Cell By Cell

Had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it and hearing that phrase come out of my mouth and wondering how it is still possible.  Still possible to mount surprise attacks on my own fortress.  Woke up today in a fine mess of pain.  The important thing is the drought is over.  I had to break some ground to get at the well.  Wake myself up again.  The dreaming has been fantastic.  I wish I could sleep forever, but that's unreasonable.  Not irrational.  There's a difference sometimes.  Even in my country.

It is odd, I do suppose.  The sensation of being outside yourself and watching the sublet drive it straight into empty air on the wrong side of a cliff.  It's nice to be back.  It always is, even though I know it won't last and never does.  Pull the circuit board out and wave it in the wind until it stops smoking.  Pop out the fried resistors and solder in some new ones with the same ratings; their the biggest baddest ones you can get on the street.  Slide the board back in and fire it up.  Note the time and date.  Log the lost information and missing sectors.  Build new ones in the virtual environment.  Repopulate.  Repeat as necessary.

Reconstruction.  It's like a gunman went cell by cell through the complex.  Cell by cell through the prison and gunned down every inmate.  It's an unfamiliar quiet.  And then you remember you told someone you were a sociopath trapped in a citizen body.  I wonder what Jeff's doing right now.  I wonder if he'll take my call on a Saturday even though I'm not seeing him anymore.  I don't know what he would have to say.  He said if I ever thought of a good joke I should drop him a line.  Psychiatrists.  I've been trying since our last meeting two years ago to think of one and for the life of me I can't.

He'll laugh anyway, to make me feel less awkward and it'll work.  Maybe I just want to hear him laugh.  He'd be proud of the work I was doing.  He wouldn't entirely get it, but that's fine.  Poetry is a fickle beast.  Half the time I don't get it either.  He'll put it up on his fridge if I wrote him something on the couch.  He'll take it down after I leave and add it to my file.  I wonder if he still has that file. Probably not.  I vaguely remember him telling me, when I told him I was thinking about joining the army, that he is obligated to destroy records older than seven years.

I miss him.  I had a bad run in with myself.  I'm laughing just saying it out loud.  How did this happen?  Why?  I don't understand.  I like to think it's somewhere down that rabbit hole.  I used to wonder if I was color blind.  Then I stopped worrying about it.  I think I scratched my eye ball yesterday.  I miss his note taking.  You might be out of your god damn mind.  Eventually he stopped taking notes.  Which was fine.  It is kind of a tall order getting to know someone that close out of nowhere without taking notes.  I wonder sometimes what he was doing or expecting his week to be like that first Monday I walked in there.  I wonder if he still thinks about me too.  If I still populate his cells.


///El-P - "Stay Down"