a gentle choke excerpt

CHAPTER 1

 

I stared out of the window of a Greyhound bus, headed eastward to the lonely hardwood forests and swamps of southern Ontario, contemplating and sighing a deep sigh of relief for change.

            It had been two years since I last rolled through the wilds, mountains, prairies, cities, small towns, and no where’s of the infitismal expanse of Canada, trying to alleviate an ever growing panic of restless gypsy energy plaguing my wandering soul. My desire for constant movement sat on the cusp of turning into rage, it sat so precariously in the balances of my fiery mind. I could hardly communicate with my fellow beings I needed to move so much, much less hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time, and so was always broke and bumming off friends and family.  I thought back to these dismal, yet electrically charged, times and wondered at what fate would meet me back in the moaning swamps of Ridgeway. Ridgeway, god damn, I didn’t think I would ever be setting foot back in that boa constrictor town so soon, if ever!  Scarred memories dripped into my psyche, like a burning bag, and plagued my thoughts with images of past violence, fear, anger, sorrow, frustration, and desperation for something with more flexibility to life. I dreamt incessantly, behind screened windows filtering hot humid air into a small room, of sprawling metropolises bending and twisting the whole perception of what is supposed to be me. I dreamt of tiny hut villages, inhabited by pure minds covered in the earth like an infant wrapped in nature’s blanket. I dreamt of neon green landscapes and Technicolor skies, of rustic cheeked city folk discussing Miller and Burroughs, while shaking with Benzedrine dreams of orbital egos, and eating cheese like a Frenchman and melting slowly and pleasantly in an afternoon sun, because I had nothing better to do than just be. I dreamt of an ease in conversations, of a completely content and relaxed soul, with no shaking head turning glances about in wonder at every sound in the night’s streets. As angry and depressed as I was, I wanted freedom to be content. As angry and depressed as I was, I needed the freedom to not be scared.

            But there I was. Rolling softly, with the incessant buzz of the bus neither keeping me awake, nor drowning me in slumber. I stared in awe at each landscape as it pasted itself into my devouring psyche. I can’t say that it rolled by, because to say that would be to say that it was inconsequential, interesting yet easily forgotten. No, each split in scenery laid itself out majestically, knowing no boundaries made by man and his imagination of rule, but instead followed the contours of nature and her easing stroke, bending the edges, at the end of vast expanses, with perfect juxtaposition.                                        The jagged, rocky peaks and immense rounded mountains of British Columbia Rockies lap at the vast plains of golden hues, reminding me of the dark pacific waters searching the shores with grasping rolling waves, and dragging grain after grain of sandy beaches into its depths. The plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan float in the foreground of my vision, as a surreal open limitless background melts in the intense heat, like a Dali painting. And I stare in wide-eyed awe at shards of ecstatic lightning, as it pierces the total darkness of rural primal lands, and flies across the horizon in predatory fashion.

            Then, as my thoughts are growing weary and stretched to the point of near madness, I am zigzagging through the winding, wooded, and desolate roads of Manitoba and Ontario. I peer into the thick, mosquito and black fly infested pines and hardwoods beyond the outcropping of boulders, searching for black bears and the elusive lynx. Every mossy, darkened log, felled tree, and dark shadow becomes the fleeting chance of seeing something that has had the courage, and the fortitude to adapt and survive where man has failed, because of a deep ravine of fear that courses throughout our very fiber and being.

            I feel nearly drained as I step off the bus in Toronto, Ontario. I grab my bags when they emerge from underneath the bus, and wince at how heavy they feel. My cheeks have sunken into the form of my skull because I made the three-day trip across the country with a total of twelve dollars, and a big bag of peanuts. I am exhausted and on the verge of collapse, mentally as well as physically. My breath is rank, my clothes wrinkled and permeated with my body odor, and my eyes shed madness in bleary red-eyed desperation to get onto the last bus, and hopefully sleep that last two hour leg of the journey.

            But first I have to wait an hour and a half at the bus station for the bus to arrive.

             Slumping down into a chair, after using my last bit of change to buy a coffee, I stare blankly at a drunk screaming his fragile anger into the soft hum of voices that try not to encourage his presence. My large green duffel bag is under my chair, and my two backpacks on top of that. I pull a crossword puzzle book from the smaller one to try to pass some of the long wait, but my eyes are too bleary to make anything out, and I’m too tired to care. I just don’t want to meet the gaze of the maniac. He looks busy explaining exactly what’s wrong with the world, in obscene detail, to an elderly Chinese woman right now though, so I let myself relax a little. Soon a timid, underpaid security guard strolls slowly over and engages Mr. Maniac, the Chinese woman never taking her eyes from the floor as he is escorted slowly away by the arm, protesting all the way. The Tao flows through her veins, wise old lady with meditative repose that belies the fear she no doubt feels. We are a cowardly and cold society, and we deserve each and every hell we fall through.  After what seems like an eternity I am on another bus, the trillion lights of the city becoming one orb of mind overloaded sickness, fading slowly like a fever as the Greyhound paws its way back into rural darkness.

            A tired energy courses through my legs, and my a*s feels painful and numb at the same time. I need to get off this damn bus, but there’s at least another hour to go as we pull into the bus depot of St. Catherine’s.

            Inside the small snack shop I grab a black coffee and take a seat on a hard plastic chair. I’m even more anxious than ever, and in a state of desperation I drop a quarter in a payphone outside and dial my parents house. The phone rings three or four times before the answering machine comes on. “S**t.” I whisper wondering where they could be. Placing my coffee back on the phone I fish out another quarter and drop it in the slot, and dial an acquaintance I know for sure has a car. The line rings twice before Kurt picks it up.

            “Hello?”

            Damn, I’m glad he’s home!

            “Yo! Kurt, man! What’s happenin’? Jay Crane here.”

            “Craner! Dude what’s up? I thought you were in BC?”

            “Yeah, I was but s**t didn’t work out, so I’m back in old Ontario. I just rolled into St. Catherine’s and was wondering if you could pick me up, I can give ya gas money later.” 

            I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get gas money anytime soon, but I was desperate to stay off the bus. A nice car ride home with some music to listen to, and maybe…hopefully, some booze to wash away this gross three-day funk emanating from my pours. To my surprise, Kurt agreed to come pick me up, and a wave of relaxation set into my weary bones. I grabbed my coffee and went to find the driver so that I could grab my bags from under the coach.

            A black cloud burst from the exhaust of Kurt’s rusted out, s**t brown 78 Impala as he pulled up to the curb. The window squeaks down and his dread-locked head slips out like a turtles.

            “Jaaaay, man. Good to see you, bro. Hop in.”

            Once inside I slap hands and bump knuckles with three other friends that came for the ride, anything to get out of Ridgeway even if only for a couple hours. And here I was traveling thousands of miles to get back in.

            “Yo, Craig. Adam. Rich. How ya’ll doin’?”

            Everyone looked pretty much the same as they did when I left. But I guess that was only two years before. And besides, there was something in the water of this area that kept everything exactly the same as it was fifty years ago, menacingly so. I, and I’m sure many others, could feel a darkness permeating the small town and it’s older residents. A haunting grip held tight to the past, and threatened to choke the life out of anything, or anyone, that tried to, even for themselves, to carve out a different pattern in the rotten swamp mud of a sinking people.  Again, I wondered fleetingly why I had come back. 

            Craig broke the stream of my subconscious ramble by pulling a bottle of Baby Duck from the floor, taking a long haul, then passing it to me with a s**t-eating grin, dripping and stained with purple wine.  The moon shone effervescently through the bottle as I tilted it back, forgetting anything negative and relishing the instant ease that filled my waning soul. 

            “Ahhhhh. That’s so f****n’ good!”

We all had a good laugh at my sated thirst and made for Ridgeway, some punk band I don’t remember blaring from s****y speakers, as we careened drunkenly and full of conversation down pitch-black gravel roads, the faint yellow glow of the headlights our only salvation from a twisted death in a cricket-filled ditch.  I stared out the window, counting the numerous glowing red eyes blinking in the inky dark, taking hauls on the bottle and laughing at all the right moments.                      I wondered if anyone ever guessed that I didn’t know what they were saying or talking about. As usual I was a prisoner of my own thoughts, and could scarcely grasp the conversation. It didn’t help that I had been on the road for so long. My lids began to droop further and further until I was asleep in the backseat, the gentle hum of the motor acting like a hypnotic tool.

I felt an arm shaking me awake and a distant voice calling my name, “Jay. Wake up man. We’re at your house.” The voice was Kurt’s. I looked about the car in a state of disorientation, wondering if I was still on the bus, or waking up in my apartment in Vancouver. I didn’t come fully to until everyone in the car began laughing at my dazed condition.

“What a lightweight.” Laughed Adam. “Can’t even handle a little bit of wine anymore.”

“F**k you.” I said annoyed. “Once I get a good night’s sleep I’ll drink all of you under the table.”

“Oooooh,” mocked Craig. “We’ll see buddy.”

“You guys are all fucked.” Said Kurt, and everyone laughed again, even me.

I walked into my parents’ house, the door being unlocked, and was immediately hit by an overwhelming nostalgia. A flood of memories poured through my exhausted brain of parties, fights with brothers, arguments with parents, joking and laughing, misery, pain, happiness, safety, and fear. All the roller coaster ordeals each and every person goes through with their own families. But all in all, it felt great to be home.

            The house looked like it was in a bit better shape than when all the kids lived in it. Three boys and a daughter can cause a lot of damage to a place over the years. The door to my parent’s bedroom was open, meaning that they were not home yet, so I scavenged the fridge and cupboards for food. I was starving. Once I had a plate loaded up with goodies I went to the living room, vegged out in front of the TV and scarfed down the eats, while crickets chirped outside and not a car could be heard. When I finished the food I lay back on the couch, and was immediately back in dreamland. 

 

            The next day played itself out as if I had never left. We all went through our ritual familia like silent ghosts floating above the awkwardness of not truly knowing each other, but respecting one another anyway. Living in this environment had made me an independent, wander-lusting soul unable to sit still for short moments, unable to stay anywhere for too long, and like a frothy mouthed mutt I pulled ferociously at anything metaphorically leashing my spirit to one place, person, or thing. It was the circle of life for the rage for freedom coming from the oppression of genealogical seaming. My ancestry wafted over my being as a whole, and kept me from forgetting the blasphemy of tyranny that boils, and poisons the mind.

            I decided to go out for a walk. An early evening warm breeze enlightening my spirits, as I strolled down the quiet streets of Ridgeway. Sounds only seeming to be heard in a distance, muffled and muted. Adding to the serenity and warmth I felt being somewhere familiar. So different from the fast paced, grimy, haunted streets of east Vancouver. There are no shoulders to rub, no grimacing faces rushing about in a frenzy of agitation that is as contagious as a plague, no junkies oozing need with screeching prophesies of your doom if you don’t hand over some change, no drunks stumbling out of seedy bars, blinded by the hot afternoon sun reflected off towering glass monsters. Instead, I hear the quiet laughter of children. The kind of laughter that is so pure it can break your heart and lift your spirits to a heavenly consciousness. I hear a meditative drone of chirping crickets and feel almost as if I need to find a small cleared patch of grass in the forest and let that sweet buzzing swirl my mind into celestial awe. Feeling peaceful and content, I wonder what drives me to colder, harsher climes of society. But then I remember that life here wasn’t always about these times of leisure. My past being variegated scraps of blurred nights and days, intoxicated madness and chaos. What I can remember between all the booze and drugs, all the fights and f***s, is a steady stream of negativity disguised as goodness. Teachers and adults squelching any speck of creative desire from the young with ignorant rhetoric laid out in the oration of fortune cookie clichés. Flapping wrinkled gums and professing their hardships at any glimpse of happiness in another. They attack the minds of their children like virulent diseased sacks of s**t-filled skin bags. With blood engorged faces they screech their brown, rusted nuggets of wisdom into the saturating young bodies afloat in their space. If only we could have been born with a more innate sense of perception, to weed this restrictive thought from our path and move forward with the clarity of a new born.

            I shook my head and let these memories fade like the setting sun. Those days were over and a new chapter was being written, starting this very night and lasting six months. Six months of wonderment, and soul up-lifting experiences that would harden like diamonds, shining through and brightening my very essence, making me ethereal and alive. Friendships regained and new ones forged that would last forever, even if I never saw any of them again. And the most important thing that could ever happen to a drifting, hapless, sorrowful soul such as mine. Joy.

            Walking through downtown Ridgeway will take you about two minutes. Just a few blocks of old English style buildings converted into modern conveniences. There was a couple banks, a couple pizza shops, a couple drug stores, a spatter of convenience stores, a beer store, barber shop, etc. Why there was two of almost everything on such a small street was and is baffling to me, but what the hell, right? Free enterprise and all that. I didn’t give a f**k if they wanted to compete for such a small market. The side streets were lined with quaint little homes shaded by elm, chestnut, and maple trees dropping the dying beauty of leaves and chestnuts onto well-manicured lawns. The sidewalks raised and split where the roots of trees push through and try to escape mans need to cover everything in cement. This is where the industrious hum of the lawn mower is the soundtrack to the lives of simple, hardworking people.

            As a wild-roaming teenager I saw this town in a much different light then how I was seeing it now. It was restrictive, the people ignorant and frighteningly crazed with a hatred and dementia against anything that dared to vary from the life they had expected to last forever. I often try to put myself in their shoes, thinking how I might of felt seeing a gang of prepubescent teenagers with multi-colored spiked hair, ripped and torn clothes with band names and vulgar statements written in felt marker, and safety pins sticking out from dirty, but innocent, faces. Would I, as a grown man, decide that these children, that are not mine and who I don’t know from a hole in the wall, needed an attitude adjustment in the tune of a fist? I don’t think I would. But I can understand their bewilderment and confusion, their frustration at watching their beloved generation melt away from its youth. What I don’t understand is their reluctance to move forward with their adult lives, instead of living a childish drunk that lasts forever in the somber, dark bars. Handing a brown bottle down to each generation like a sputtering flame with the motto “NEVER CHANGE” written in blood across it. But hell, I sure wanted a beer too.

            I have no problem with contradiction. Contradiction is the pendulum of thought that activates change and growth. Firing opinions across your own mind in a schizophrenic fiery blaze of confusion can only lead to an uplifting wind of wisdom that sends you in an updraft to another plateau. What can be more selfless than questioning yourself and your actions, and how they affect not only you but those around you and the ripple of cause and effect we all create in this universe, but don’t want to take credit, or blame, for. It is the ignorant that peer from behind cold dead eyes, observing everything like a reptile, waiting for a moment that will spring them into action. The outcome benefiting them only, the rest are just prey to engorge their own self-centeredness. Societies are based on this simple logic, to get what you need to survive at all costs, and to uphold all your naïve beliefs, no matter how out-dated and useless they become. We become a nation of crocodiles, waiting to drag the next unwary piece of meat into the murky depths that is our perception. How do I know this?

Because I was one of them.

            Strolling down the nearly empty street, vivid memories came to mind when triggered by certain landmarks. The post office steps where I wiled away many an hour skateboarding. The apartments above the McLeod Hotel where a gallon of spilt beer, puke, and cigarette ashes are ground into thin carpets. The drug store where I bought saltpeter to make small fizzing bombs to burn on railroad ties. The pizza shops where I played pool and video games. The Chinese restaurant where I slaved away washing dishes by hand. The steps on the corner where packs of us would meet, after a night of booze and drugs, and perhaps share what little alcohol we had left before going home to pass out until the early evening. I felt content and at ease, and at the same time filled with a vibrating energy at all these memories. Postcards sent to myself from my reminiscing mind, filled with a robust glowing nostalgia that sent my gypsy legs afloat. I could wander a million miles, sustained only by my erratic thoughts and wonder at everything.

I peered into the window of the movie store, on the slim chance that Winona might still be working there. Of course, she wasn’t, but a flood of memories washed over me anyway. It was the day of the annual street dance, a small area of an already small area cornered off in front of the fire hall. Little kids playing the fishing game and bobbing for apples while adults drank away their working blues in the beer tent, listening to a middle-aged group belt out their favorite country, blues, and rock songs. Some, after sitting in the sun and beer tent all day, would be overcome with the madness to shake and gyrate rhythmlessly in a dance that always made me drunk with sorrow. There was just something profoundly desperate in these dances. It was if they were trying to shake off a burden that was much to heavy, so much so that it had grown into them, like a wrinkled pus-filled goiter that spat blackness into the still, humid, mosquito-filled air and held their limbs like a bad dream.

            Why was I there then? Because we were that bored. And drunk.

            I radar-ed in on Winona, standing with a couple girlfriends. She instantly grabbed my young, inebriated attention, becoming a hazy obsession. Her long dark hair passed her shoulders, streaked with a line of white just like a horror movie, punk rock goddess. I watched her laugh at something someone said, her smile big and consuming, surrounded by luscious plump red limps that I ached to suck the juice from like cherries. She was one of those girls that when she laughed it was hearty and real like a lumberjack, but still altogether feminine, her facial features sharp and Romanesque, drifting in the senses of a tanned aura.

            I ambled and stumbled up to her, completely ignoring her friends, and asked if I could have a drink of her soda. To my surprise, she smiled and handed me the can, but when I tried to give it back she declined. Feeling a little bit dejected I swayed in front of her and declared, “What! You think I got A.I.D.S or something?”

Pretty soon we were at my place, my mouth on her small perky tits, while a drunken friend snored beside us. 

            That was years ago, before the melancholy boredom of small town life swept away at the shores of lake Erie, the tides rising across our minds, and only making themselves known in the deafening crash that pulls you into the undercurrents of another life. With each wave another soul is dragged, usually willingly, into the depths of real life. Into the hungry mouths of cities and the blinking frenzy that can hold our minds in a blank state of absorption, billowing along the crowded streets, as light and ethereal as clouds drifting to a soft whistle of the pied piper. The city is change and progression on a societal, and a personal level that doesn’t seem to be able to happen in the rural areas. It’s too easy to make all your assumptions based on a poorly interpreted news cast about life and cultures. Its much harder to throw yourself into the mix with abandonment and an open mind, letting the madness melt you into something less solid and abrasive, allowing you to morph into the next level of consciousness. But walking down these quiet streets I felt a quiet comfort, a chance for inner reflection in peace instead of chaos, and the trying to piece the shattered, fragmented puzzles of a multitudinous perception, seeing the lump of s**t like a fly with a thousand eyes that never blink.

            Turning from the window and my thoughts, I see a white van slowly rolling down the street, becoming a luminous metal insect as it moves under a street lamp then fades like a predator in the jungle into the dark again. A familiar dread of being jumped by coked-out jocks enters my mind, but I also have a sense of not giving a f**k. Live or die, I wasn’t going to let a pack of small-minded a******s dictate where I could, or couldn’t go. It wasn’t too long ago that walking down these streets dressed in anything different than penny loafers and pink polo shirts could get you in a fight.

            Shadowy figures peered out of the windows at me as they drove slowly by. I was about to turn and keep walking when the van stopped. I tensed up like a cat ready to strike when the back door flew open.

            “Hey!” a familiar voice called out. “Craner! What’s goin’ on?”

            I relaxed as I saw an old friend, smiling wanly, hanging from the back of the van. I walked over and ended up riding in the back of the van, cruising nowhere and everywhere that is nowhere, making awkward conversational gestures. Sometimes it’s harder to think of something to say to someone you haven’t seen in years, than it is with someone you spend everyday with. Anyways, Buckner, the friend that beckoned me into the van, was a quiet, ever-grinning type and smiled with more enthusiasm than some do with their whole being. Driving the van was J.T., who I actually met through his sister when he was a young hoodlum stealing cars and selling dope. Not much had changed there, but I was glad the van wasn’t stolen. Beside him was a girl named Genevieve, whom I had not met before.

            Being instantly attracted to the quips, quirks, and characteristics of the opposite sex first, I couldn’t help but notice that she vibrated with junkie energy and that tough guarded exterior that comes along with the abused. Actually, it depended on the drug of choice when it came to the energy expounded. While J.T. and Genevieve jumped about like an attacking virus under a microscope, Buckner sat in calm, meditative repose in the clanging shifting van. The polar opposites of coke and H. Then there were the boozehounds, such as myself, now sipping on a beer given to me. An alcoholic is a shifting, morphing disease; emotions prowling about in the dark recesses of the mind like a schizophrenic, waiting to expound whatever personality is in the worst mood onto the unsuspecting world. At least with drugs you could usually tell how the person would react, well sometimes I guess. I don’t want to generalize too much. Again, it depended on the drug and atmosphere, circumstance. With alcoholics you never knew though. The alcoholic usually didn’t even know how they might react once in the grip of boozy psychosis.

            Sometimes I would try to fill my thoughts with positive ideas to keep from going into the Netherlands of my subconscious, and puking my vile, evil self onto my friends and anyone who happened to be around. But sometimes the ideas were formed while drunk, perhaps sparked by some incidental image, media, or snippet of conversation.

Those are the times I would wake up the next day, full of dread that I could not explain. The dread turning to horror when I am told what I did the night before, unable to believe that I was actually capable of such ignorance. Yet, there were other times too, where I would wake up just as the sun was rising from a long night of drinking, full of some quivering energy expounding an almost euphoric happiness. Watching the passed out revelers on the floor, couches, chairs, beds, some with a small beatific smile on their lips, held a serenity, enhanced perhaps by warm rays of sunlight filtering through a dirty city window, dust particles floating in the ethereal light, a miniature melancholy universe existing only as long as we stayed still enough not to disturb it. The universe is scattered throughout the room, as someone floats through and starts the coffee maker, the warm invigorating odor of ground caffeine waking them up one by one, like some demented commercial for Folgers.

J.T. talked incessantly as we cruised down into Crystal Beach, zigzagging through the narrow back streets studded with trees, an occasional house somewhere in the background. The coke had him in overdrive, working him into a frenzy of excitement about all the various plans he had for the future and now. Everything and anything was possible. I had the feeling he was talking more to himself and the windshield than anybody else, maybe just wanting reassurance from himself and us that things would work out better, that there was more to life beyond the borders of this chunk of land, given a name to hold its inhabitants to it like fly-paper.

Was he looking for an escape from the place? The drug? Himself? All of it?

I knew I had also searched for that elusive freedom, moving to the other side of the country in search of it. Looking back I may have found it, but it wasn’t really a place I needed to get away from. I think that, maybe, I needed to be free of myself, as I had built myself up to be. I needed seclusion from all I had ever known, be thrown into a completely new reality to realize my true place, and be humbled by it enough to want to change. My mind had a need to expand, but staying in one spot, mentally and physically, was like sealing a combustive vapor and heating it. I was ready to explode in a fury of madness. I could have walked to BC from Ontario without a cent or a scrap to eat. I was becoming a rabid dog biting the throats out of anyone that dared get close or try to love me, feeling cornered, boxed, strapped to a place I was growing to hate. Not because of the place itself, or the people, but because I was beginning to hate myself for being so dreary, stuck in a rut and grinding the wheels in deeper and deeper until I couldn’t see the sun, the stars, the moon. Familiar faces began to distort into bestial horrors, baring bloody fangs that sucked the life from me like a vampire, like the thousands of mosquitoes emerging from the swamps and marshes like a black fog, a million tiny blood-suckers becoming the straw that broke my back and ravaged my spirit like a pack of hyenas. I could have floated an inch off the ground and flew to Vancouver using the energy of my hate and frustration to get there.

I could relate to J.T. because I had already inhabited his being. If I could have, I would have picked him up, right there and then, and harnessing all our misplaced energy I would have thrown him into the winds, urging him to float with the currents to whatever fate awaited. Shiny and toothy or black and burdensome like a starved dog, it wouldn’t matter. Anything would be better than living inside himself, oozing a vaporous noxious gas into the area around his confusion, becoming just another little bloodsucker in the swamps.

We drove over the hill leading down to the beach, near the Palmwood Hotel. The dark waters of lake Erie lapped at the shore like a tired dog, the moon mirrored off its glassy surface. I had already drank about five beers so was feeling pretty good when I jumped out of the van. I was energized and alive, more than I had been for a long time. Sure, I was happy in Vancouver, teaching kung fu and getting into great shape had definitely cured some of my depressive ailments, but I was lonely. Working from noon to midnight five days a week, and being too broke to do anything on the weekend had started taking its toll on my restless mind. As I have mentioned, I have gypsy legs, a deep resonance for the need to keep moving has always been a plague in my mind and has burdened me with instability. I couldn’t seem to hold a job for more than a few months, at the most, without freaking out from boredom and doing something drastic like walking out in pure distain for the mind-numbing work and the bosses who meted it out like sadists.

By the age of twenty-seven, I had seen the insides of countless numbers of warehouses, factories, construction sites, and dish pits. I often looked at the slumped over heaps of exhausted co-workers, men and women with five-ten-twenty years and more sitting on their aching backs, and wondered how they did it. How they woke up every morning knowing it would be a carbon copy of the last. The same coffee breaks, in the same dirty lunchrooms, the same conversations that never get deeper than a scratch ticket, and the same repetitive movements that ate at them like an acid until they were broken indefinitely. Lying in paupers graves are millions of souls that are nothing more than a means to an end for some completely ignorant, lifeless greed.   Lets face it, we all know that experience creates wisdom, and some rich f***s hiding away from the rest of the world with their spoils knows nothing of man, nature, or reality. A monk sitting in a cave, or in a tiny room provided by an outlandish, pointy hat drag queen, is being fooled as well. Their perceptions are skewed by fear. Fear of losing what they think makes them who they are, fear of failure in a society that is mentally ill and ravenous, fear of those that surround you. The rich have us so frightened of ourselves that they make us think we need men with guns and batons to keep us in line, while they destroy and defile the earth and our children’s minds. We are led to believe that we are the weakest beings in the universe. Bullshit, you say? They tell us we are at the top of the food chain, you say? Then why, after thousands of years of moving through life in a natural line, do we need over-glorified and abusive baby sitters? It’s simple, if you think we need cops, or that they are even there to protect and serve anything more than a bucket of someone else’s gold, then you are a coward. You have no faith in the humanity of man. Take away all the carrots being dangled from proverbial sticks and all you have is existence. Freedom to evolve as a human, not a cog in a machine to support greedy out-dated ideas of what a human is, and what our purpose in life is.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this on the beach that night. I was merely absorbing the air around me, like only the freest mind can do. When all the weights of life are dropped, with abandon and vigor, and the soul sets itself on the wisp of unknowing, setting out near penniless and with a trepidation of the cold waters of reality, can you truly breath all that existence has to offer. I had no shame in being broke, or asking for whatever it was that I needed at the time. Why should I? Do these things really mean anything in making me a man? Am I a dollar sign, a table full of food? Am I anything? For all the things I have borrowed, or asked for and never returned, I feel I have repaid in some way or another. Maybe not in monetary value, but perhaps something more. Myself.

I give myself wholly to those that know me. I try to instill the restless madness I have into their blood stream and give them another perception to rotate like a cubist painting in their minds. I want the world to reverberate around me, smash into me, meld into me, drift through and around me. I want the armour of mankind to melt like ice beneath a sun of joy. I want to learn from and become my fellow beings.    Reincarnation is a reality, but it does not involve the death of the body, only the mind. We do not move with legs, but our minds. We are born as many times as we choose to be. To stay the same is to live in death, to become lost because of ideals that don’t wilt to an overflow of invention. The dead rot in the blistering sun of ignorance.

This is the energy that drove me at this time. It crept up on me like the tides of lake Erie, and could have been driven by it. I was becoming aware of the life that flowed around me like lilies in the lively green mossy ponds of the surrounding woods. So many urns of wisdom waiting for me to drink from their mouths and fill myself up with their existence.

            We walked around by the water, talking smiling, parading our thoughts by one another, and none of us able to remember the specifics. The recall of memories are pleasant, and I guess that’s all that counts. After awhile we got back in the van, but after doing another line, J.T. mentioned that he was too fucked up to drive right away.

            “I don’t have a license,” I said. “But I’m an alright driver if you wanna just hang in the back.”

            Truth was, I felt safer being behind the wheel than being driven around by someone coked out. Even though I was drunk.

J.T. saw it as a good idea, so I jumped into the drivers seat and started out aimlessly. I took the streets slow and randomly, turning down whatever corner came into view. Down the rocky, dusty back roads trying not to spill my beer, as the van jumped and bounced in tire ruts and little ramps made by dirt bikers. I pulled into a long stone driveway; at the end was a boy-scout campsite complete with a pile of firewood. Genevieve called us her ‘little country boys’ as we expertly made a fire.

            What was it about fallen angels that turned me on? There was something about her tough exterior that I wanted to crack. For some reason I felt like I needed to soften the world, even though it was usually the soft ones that churned my stomach. I wasn’t jealous of rich people’s money, or the easy lives that they lead. I really wasn’t. I was and am always happiest when I am struggling. I feel challenged and wiry when I am broke and starving. It’s when I have a full belly, surrounded by serene elements that I find myself beginning to wig out, getting antsy to move on to some other adventure. What I dislike about the rich is their apathy, their un-caring and ignorance to the life of the poor. Looking at us like simpletons with half a brain that is only being put to good use when figuring out laborious tasks, or entertaining them on the latest episode of To Serve and Protect.

            I drove them around until after dawn, drinking beers as they did lines in the back. When we got a few blocks from my parents place I jumped out, deciding to walk awhile and get some air before heading inside. J.T. took the wheel, looking tired despite all the coke and they drove away. I shuffled own the street, the sound of birds chirping and crickets whirring in my ears, the occasional car driving quietly past with the occupants drinking coffee on their way to work. Something I should have been doing, instead of sleeping on my parents couch. Just the thought of getting a job was a bring-down. The worst thing about jobs for me, besides the boredom, was the socializing. I never knew what to say to people. I just couldn’t relate to small talk about the weather, mortgages, car payments, kids, and all the other burdens people heft on their shoulders in the name of responsibility. I wanted to experience life, not get trapped in it.                                          Laziness had nothing to do with it; I had the energy of ten men. Set a task for me and I usually had it done in half the time, something that irritated many employers, as they would be constantly looking for something for me to do. I would usually end up pushing a broom over a clean floor for hours at a time. I couldn’t understand the time/money theory. I worked as if I was being paid for the job, not a stretch of time. That s**t was for prisoners.

            When I got to my parents I snuck in as quiet as possible and flopped on the couch, the sound and smell of percolating coffee wafting me into dreams as my parents got up to start the day.

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Sweet_pale_cacophony]

This is long...:p..i have to come back to it..
'an ever growing panic of restless gypsy energy plaguing my wandering soul. My desire for constant movement sat on the cusp of turning into rage, it sat so precariously in the balances of my fiery mind...'
i know this feeling well...i think i know you..:)

[lark]

I have to come back. I'm way too tired.

I taste Tom Waits in this (and no, not -just- because benzedrine is in here. though it helps.)

[Nocturne]

I began reading this and then just started getting bogged down in the meandering internal thoughts of the writer. I mostly judge a prose piece first by the structure of the prose and then by the content. Here is a blow by blow analysis of why the first couple paragraphs didn't "hook" me:

Paragraph 1) I stared out of the window of a Greyhound bus, headed eastward to the lonely hardwood forests and swamps of southern Ontario, contemplating and sighing a deep sigh of relief for change.

The first thing that snags me here is the wordiness. The second is the giving abstract human qualities to inanimate objects.

Wordiness: Why "eastward" and not "east"? Isn't a sigh of relief deep always and usually accompanying contemplation? Can a sign of relief be shallow and not caused by some sorts of thoughts? I don't think so.

Abstract animate qualities to inanimate: Lonely hardwood forests and swamps. How can a forest be lonely? A forest can cause feelings of loneliness in humans, but it, itself, can't be lonely. It's like calling a chair sad, or a desk uneasy. Better to describe to the reader why it makes the narrator feel lonely, then to claim it is. (Also, I have to wonder at the description of the forests and swamps as hardwood. Hardwood (ignoring its strong association to floorboards) are dicotyledonous trees, oaks, etc. Do oaks live near swamps? I don't know much about swamps, but it just seems a little odd. I looked up a couple images of Ontario swamps and wetlands, and I'm still uncertain there. (Oh nevermind, I just found that yep, the maples do indeed grow there)

So why not just:

"I stared out of the window of a Greyhound bus that was heading east to the red maples and swamp-shrubs of southern Ontario, and sighed in relief."

More specific, more focused, etc.

The same kinda was what I felt while reading on, except with less nitpicking. Less adverbs, less meandering, more showing, less telling, more specifics - these are all the things I'd want to see. It makes reading more vivid an experience and more interesting. Also, spellchecking - this might be a difference between American English and Canadian English (I know there is between British and American), but "infitismal" for example, is spelled "infinitesimal", and "drempt" is considered archaic, if technically grammatical.


"I last rolled through the wilds and cities, and the no where's of the infinitesimal expanse of Canada two years ago, trying outrun the restless gypsy energy and panic. The desire for constant movement perched, unbalanced, in my fiery mind, nearly a rage. I couldn't be part of the social bustle; I needed to move so much. I couldn't hold a job for more than a few weeks, broke and bumming off friends and family. The dismal yet electrically charged times might meet me back in the moaning swamps of Ridgeway."

And yes, I'm not saying that my version is necessarily better than yours, but I feel that stylistically it is tighter, and easier to read and understand, as well as having less a diary-entry feel to it, and more of a reader-oriented feel.

These are just a couple thoughts and really very subjective of course. Good luck writing!

Cheers for the read,
Naiya