happiness (as it were) but also, in the right light, is twisted, ugly, and ignoble.

everything online tells me that dreaming of bees is good luck. reversal of fortune. somehow i am disinclined to believe it.

someday soon, oh someday soon, i'm going to lose all of my teeth & all of my money & all of my friends & everything i own & i will be itinerant, peripateic around the edges of everything until the fire that's raging at the heart of everything finally makes its way to the outskirts & finds my corpse.

cheery today, aren't we.

April: bastard daughter of February

chill, damp april. gray veils rushing back in over the sun, as though the sky is embarrassed to have shown it so early. a spatter of rain last night. the asphalt glistens before seeming to suspiciously disappear, except for the sheen from the streetlights. in a surprise verdict, i am sent home early from work. i spend the night lounging in a green stupor before the television. it is all mindless. i investigate the more absurd corners of this glowing world: so-called 'reality' programs, game shows, a truly terrible movie, cartoons, even the news. the news, i find, is the worst of all of it. sensational headlines. although one of them was merited: in our small town, two nights ago, an individual set fire to ten cars over the area of three to four blocks. some of the flames were so intense as to leap to buildings nearby, leaving twenty people homeless and most people (at four in the morning) awake to the shrieking sirens. E. is incredulous: this, all this, the work of one person? apparently he was down the block, setting more fires, as the sirens & lights filled the streets just behind him.

from that story, it's onto another house fire, this one fatal, killing a young man and gravely injuring his friend. from there, a murder, a killing. the weather, which is dramatically rendered in poor, halting, 3-D graphics. there is a wide swath of variegated green rushing across the lower half of the state.

morning: chilly. that kind of filtered gray light that still makes you squint. the air seems thin. i can feel it in my lungs - amidst the cigarette smoke, mucus, and god knows what else.

the cigarette abruptly undergoes a transfiguration. no longer am i holding a paper tube filled with god knows what else, suddenly i am injecting a white syringe deep into my throat. the needle curves, spitting noxious black liquid into the cushiony bottoms of my lungs. i hack & cough as a convulsive result to this grotesque image, and stare for a long time at the ash-end of the thing. a few seconds pass. i watch the smoke curl into the air, nearly invisible. the clouds become god's exhaust. i stub out the cigarette but make no commitments to quitting. just the vague, formless notion.

i watch the cat, curry, a plump patchwork lady, stare at a row of three birds on the curb. she is far enough away to ready herself for the pounce, eyes fixed on her target. the one on the end, i imagine. it hops a little stranger than the other two, looks smaller. the runt, i'm sure. curry's tail is lashing, deliberately, side to side. her hind legs are tensing - i can see the minute twitches of instinct running electric through her muscles -

i blink, and there's a brown dog, large, barking madly, skittering against a leash, and curry has bolted backward in a contortion of adrenalin, somewhere up & beyond me, to cower & quiver up on the second story porch. the dog is straining against the collar, chuffing, spittle at his jaws. i, being on the top of the food chain, can't help but laugh. there is no sign of the three gray birds on the curb. the dog's owner, or at least, the woman on the other end of the leash, is getting on in age, chiding the dog at the same time as reining him in. we make amiable chatter for a moment. i fill her in on the moment before. she tells me what happens from her perspective, which i imagine is a sudden jolt in the arms, followed by a stumble, a regaining of balance, and then that brief tug-o-war.

she moves on. curry is nowhere to be seen.

oh, yeah, and the IRS took my tax refund to pay for some of that, like, 20k i owe to various loan-places. i figure if i keep this up, say, at $250 a year in taxes withdrawn, i can pay off my debts in my eightieth year.

ha!

last night, too much to drink

back to camel lights? marlboros make my lungs hurt. i need to quit smoking.

THERAPIST
...I think, I think that you're...searching for something, and ... whenever you don't find it, you get frustrated and turn to using. or abusing."

ME
... it's funny ...

THERAPIST
What's funny?

ME
the prefix "ab" on the word "using" is the only thing making the word negative. the prefix "ab" means, away from. Away from using? Ab-use. Use away from.

THERAPIST
What does "using" mean, then?

ME
When you ... damn, it really is one of those words. When you.. um, are acquiring? No. Taking... Using .. see? damn. When you ... are trying to achieve something, when you're ...okay. Let's say: When you need to get to a goal, and something aids you. No - see, that's not it either.
(pause)
I don't know.

THERAPIST
So when you "ab"-use something, you're taking that thing's function and using it away from the goal.

ME
But... what is the goal?

THERAPIST
It's something different for everyone, isn't it.

********static*********

my dreams last night: the color red, predominant. red tongues, red walls. red dress on the red-eyed woman. firestone jewelry, glittering white fire. fire leaping out of the totaled car, leaping licking flames against the black skin of night - the girl with blood sliding like a hand down her face, half in, half out of the metal wreck. her dress had fallen over her body and i could see her cunt, now just another gory slash in the company of so many others. like a child with a pair of scissors snipping idly at a piece of paper. you know, to make a snowflake.

a party, a veritable gala. huge chandelier. big old house with a lot of people crammed into its foyer. the wings lay empty, almost eerily so. what would it sound like if there had been no house built there. in the middle of the forest.

someone at the party jumps off a cliff and splashes soundlessly into the sea. then they all start doing it. from my view on the third floor: penguins, hustling themselves off of an ice floe. the house inches closer to the edge, picks itself up and shuffles towards them in ashamed lemming-fashion. i run out of the room and try to escape before it hurls itself to the pitch-dark sea. i am successful, though by only a stuttering toe-hold on the edge of the cliff as it plunges down to the waves behind me. it's one of those instances when i feel that logically, i should have plunged with it, but because it is a dream, i allow myself to suspend logic and continue on living. most of the time in dream, i am a camera behind my own head. i am a brilliant cinematographer in my dreams: i work all the angles.

**************

plaid shirt to work tonight? warmish weather. maybe rain tomorrow. wash away the dirty snow. ryan says: "one more blizzard before spring, i guarantee it." he "grew-up-around-here." i said we should put a wager on what date the huge snowdrift in front of the museum would melt by. i was joking. there was no bet. but now i'll be watching.

big band of green and pink coming westward, crawling in on the edges of the radar like moss, vanishing, and doing it all over again. i am watching for green grass. i am on the lookout for that first warm day. the sun and the birds. the surrender of winter, snow plunging heedlessly from roofs and impacting the ground in huge heavy splashes. the thaw's begun, i'm waiting for the capitulation.

sometimes i feel inordinately crazed, of a sudden, spasming with fury, frenzy, and desperation - like a dog that's been poked one too many times with a stick. then i settle down and realize it's nothing.

such big words from such a little mongrel.

such dramatics, such histrionics, from such a little man.

it's a wonder people like me. i am unable to see how.

cigarette.