I Could Kill Us Both

It's Whatever.

I Could Kill Us Both

 

The human experience- a beautiful b*****d child of chaos and order, bent in all the right places, spent believing in the certainty of an uncertain moment that will never come, one that will change everything.  A miracle, prosperity, understanding, perfection, success, love- the pinnacle of a want so severe a child’s Christmas appetite couldn’t compare.  But it’s there, always, and that expectation in the end will remain only hope.  For we are otherwise too busy painting the uncertainty of the only certain moment we can be sure of, death, with the colors of a lullaby.  The question until then, one we all must answer is: who am I? this fleshy puppet, this orchid with lungs, this symmetrical being, me.

Me. Ha.

I roll the cigarette between my fingers and watch the smoke sink into the room, my pretty, pretty room.  It holds me; it’s the only thing that really knows me, that listens to me, that keeps my secrets and my self-abuse quiet.

I love it, if love is anything, even, I love it. 

The walls are like old skin, scarred, with pretty ornaments for show-and-tell, but it stinks of its owner’s insecurities, my oiled perfume.  Did I hang the Wittgenstein poster because I’m a desperate fan or because I’m desperate for affection, for admiration, to be considered something like a street philosopher, a savant?  Oh, I just want you to say I’m brilliant, damn!

The ‘Pulp Fiction’ poster is honest.  I adore Tarantino.  Mostly because he’s mad and I’m mad and we could get along.  And I like the film because it’s gritty and black.  It’s about people and their twisted convictions and opinions and how they parade around with their hands in their pockets as if the whole damn world turned and turned just to warm the soles of their miserable feet.

What was that quote- sit we upon thrones but still sit we upon our own behind- I think it was Montaigne who said that.

You see I’m polished, and civilized, I remember the voices of brilliant dead men.

It reminds me of when I was young and bold and believed in the animal of politics.  I spent a summer campaigning for some flat-faced white woman with all her hounds, sitting in her palace sipping coffee and pretending to understand their Latin and their French and golf and Picasso.

Picasso.

I prefer Salvador Dali.  The Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity.  It hangs above my yellow mattress in the back room; I can see the virgin now, staring into the canvas.

What else is there in my room, that you would care about?  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The floor is half-carpeted with used shag.  I go through phases of caring to clean and making the effort of dirtying every inch and not bothering to care at all.  I’m in between phases.

I’m always in between phases, I’m never in one.  The ideal of yesterday becomes the vice of today.  Until night, when I no longer believe in anything anymore, and it all becomes a hole of sound, swallowed like the sun.

I suck on the cigarette and hope the smoke rakes my lungs; I need a physical reason to b***h about, something concrete, instead of all this abstract garbage I often invent, through circular reasoning, I know.  But I’m not miserable, it’s true, I’m miserable, and I choose to be.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Choice.

Choice, choice, choice.

I hate choice.  All it does is remind you of everything you can’t do, everything you’ll never be able to do, and everything you wish you could do until you wake up and damn it all because you’ve been kneeling in the middle of a disintegrating road your entire life. 

But you have a choice.  Which side to leap off.

I snuff the light on my coffee table, dramatically, so I can feel alive.  I’m so human, like you, I’ll go out of my way to create a scene.  Otherwise, life is boring, and raw.    

Life: drifting down a tunnel of love with death sitting beside you smiling and smelling of woman- and you’re well aware, but you have only the freedom to pretend, that maybe, in the end, everything is going to be alright. 

Certainly. Ha. 

I laugh because that’s all I can do and she understands, she tugs on the corners of her infected lips and smiles like a w***e who orgasms sincerely.  She can’t imagine what it feels like, to become gradually worn and festered and worthless until your shadow weighs more than your skin and your memory runs with color, but she doesn’t need to slip on my clay boots anyway and play altruist.  My submission to ruin is her heroin, the un-tethered kind, where no one is an addict and the needle builds pretty basements in her skin instead of wormed holes.  Besides, it's a matter of self-purification, preservation, and deification, death knows she's got me by the balls, so why make room for sympathy? 

I want none anyway. 

Let her come with her honey comb lips and newspaper-colored skin and skittle walk, her toes fashionably pearl like a lady in a nightmare, to tear me down layer by layer, thought by thought, being by being, until there is nothing left in me but- succumb.

I stand and feel my legs creak, and I’m tired, in the mood for nothing, but maybe to stare out of my window into the whirl pool of everything I hate.     

The city.

            What a wretched stone doghouse, a sluggish festoon, with streets for guts and shadows for sinew.  A hive, with a million faceless men pacing its avenues, constantly busying themselves with personal obsessions, flux, and red-flag routine all provided by their urban mother, the alchemist of whatever, happiness? I don’t know- the city.

            What drives a man to embrace a community of strangers who keep their faces in an urn by the door anyway?  The disquiet of the self? A fear of loneliness or a vague sense of being? The inability to enjoy one’s personal company in nowhere? Or the continuous need to occupy one’s thoughts, desires, and actions between the time of existence and the time of no more, without ever having to embrace actuality?

            But I must admit, I often walk the streets with spliced disgust and discrete admiration, for the city, even in her darkest hour, black as a mausoleum for the masses, is a Helen, captivating like crippled romanticism, sadistically arousing, and a machination of humanist occult beauty.  And the collision of life within, a moments intertwining of beings who will never cross paths again, is such a terrifying reminder that no matter how high we climb we will always be but a splinter in a wooden heart stilled by a world of goliath proportion.

            How I love all the beautiful city people.

            The taxi driver with his personality on his dashboard, a Moroccan flag, a Bob Dylan t-shirt, and a clay face wrinkled and torn by the razor wire of time.  I love to wonder, what kind of man is he, what are his passions, how about that darkest secret all men carry, like lead, to the grave.

            What about the street vendor with mustard on his hands, waste-deep in a ratty copy of the Wall Street Journal, a Camel Meth hanging from his mouth like a smoking ornament?  What are his gravest fears and his heaviest ambitions? Was he a man who’d lost the dreams he had as a child, diluted by the tempest doubt, scorned by the reality that he could never become who he always wanted to be?

            Probably.  Mediocrity is subtle, warm poison, we share.

            And the tourists with their ball caps and accents, free for a time to lose themselves in a foreign dark room, flooded by the enthusiasm of escape and porous adventure.  What are their thoughts and sins, their opinions and beliefs, their disgusts and lusts?

            The city depresses me like the memory of old love.  You cup it in your hands and hold it close to your riddled heart, desperate to forget, desperate to remember, but as time drags on it becomes a ghost without color, a pain without closure, never ceasing to remind us all that life is laced with sudden dark beauties, escapable.

            I have become amused with the world, that she could be so cold toward her greatest species, that we who learned to skin her mountains and forge temples of steel and conquer her oceans and sky and cultivate language and war become nothing but rotten fodder and mildewed thoughts on the bottom of a casket.  And is that fair? That in the beginning we mingle and live among each other, trading hopes and ideas, but when the final grains of sand slip down the neck of an hour glass you have only yourself.

            Yourself and nothing more.

            And here, in the epicenter of humanity, I find and face the constant realization that men, no matter how important or accomplished they become, are still so miniscule.

            Maybe I’ll wander the streets tonight after the sun stops bleeding, to be entertained by the peep shows a block from a cathedral and the homeless lying in gutters as limos passed by.  Or I’ll listen to the Dead Weather and ride the subways and bus, studying the stenciled faces of my companions in travel, all different shades and shapes and colors, all occupied by different thoughts and stale daydreams.  We’ll tour the congested commercial streets together, the ones prettied by décor and the ones trashed and reeking of sweet piss and the alleys where the corpse of an unwanted fetus attract flies and rogue dogs in a trash bin.  Or I’ll just sit on the stoop of my building and burn one down and watch the faces of depravity and drug addiction linger in clam-colored window panes across the way while bell boys cart around the leather bags and aged chardonnay of capitalist barons and celebrities in the pretty part of town just a block up.

            My phone starts ringing, but I’m not in the mood to answer it.  I know who it is already anyway, probably my roommate to let me know he’s off work so I can pack a bowl or pick up beer or run my ears into the ground about some lame whatever.

            I’m just not interested, not tonight; I prefer myself and my misery.

            Grabbing my coat and slipping on my moccasins I make for the door and head downstairs and out into the city streets, the veins of my dear stoned mother.

            The closest bus stop isn’t far, but I think I’ll take the one on eighth.  I’d rather not run into anyone I might know and it’s only an extra block or so of dragging my feet.

            Or maybe I’ll just walk the few blocks to the bridge and sit and stare. 

            I light another cigarette just to give me something to do because I haven’t got anything to think about right now.  I hate that.  When my head feels empty.  Because then I don’t know what to do and I bite my fingernails and shift my hands from pocket to pocket and flip through my phone and stare at the cement because it’s awkward to look anywhere else, I suppose.

            I hate myself, this whole routine of my being.  But doesn’t everybody?

            I think so.

Everybody hates who they are just as much as they love who they were, what they’ve become, where they might be going- if any of that exists at all in some contorted positive limelight.  But I wonder, at times, rather always, if I am the only one so twisted as to constantly consume my conscious being with doubting, that I am even real. 

Or if you are real.  Or if this, this everything, is real. 

What is real?

If, as people argue, you cannot know good without knowing evil then how can we understand what is real without understanding what is unreal?  Clearly something unreal cannot be.  It cannot even be nothing.  Because nothing is real.  Nothing is everything what everything is not.

Unless the nature of something is exactly what it is not.  Like darkness.  Darkness does not actually exist, rather it is only a lack of light.

But maybe I question too much.  I dig too deep.  Am I the only one damned with this kind of obsession, this typified desire to know meaning, even the meaning behind meaning?  No, no- it’s this I’m certain that has driven mankind more than anything else, or at least those of intellect.  The rest seem to latch onto whatever they are conveniently born into, whatever seems to satisfy their dullness.

I think it’s unfair.  That they are so easily amused and I am not.  I wish I could be dumb again, a canvas without will, mechanic, letting the paint run so prettily across my skin to form whatever portrait my painter wants to see. 

I remember searching for such an institute, one that could flatten me to a point where money and fashion and politics no longer seem like the plastic games they so obviously are.  Of course no such institute exists, at least not for people like me.  You have school and church for the rest, institutions that fit you snug into a pretty umbilical cord where you can have all the crooked fact you want for a slice of your time and your individuality and your natural, pure humanity.

They never did teach me who I really was, they just suggested what I could be, a shadow in their dark room, how courteous.  No, instead they revealed what I could not be, who I wasn’t- a disciplined contributor to society, a citizen, a man, the epitome of their proper labels.

Most people want all their lives to be grand, known, loved.  I just want the crazy to go away, exeunt please the creep who sits behind my curtain laughing and laughing because I can’t enjoy anything, I can’t sit in a moment without realizing I’m a clown drowning in a pool of nonsense.

Like this moment. The one now.  Of me walking and walking down the street with these thoughts and a lot of sour plastered across my face so no one looks at me.  Some still do.  The ones, I know, stare at me cross as if their happy bubble is bothered by my obvious dismay.  Sometimes I try staring back but I have this terrible habit of shaking uncontrollably when I feel like I’m attracting too many eyes or any eyes or however many. 

Sometimes I imagine them commenting to me, something like ‘Smile boy it’s not that bad’ or whatever.  It’s usually absurd dialogue, nothing real.  Then I become the witty one who snaps back brilliantly with some kind of retort like ‘It’s not that bad?  Have you read the news today?’

I guess that’s a poor example.  But if they did slam me with one of their favorite small talk lines I’d counter perfectly, so I imagine myself to. 

Why do I need to even imagine such a thing?  It’s self-gratifying, me pitting myself on this hypothetical throne.  How come my own legitimacy must derive out of fantastical cynicism?

I know, I know what you would say if you were here.  It’s only a matter of attitude; think positive, hope, all that garbage.  I hate that happy nonsense.  It wouldn’t be a matter of attitude, it would be a matter of pretend.  I can’t pretend, I can’t be like you, if you are even pretending that everything is so pretty.  Or at least bits of it.

And I hate how I go on these random tangents, especially when I read.  I read and read but slip away all the time.  I’m reading now, ‘The Adolescent’, it’s good really.  I can relate. Maybe that’s why I’ve always enjoyed reading all that posh everybody else considers boring required reading while I find all the best-sellers more or less baboon material in miniskirts.

I must admit, though, that I make a conscious effort to flash the covers of all my books when in public. Or I stick it in my back pocket, as if it’s an accessory, an expression, so you can know who I am and that I am literate and intellectual.  Again, self-gratification, as always.

Damn I’m no different from the rest, from the doll who paints her face so she can be beautiful.  Or how about the slug who cuts his sleeves so everyone can admire his oversized triceps or biceps or whatever.  We’re all walking sculptures it seems- vain- we’d love to all sit in a gallery somewhere to be admired wouldn’t we.

It reminds me, I forgot to bring something to read on the bus…

But, again, the tangents and the tangents, are you beginning to understand my problem?  Perhaps. Perhaps it might help if you knew who I was.  Perhaps I could help you if I knew.  Maybe I should go with the basics, the things they used to ask you on your first day of elementary school, like what’s your favorite color-

Favorite color.  How can anyone even favor a color?  What’s a color anyway without the rest?  Why should I even bother wasting my thoughts on figuring out what color I should favor?

Blue is too common.  I know too many people who love blue.  Nothing is really blue anyway.  The sky isn’t naturally blue, the ocean isn’t naturally blue, it’s more or less just a game of light.  But every color is a game of light isn’t it?

I remember when I was young and bold I loved green.  I’m not sure why.  I don’t even remember when green was no longer my favorite.

Pink was my favorite once too.  Because I love being the antithesis of what I should be.  Clearly, pink is not masculine.  Though muscles are pink.  Pink, they say, is a girly color.  I remember in third or fourth grade a girl claiming that purple was girly, not pink.  I think her mother loved purple and hated pink.

Subtle conditioning.

If I ever have children I’d teach my son that pink is masculine and tell my daughter that blue is feminine.  It would be an experiment, of course, a derivative of amusement.  I find it funny that as a child you are so convinced that colors correlate with gender.  Don’t you recall all the berating and arguing revolving around color?

It was suicidal for a boy to even find pink agreeable when I was young.  I remember throwing away pink crayons and laughing at the other boys who wore pink and hearing the parents inquire from one another about whether or not that boy there on the playground with the pink gloves was a blooming homosexual.

Whatever. These tangents. 

I fall out of my head and find myself on the bridge, my cigarette long dead.

The sun finally starts to sink, its tangerine coils evaporating and succumbing to the black licorice cantina of Artemis and her ebony funeral dress.  I let my feet hang off the bridge and watch the city begin to spark and smolder.

            Gulls sing and crash into fire water illuminated by lights, the smell of sewage and bay is thick, as grease, and the needling breeze fat with musk, Italian food, and smoke forces me to bend my shoulders in like a fetus. 

This is the city I suppose, as beautiful as sin, with her guttural lullabies, always alive and ready to accompany the living on their pursuit to distract the senses and the mind from death and truth.

            But as I sat under the bridge in the bosom of an unsterile human ant farm, I had to thank the city for its constant single and gross realization, that this is why the whole operatic show is so utterly fucked up.  Because as long as humanity has an excuse to distract itself with gauche materialism and a drugged sense of worth and being, the impossibility of harmony remain as concrete as city bones.  I can’t blame us anyway, for humanity alone is too dull to deserve a charge for flaws designed by a Cronus in black furs.

           

Reviews

[Unwelcomeguest]

Your writing gives me the feeling I'm way out of my intellectual depth. Your character's wild musings on his own insanity/brilliance seem to border on the smug but are interesting none the less. Even if I do have to read a single line twice before it makes sense. I will say this, some of the imagery is wonderful. "Orchid with lungs" is one I particularly like.

[HighBrowCulture]

STEPHEN! Thanks man, I'm def digging the typewriter snag haha, let's combine thoughts into The Scroll of Life

[Jody Rowe]

Hey Andrew, it's Stephen Henry. Love this s**t man, it's wonderful. Don't know how you think of some of this brilliancy. Inspired me to get on this thing. Wrote a poem but as soon as I submitted it, lost it. Brilliant. Oh, and I want to suggest buying an old typewriter, taping paper together, and Kerouac some stream-of-consciousness writing into one long f*****g scroll. Just a thought.