I have been dreaming graphic. Memory graphic. It has been difficult to deal with still. A silly concern. Sometimes not silly. Trying to keep track of the comers and the goers cross bridge and who is lingering and who isn't in places they should and should not be. I feel like what would lend them all credibility is if they had names, but none have offered anything close to a name since I left Maryland. Since I left murderland. It's a strange thing. The namelessness. There is the thing in the white and tan ghili suit, man or woman, but definitely humanoid who shows up well in fluorescent lights and little else. The little man in the black trench coat. The woman in the blue dress. The tall and wide man who loves to wear khaki and from head to toe and never talks. The bone spur balls of things I can only really describe as pre sleep sheep skinned and tumbling. The seeing spots in the middle of the day. The thing who offered a name, whose name I cannot record because it would serve it's displeasure at my efforts to disseminate its existence on the crown of my head by day and by night and chew my nerves like dollar a pack gum and suck the insides of my skull like a starved lamprey.
Times have been strange at the cusp of awareness. Maybe not the cusp, but the interface of understanding and the known with the less known and the abstract removed thrice from the models and modes of deduction. The experience of the thing is not even close to ... I don't even know. They're not ghosts. Some are new. Many are old. Some of them change clothing and change sexes, but I can smell them beneath the dressings. I can smell their blood in the marrow of their bones as clearly as they can smell and find mine across state lines. With them it is always a matter of time. Sometimes I have to trick myself into being alone, put on the little blinders and the nose muzzle and slip the bit between my teeth so I don't swallow my tongue while I run so hard and so tuned, but I'm faking it.
and I'm just talking. Trying to talk some things out. Orient myself. I cannot tell if I'm air locked or just cold. It's 58 degrees in my apartment. I should fix that. Six hours later, the temperature is fixed, but my geography is not. There are a lot of things that made me laugh today and I'm trying to remember some of them. Trying to keep my insides in. Browsing my old day time notes. And by daytime I mean work time. And by work time I guess I mean night time.
As a side note though, do you ever get into those odd temperature situations? For instance the break room where I work is already kind of a hole in the wall with some chairs scattered around. Kind of like a refrigerator box behind K-Mart that someone saw and said to themselves "yeah, that would be a cool place to hang out for the next ten years of my life" and then adopted a stray one legged pigeon and fed it corn puffs until it was eaten by a stray cat. That kind of break room. Actually, I don't even believe it would be a stretch to say there are probably better cafeterias in most underfunded high schools than the place where I work. That's not the bad part about it though.
I'm the kind of person who just loves opportunities to eat. Not that I'm fat. Not that I particularly love delicious food, even though I do. Who would really say no to an open flame seared, seasoning rubbed slab of rare beef. Like, bleeding delicious, with buttery asparagus and sesame seeds and I am getting way ahead of myself as I can afford to eat that, maybe, twice a year. Two times out of a year. That's thirty minutes out of 60 minutes multiplied by 24 hours multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days. That's gotta be a tiny fraction. Anyway, I love eating. With a passion. My mouth just needs to have something in it at all times to be truly happy. I would have made a pretty awesome shark in another life. Perhaps a penguin. Also pornstar? That should probably be on the list. But I love food, so any opportunity to sit down and eat is a great thing. Not good, great.
How often do you run into opportunities where someone sits you down and says "if you pass this background check we won't pay you to sit and relax and eat for thirty minutes, but we will pay you to sit and relax and eat for another set of thirty minutes, but there's catch." And you slide to the edge of your seat and get nervous. Am I going to have to kill someone? Am I going to have to whore myself? Am I going to have to drown a family of kittens? And then they come back "the catch is the thirty minutes will be broken up into two fifteen minute blocks and settled at opposite ends of the thirty minutes we will not pay you for." Awesome. So any chance to sit down and eat is a good thing, because there are people with jobs that allow them to sit down and eat zero percent of the time. Literally if they are caught sitting and eating, like humans are wont to do, they will be fired for not being perfectly mechanical.
So the bad thing about this prison break room cafeteria hole in the wall with chairs that were shat out of plastic molding machine once every second and probably as ergonomic a bed a refrigerator box's floor is that it is eighty degrees in there. I bike to work. By the time I get in I am sweating pretty much from chin to ass cheek. Hiking up the stairs to the lockers and the break room after pummeling my body just to get to work is a bother. Not intolerable. Not even difficult. Sometimes tiresome. It is kind of ridiculous that if you were handicapped you would basically be ass out of luck if you wanted to watch tv or have a table in front of you while you took your breaks, but having eighty degree heat bust you in the face is like getting on a bus and having the fattest, sweatiest, cheese smellingest person get on the next stop and not sit next to you. Sitting next to you would be okay. Contact with people is unavoidable on a bus and sharing a bench is just part of the contact contract. However, when people stand next to you it's a whole different set of acknowledged boundaries, and when heavier set, fatties, stand next to you and your ear is two inches away from the bulging gut and you can hear the carnival of their digestion, it gets weird. It gets real weird and uncomfortable is all I'm saying.
Like, weird enough to make your ear hot and tingly for all the wrong reasons. Like having a complete stranger at a party come in really close to you and drop a hand in your lap. Your crotch sends the signals up to your head and your head is like "alright, this is good. We are on the right track here, drunken stranger" and then they bring their lips up close to your ear and you're playing it really cool. You're too cool for blushing. Highschool kids blush not adults (you pedophile), but even with all of your super pro control and James Bond coolness, your ear never does get the memo and all the blood that should be in your cheeks rushes to your prickling ear and then the person whispers something like "I'm so horny I could take a long walk on a beach, and knit for hours, because I really really need to use the bathroom after eating that many tacos and I want you to watch," and you kind of have to step back and rub your eyes because they either actually said that or you are way higher than you thought you were. And that's why I hate riding buses. Shit gets real weird, real fast. That's what it's like walking into this break room most days. It is break room in which it is impossible to relax. Someone basically said "hey, do you know all of the things that can make relaxation impossible? Well let's take all of those things, combine them into a single room with easy to clean floors (because someone is eventually going to throw up their lunch) and then let's put a television in there to lure them in and then a camera to capture the hilarity that ensues."
It's an odd temperatured situation. And I have no idea why. But when you run into a situation where the setting is alright, but the temperature is way off it becomes impossible to do what it is you went there to do. Try having sex at fifty degrees. Ain't going to happen. Sure, maybe you'll get it up, maybe you'll get all warm down there. But unless you've got a blanket, eventually your skin screaming at you "good lord, it is cold as fuck, what the hell are we doing without clothes on" will pretty much trump that. Try playing a sport at a grossly incorrect temperature. Baseball at one hundred degrees? Sure it can be done, but good luck keeping eighteen unpaid individuals in a pick up game when their couches, cold beers, and coldcuts are waiting for them back at their homes. I think that's what I ran into today. Trying to get my thoughts together when it was simply too cold to think.
Situations where you can't hear yourself over your body trying to survive. On a completely unrelated note, is the hallmark of the late eighties generation sarcasm? Maybe not completely unrelated. I was just thinking that maybe with all of the nebulous threats to being and the rise of open sharing and the sense of "what have you got that you have to hide" and the unrelenting standard of interrogation and search and destroy culture has given rise to a survival mechanism. Sarcasm. Sure, some people are beautifully sardonic. Some people try to be. I kind of feel like a lot of the younger people and peers that I am familiar with find a sarcastic, sardonic, dead pan stance to be the most comfortable base state of being. A variation of the poker face. It's like a poker face with burlesque sequined and feathered sunglasses on. A poker face with a little personal flare so not blank, but not telling in a world that has become one not available for questioning, but able and unceasingly questioning of identity and intent.
Like the question "what did you do to your hair." There are many responses that are acceptable. Many responses that are reasonable. I cut it: is one response. I wanted to try something new: is another. But, how many times can you be asked that question in different ways before you wig out and say something like "oh my god, did something happen to my hair? Is it still there? I could have swore I cut it yesterday. Oh god, why? Why could something happening to my hair have ever happened to me!" as you fall to the ground weeping and clutching at your scalp. It's just the nature of the world we live in. Everyone keeps asking you how old and who you are and where you're from and who you know that would also cop to knowing you.
Sure some people still give the standardized responses, but I think a lot of people in our generation who want to be slightly more than a string of numbers and a birth certificate and a photo i.d. and tax form fall into sarcasm as one of the last free forms of interpersonal, globally accepted, expression. Clothing as expression peaks and falls and peaks constantly. There isn't really an age of clothing as expression. Drugs as expression, I think peaked in the seventies. Is that fair? I know new drugs came along later on, or were in development and then came to fruition later on, but that's definitely a negative. People don't look at users of pharmaceuticals and think "wow, man you are seriously expressing your take on life and it's battles." What they think is "wow, man who raped you when you were five," or "wow, can you really not cope with your white bread existence," or "unlike bacon, everything is not better with glow sticks." Pot heads are probably the exception. And amphetamines that do not have to be smoked or injected. Those people aren't users by today's definition. They're modifiers. Suped up. For one reason or another they need to enhance certain abilities or muffle other sensitivities and so aren't really expressive. To say there are expressive is to say that someone who closes their eyes in a horror flick is expressing their inner self. Nope, they, like most normal people not desensitized to acts of brutal violence through television, news media, film, and video games, happen to not enjoy watching someone get their head twisted off. They are modifiers, not necessarily expressive. And that's what's up.
It's not the culture of harder drugs that are a way of life as much as they are a means to continue living. The old adage of "source of and solution to". Maybe if everyone wasn't so sarcastic things would be more straightforward. Hobbled senses of humor being symptomatic of hobbled senses of being maybe? As expression and avenues of expression become more vacant there is the old mainstay of sex. Being utterly personal and completely void of pretense sex still expresses who you are and in that opposite way of expression spread across the surface of being, sex is much more a sense of being spread across pure expression.
I mean think about it, the lady behind the desk at the dmv is in principle a sexual object. She is a vagina with a lot of extra things draped around it that define her self, but in a pure sense she is expressible by her vaginality at her core and everything else is in place to facilitate that expression. Same goes for the guy. It's like the core motive of man is perpetuating itself and everything else is in place to ensure its perpetuation. So if you're sitting on a train in rush hour and all you see are hovering breasts, vaginas, cocks, and balls all around you, you're not tripping. You're seeing through the bullshit. Or you are absolutely tripping your brains out and should probably not be inside a metal sardine can powered by coils of wire and magnetic fields twenty feet below the surface of the earth inside a dark tube. Or you are in highschool and are writing on post-it notes "you smell nice" to the person next to you and you realize you will probably never land that date to the prom because you are expressing yourself backwards, as far as the rest of the population is concerned, but hell, if you don't tell them, who will?
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