Negate the End
"We must travel in the direction of our fear"
- Berryman
"I ain't old just out of date"
-Dwight Yoakam
Rage, rage against the machine
-Dylan Thomas de la Rocha
-Dylan Thomas de la Rocha
And yes I recognize the irony in never finishing a blog entitled
Negate the End.
Why end it? What end? I never end anything. I'm always
putting off buying books, reading books
but not finishing books
meeting a girl
not meeting the girl
meeting Kyle instead, in his capacious cargo shorts
meeting a girl named Angela
who produced copious quantities of what
she called
Hole Punch Art:
-tiny agile drawings on the round effluvium of the hole-puncher
and collected some-of in a journal called Exegesis but
handed out most-of to strangers and passersby
who would hold out their hands when she offered hers, cupped, to them
and receive their brittle white offerings,
(if there wasn't a breeze to get them first)
before looking up, Angela already gone, and casting for her
with a look of dismay and accusatory subterfuge.
Expecting perhaps candy.
Curious, the lambent electricity of sadness
pulses when you touch or smell
odd things, like a cigarette or a song,
I never knew what the man meant when asked
"are you suicidal," by answering "only in the mornings"
but now I think I do. I am a clock face set to chime
hollow on the hour, a number on the wall
half falling, the other half lifting myself up that hill
from rock bottom. It never ends.
I'm getting to an age when I have to consciously remind
myself to move with zest. Don't crawl 'round,
zip! Like you did when you were 12 and couldn't sit still.
Ironic too, because I spent most of my teens
lumbering morosely, feeling somehow innately that this
would make me appear older.
Which it did.
Until I met Kyle who was a taut bundle of nerve
introducing me to life so
fully packed with living it
for a time
blew away all my desires in me.
Like a fuse, he, sputtering toward a certain date with doom but
in the meantime igniting me with dates with strippers he knew
named Sibel, & Candy & Butterfly or Jade
and waking me up at 5 in the afternoon after 18 hours of solid communal drinking
to bang on my plywood door and say
"C'mon! Let us arise & away
for I have dealers to pay," and off!
A friend like Kyle is a hard thing to lose but I managed it
when: he met a thin flat-chested girl with a trust fund who
served him coke like weekend cupcakes and
when: I got a job tutoring crippled teens in Brooklyn
like Alice Reardon who
not listening to my lesson one afternoon in
her parent's apartment with the big barred bay windows
said: "Skyscrapers are like penises aren't they?"
and that gave me pause.
The only girl in that time who would willingly
let me into her bedroom and even
paid me for the privilege of doing so
and so young and blonde and daydreaming about penises
while I, reading lines from Blake aloud trying not to fall
into distraction
meanwhile thinking: Oh, Onanism— though actually
confessionary was my favorite position
right after The Butterfly, which
(if you don't know what it is don't ask)
a stripper taught me
and I tried later that year when I
moved to Texas
(you think I wanted to move to Texas?)
and then came to cast doubts on any show of triumphal thrust
because what developed was a slight burning
while I pissed
and so I moved again
and went back to school and drank heavily
Because while my life was over, yes, also, it wasn't.
Surprising how often you live through your deaths
and wake up to new dawns shining through
strange windows and notice you have an erection
like a skyscraper.
The community college princess-
es stroll by young and
leggéd long, my love
now, an Aquarius, is not getting any
younger. Fuck. You
know that the only way for thems to
stay sane is to get frigid.
Like water.
Otherwise they fall all apart.
I know what they say about believing in something and getting it,
but that's bullshit! Because I believe in cake and there's no cake in my bag!
Life is like the primer book they give you to learn to read
at the start of the 1st grade in the early 90's
when all the pictures in the book were hold-overs from the mid-70's
even the though book itself was copyright 1983.
Everything was magical about that book when you first got it,
from the doughy smell that the pages gave off when you rifled through them
to the fluffy grandeur of the name on the fraying cardboard spine
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN.
But by the end of the year you sort of despised it. The
outdated clip-art, the formatted readings, questions,
never varying from chapter to chapter, even the glossary at the back where
some kid two years ago had written in with a dull leaded pencil "Faggot" and
"sexy balls".
All of life has been a variation on the disappointment inherent in
that experience with
that primer book. Including
in the 3rd grade
when you were finally confident enough in your skills to check-out
a Goosebumps book at the library
all on your own,
it's pimple-textured velour cover glistening between your greasy fingers
as you rushed home and stayed up all night reading it,
then the next week the next, and the next, until
about 4 books in
you realized they were all the same and kind of lamentably formulaic. What next?
The middle school dating scene? It got old.
And if you don't remember it getting old it's because
you didn't date enough people in middle school for the thrill to wear off
but I bet the thrill ran off soon afterwards
in high school
when all the girls your age started dating pathetic or angelic older guys who
pimpled, you despised, and vowed you would never ever be one of until,
a few years later,
when you forgot your vow and started dating that adorable
freshman who had a crush on you for about 2 months before
hanging out with you all the time caused her to realize
that you were a troll
and she could do a lot better.
I've been listening to a lot of Dr. Dog because it is memory-neutral for me.
Won't be for long.
What sucks about music is that it's charged with memory
and the songs that harken back to the girls you can't forget
are played while you're single and yearning.
Or the songs that you overplayed while single and yearning
play when you're on a bad date, sitting silent over uneaten food and thinking, secretly
Damn man it was better when I was single.
We await the retrievements that never come.
Negate the end.
This ain't no roman à clef.
Life is hard
and no one goes out of their way to make it any easier for you.
I have no doubt about this.
The nights are long,
the days are tough,
there ain't enough money and
apartments are too small and
classes are too long when life is too short and
fuck it.
You've gotta get it while you can and
if you don't well, maybe you'll get wiser
but most likely you'll just get older.
So yes, I've been putting off this blog
entitled Negate the End for a month or more now.
I would put it off longer because
it's finals next week and I've got homework
left to do but
Here I am
stopped along a roadside six miles east of Sierra Vista
and brake fluid on my hands — I don't know anything about no cars
whom I fuckin'
kidding? — so maybe I should call a tow
or maybe I'll sit here and write it
and be done with it
and then hitch.
The sun is going down.
She won't start and I feel the sharp chill of nightfall
on the backs of my cracked and dirty fingers.
Is this the end?
This isn't the end.
This is just another
beginning.
Labels: alice's restaurant, automotive disasters, dr. dog, each instant is filled, goosebumps, hart crane, houghton mifflin, kyle's cargo shorts, onanism, skyscrapers, texan transmitted diseases
2 Comments:
Salut à tous les lecteurs de ce site ,
Pour débuter , permettez-moi de vous montrer ma gratitude pour toutes les formidables informations que j'ai trouvées sur cet imposant site internet .
Je ne suis pas sure d'être au bon section mais je n'en ai pas vu de meilleur.
Je proviens de North vancouver, us . J'ai 41 ans et j'ai quatre super enfants qui sont tous âgés entre deux et 10 années (1 est adopté). J'aime énormément beaucoup les animaux de compagnie et je fais de mon mieux de leur présenter les biens qui leur rendent l'existance plus heureuse .
Je vous remercie à l'avance pour toutes les super délibérations dans le futur et je vous remercie surtout de votre compassion pour mon français moins qu'idéal : ma langue de naissance est le vietnamien et je fais de mon mieux d'apprendre mais c'est très complexe !
A une autre fois
Arthru
waiting for next post
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