Night Down

Valentine's was a Saturday and I woke up roughly three AM to a steaming pile of dog shit just inches from my face and thought; Here is the World, Masked Man. Make with it what you will.  Three steaming little dog turds where some somnambulating canine-owner came within inches of my streetside nook in the bushes under the overpass downtown and failed to notice the sleeping vagrant, the rakish bohemian, the masked imbecile, sluffing off into his chilly high-rise condominium nest to shed away the piss stench of night and sleep through the dawn.

In my dream the savage city's delirium rose majestically before me, San Franciscan skyline piercing brilliantly up from a confluence of faults at the slowly slinking western edge of this unreasonable bloated & beached whale called America.  Low notes permeated the cradling mists of that nightsleep.  The sad vibrato groan of trucks speeding onto the wind-wracked tower bridge, cooing trains in the lonesome rain streaked distance, the grinding of wharf-bound streetcars, the clicking chirp of auto alarms deactivating into their drunken masters whimful steerage.  Notes familiar and eerie, possessed of a quiet secret and as resonant within the subtle realm of the unseen metropolitan netherworld as in the cavities of my wayfaring mind.

But before the waking world arose, before my harmonic dreams and before the stagger flop by the roadside there was a night that began, as so many of my nights begin, two weeks earlier, bespotting a pretty face across a crowded considerate convention hall and making a point of introductions.  Introductions that went well.  She flashed curious promising eyes at me, and I steered the conversation along the well-worn course until a door opened and I asked for her number and two weeks later we were meeting for the fifth or sixth time.

It's her eyes that hooked me.  Perhaps I weight the eyes over the breasts or the hips or that small soft around the arms in a woman, because I keep my own eyes so heavily masked, but when you look into her eyes you can see if it will mix.  Look for that sweet mixture of longing and integrity.  The I AM solidity with the needy fringe that only I can fill in a dousing rush of abandon; some call it chemistry, the mixture of our parts.  I saw in her the proper combination of chemicals and her eyes laughed in their appraisal of me as well, hitting upon some secret history in her narrative makeup that she found just attractive enough to warrant flirtatious attentions.

I waited nervously, an oasis of smoke-smelling layers in a sea cluster of tweens standing outside the auditorium, the prolegomenary to a pop concert that I'd been awaiting with religious fervor.  My heroes aren't all Rock Gods, they are Pop Stars.  Guys who think the Road is IT when really there's the drug and sex and choke-on-your-own-vomit death of it passion that the masses love.  Not a shiny face and a subtle sound.  No Jimi Hendrix sweating heroin residue or Jim Morrison riding tremulous acid chords as they screamed into the terminal vortex, no, I like catchy pop.  Mild songs about conversations and girls crying in the rain until they meet nice boys, like me.

The tweens cast their wary glances and hustled up into the giant shoebox as the Doors Opened for the Show to Begin.  All lithe and vague and rebellious, baggy clothes and painfully cropped hair, they seemed obscured by a painful distance.  Somewhere along the way I had found myself across the vivid chasm of years and the vitality of their youthful vision rendered me as meaningless as a faded picture on a ancient wall.  Dead on my feet.  And yet in my heart of hearts I knew better, awaiting the touch of her honeyed membranes, intranscalent fingers reaching out from my memory and into the urgency of the night, flesh rendered tender through lack of contact and desire to please.

But there was no touch.  Waiting, waiting, the concert within arched its sonic flexes and I had one of those strange moments of unreality.  The old, not-unfriendly, what-am-I-doing-here sensation with its distinct aversion to belief in the illusion just because they ask me to.  Not enough of us are questioning the illusion lately and somewhere in the great elsewhere, beyond its believers and adherents, the fake tales and blindnesses, are things which cannot be gained through belief, higher callings, nobler ambitions...

A ringing bell of truth! No, my phone.
“Hello?"
Her voice lifeless and remote, she can't make it, she'll call me later, excuses excuses, apologies apologies, ok bye.
 
So 'How to Waste the Time Remaining' was the question, like pondering the origin of heat or counting all the houses in your mind.  Going in to the concert alone was out of the question, it was to be a group venture filled with soft hugs and moist squeezes, yelling into ears and spilling rancid beers and dancing and all that was over with and so I crossed the street and pulled just enough money out of my pocket for a hot dog at the little silver box scentedly burning them, and my luck extended still further, unto a still smoking cigarette discarded in the street which I promptly snatched from the exigent threat of rolling claws, an oncoming car.  Held the cigarette away from my lips as the holy men do, and inhaled.  Acrid Camel.

The hot dog didn't taste too bad.  But I threw the lit-stick away in disgust.  It was one of those times where relying on the innocent judgments of children will better preserve you than your sullied adult impulses culled from years of falsely guided experience.  Tell a kid you're eating wieners for dinner and they won't laugh or chuckle but praise your wise decision, unlike adults, who, conversely, would never dare laugh at the notion of smoking camel butts like a 4-year-old would.  For they are wise, and Camels are the work of Satan.

Across the hungry night feeling bleary-eyed it was cold outside.  A dark insipid mist leaked under the cuffs of my coat and I escaped into a bar where the dots of light and shrieks of music made merry of the impossibilities inherent outside.  I had been stood up.  So what?  Life was made up of invisible forces that everyone thought existed and no one could refute because there was no hard evidence but belief and the best thing for it was a good strong drink.  Or four or five or six.

J.M. gazed with love at the brewery crest over his reflection in the mirror and told me "the world is an organism and we are all part of it.  A single collective creature, created by many interacting organisms chained together in countless arteries circulating in a continuous loop of new data sent and old data collected,"
"You ride the bus to work dontcha?"  Only a frequenter of public transit would feed into this notion where others who drove solo would never think it.  The level of reliance on others necessary in taking a bus, unseen schedules followed and the chaotic happenstance of various vagrants' moods, failed coin-dropping endeavors still collate in cohesion and manage to get everyone where they are going.

"Wars are merely a disease; Philosophy, politics, simply our planet's immune system.  Contradictions are righted and healed, greater reasonings disseminated in a squirming blue metabolism of interacting equations that we are too small a part of to see.  If you were a red blood cell would you really know that you were bringing oxygen to the lungs of whatever creature you lived in?
"When pickpockets meet a wise man, all they see are his pockets."
"Precisely!”

I drank heavily.  Empty glasses stared mockingly at poor rejected Me and I tried to write a poem on a napkin while J.M. discoursed on astrophysics.  My love is a broken 40oz/ once toxic now skittered/ and tossed across some/ wretched landscape of/ coarse uncaring pavement/ you.

I remember screaming for more drinks.  Lolling the word 'Bourbon' around in my mouth and then swilling the stuff and wishing to beat my head against a wall, opening a door and lying face down in a toilet and then feeling much better and returning to the conversation as if nothing had happened.

"Instead of time and space being instant and universal, they were flexible and personal.  Einstein himself sometimes found it difficult to trust his own logic saying 'The argument is amusing and seductive...' "
"This one time my girlfriend and I wanted to make a porn tape," slurringly interrupted Martin, and we reprimanded him for being so off topic.  "Just hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, just let me get this out."  And I thought maybe he wasn't that far off the mark.  Science is just sex trying to defend itself right?

Funny he would try to talk about sex just then.  Because I had started to think of swearing off women entirely.  Who needs women when you can meet two guys in a bar and talk about spacetime and have drinks and not worry about anything.  I had started thinking this, and then, like a sheen of stars I caught the aroma and followed the furtive glances of those few men also on alert from such primal callings of Eros and there she was.  Leaning back like a supine volup, a Brazilian jaguar in heat I sat upright and erect, ready to massacre any outmodeled dogmas that stood in the way of catching this chimera.  Frizzle-haired and tawny-skinned, dark-sparkling animal eyes and limbre limbs all scented webbed and postured, I could feel myself falling in love.  But after only a few fluttered heartbeats a man came around my shoulder and I realized she had been posturing for him.  The place was filled with beautiful creations I noticed then, and I felt the clock slow and then race and could see each instant for the infinity it was and then watch as all life faded away into the empty darkness and left nothing but a few rotting wet fermented smells on the hardwood floor in its wake.

Left wandering around the torturous streets, making twists and turns with every singsong hum of the unseen town, sonic promises of both mysterious distant thunderous terrors and the comforts of a mother, heard muffled and distinctly lovely through uterine walls.  I had believed in love and been let down.  Something like that, brick walls funneled down the heavy omnibus of failure as I made my way further and further, only to stumble and fall, awaken to the reminder that all is for shitty dogged naught and then keep going.

Fall down, get up.  Make new friends and they vanish into the whiskey distances, the streets strewn with letters unsent, newspapers blown past unread, sleeping men on benches unloved, graffiti unfinished and buildings unbuilt and streetlights winking back the tantalean promise of the lightly rising sun.  Life?  What is life but a gamble in the dark, a tiny trembling particle in an otherwise cooperative wave of light from a sometimes flashing star?  A dance filled with fragmentary faces and echoes down cynically shadowed cobblestone back alleys.  The basso moan of the city continued undiminished until those foreboding minutes just before dawn, when nothing seems likely or familiar or possible or safe, but is.  The sun crawls out from behind the murmuring hills purpled with distance; a chill lingers in the air unsure of itself and rushes away into blindingly lit skyscrapers.  The new day yawns and stretches ahead, rising on this heap of dog shit once more.

It was beautiful, and a pity I felt miserable and dirty and crumbled, and only wanted to go home.  It doesn't get any better than this, I thought, removing my mask to rub my eyes and soak up the red-streaked newmorning sky.  It doesn't get any better than this.  But I hoped that it would.  Get any better than this.  Any better than this.  Better than this.  This.

Rain Date for the Splooge of God

With this depression on people behave in ways they otherwise would not.  Depression, ergo, persisting under pressure.  Like those miners and sandhogs digging tunnels in gaseously pressurized shields of air deep underground, or under water to counteract the pressure of the water table above.  Sometimes, when the pressure is off, or the miners shield hits a weak spot or an air bubble underground, the pressure within the tunnel suddenly becomes greater than the water pressure in the subaqueous material beyond, and a man can be blown hundreds of feet up through the ground!  It’s a spectacular sight, not unlike the fight that broke out at McDonalds yesterday over 65 cents change.  Two warring factions of high school kids on their lunch break started throwing chairs and Fries and ketchup packets into the ring where the two boys in dispute (over an amount which in ideal economic conditions would be laughably trivial) shoved and punched and pummeled until one could take the pressure no more, and ran out with his jacket over his head into the rainy February morning.

 

February.  Named for the latin februum, or purification by rains.  Rains that accumulated in this month and fell through cumulous pressures unfathomable, and therefore, worthy of worship and feasting and praise.

 

And so it rains.  I take my lunches indoors now, adopting a ribauld repartee with the subdued and loosely dressed Panamanian girl who cleans our office and tries to get me to verbally betray our game of footsies under the stained white breakroom coffee table knowing full well that my supervisor's desk is right around the corner.  Easily within earshot of her companionable anecdotes.  "Tha motherfucker, he come runnin' down my steps.  I say bitch please! He say, man lets go fuck but I tol' him straight up: No more funny bidness with when cuz my baby girl she see sittin' right der.”

 

Motherfucker.  The most common word in the world, means man, or in this case, ex-boyfriend and baby-daddy's best friend Rauol, who "jus gat he outta juvee."

 

There are those who say the end of time draws near when there are no more wars or Rumours of Wars, but I take the opposite stance, since I am not of the warring niche.  Lack of Love or Rumours of Love will be my demise.  Call me sentimental.  Call me cerebral.  Call me Frank Bidart, but don’t call me on a Tuesday night after eleven because I've got a date with  a girl and if that love cancels I am nothing.

 

As if the pressure all around is not depressing enough there is pressure from within straining to get out as well.  It knots my legs up in sweaty blankets each night, I turn and am swimming in a turbulently dreamy sea where there… There! Is the coastline, a bay rising, two pale tremulous thighs gaping warm and welcome uninhibitions!  We are home! I declare, horses running free and all these pressures find release in ecstasy, every niche is filled and all the rains glide lubricious and free across the surface of my tanned flesh.

 

On my days off from the office I stay home and do laundry.  There’s not enough money for enough detergent any more, so I only use half as much as I should.  These masks are starting to smell like stale peanuts.

 

There are so many niches to fill.  So many openings in the vast chaotic possibilities of evolution, and yet we see so few of them and mire away our days in ruminatory complaint and conjecture.  So many prospects that we can't see in the pressure of this depression, and when someone finds one we laud them and whisk them away into the niche of the elite.  The Bill Gates's and Richard Branson's.  The Gary Brolsma's and Bill Hader's.  There are those who fill the big green quiet moments with incandescence.  Imbibe their each and all lowly hour with the wondrous mead of life embraced, of vitality empirically drunken and to that I say, kudos.  You see we have this depression on.  My lunch breaks are now savorably unsatisfying, the rain outside continues to fall, my boss taps his foot in nervous anticipation for cutbacks or God Knows What Else and all I want to do is invest myself in preparation for this coming Tuesday, for tho under pressure we may fold all else we may still retain our hope.

 

Hope.  For better days to come.