Basement Solipsism

dissent is not revolution
-George W. Bush
22 Feb 2002
"I am my own God" said I to Smurf and Slicey, exhaling deeply. Neither one of them disagreed. I continued with the Haiku: "Furthermore you don't exist... except in my mind."

The basement smelled like smoke and altar candles. Smurf was reading The Decline and Fall of Ancient Greece with a look of perfect indifference on his face. Slicey was ramped on Barbiturates, and slunk so low into his indent in the sofa that he may never get up. I peel a slow palmful of fingers across the imagined glint of perspiration on my forehead, worse than bored, thinking of leaving. We're absent-mindedly anticipating 10 minutes from now when we will be doing nothing but trying not to yawn.

"If I'm wrong then God, the real God will strike me down. Just Like at my job."

I used to work at a radio station. I worked at the radio station until that day, that afternoon. Then the powers that be voiced their displeasure with my artistic vision, and the way I would never take my mask off in the studio.

"But It's a RADIO!" I argued vehemently, already shuffling to stuff my few belongings from there in the studio into the flimsy industrial cardboard toilet tissue box, "This is not television! No one can see me." But they could see me, and didn't want to any more, in fact they wanted to see and hear a lot less of me. I had built up my career, I had gone to (and dropped out of) school for broadcasting, I had worked the odd job in stations from here to Pittsburg since high school, and they had cut me down.

But that's just a job. Corporate Smoke and Mirrors. It's not like that in the real world. The real world that is my mind. I create my own house of cards and I'm the one who decides when to blow it all down.

"I like plants. Like grass and shit. Plants don't so much grow as appear out of thin air really really slowly."
"The evolution of photosynthetic processes and the chemical congealment of various soilstates work together to transform aggregrates of flora. It's not just outta thin air."

When they talk science I inevitably daydream about a girl. Some beautiful expanse of feminine skin that I can fly over in my mind... a bunch of soft and beautiful topography. Women carry positive vibrations you know. They carry babies too, I'm told. The afternoon I got fired, this afternoon, I was thinking about a girl who had the the moon in the middle of her forehead. Running my hand across her belly, then lower... lower... she wouldn't have stopped me in this little daydream like she would have in real life.

"I am accounta--" I stopped to cough, a vicious long rumbling cough. And then to laugh, embarassed for inhaling so deeply my lungs rebel, "accountable to no one! No one watches me!" Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? No one. I am an island.

Slicey blew real hard on a flute and then stopped, a little light bulb going off somewhere behind his cobwebbed eyes. "One attracts what one projects," he says.

Smurf frowns and suddenly pushes himself off the sofa. I drop my lighter. Slicey reaches for something deep in his left pant pocket.
"It's magical thinking! Both of you! Life is tough, often unfair and the world is something just less than a meritocracy but close. You have to work for success not just sit around visualizing it. And sure the universe will provide... bla bla blah, but you run up that credit card long enough..." He took half a deep breath and stormed out.

We didn't get up to follow him. Sitting there, we imagined he hadn't even left. Maybe he hadn't really left.

Hell, he'd probably never even really been in there with us in the first place.

"Pass it on," said Slicey to me. And so I did.