At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me.  I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again.  I try to skip rocks.  I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang.  I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am.  If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.

Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink.  One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud.  The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship.  Found.  Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash!  Mid-river.  The current continues.  I can't see my face, looking down.  The angles aren't right.  The light is not just so.  The sun is not cooperating.  Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.

Thinking about how people find their perfect match.  At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me.  Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic.  Impossible.  Incredible in its perfection and destruction.  Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist.  Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.

Happy and satisfied are two different things.  The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief.  As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true.  Doomed.  I laugh typing that.  The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle.  Dooooooomed!  Of course not.  Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat.  I wonder what quantum decay looks like.  I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them.  Some of them, yes.  None of them, also yes.  Always at distance.  Minding the fence.  Minding the facilities.  On the off chance they might be me.  On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.

A moat.  Sometimes the bridge is there.  The gates open and ambassadors cross.  I don't know what madness is.  Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself?  Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself?  Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere?  Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here.  This is what I wanted.  Few things truly scare me, in life.  I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half.  Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.





///Groove Armada - "At The River"   ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.

Counting Down Seconds

Counting down the seconds until I have to go outside again. It helps when it's dark out. It feels like there are two inch diameter screws pushing into the space behind my ears and doing their best to touch in the middle.

The wind blows up through the corner of my building where all the boiler rooms and utility closets align. I'm pretty sure I could climb down through the entire building to the basement through there. I'm pretty sure whatever's in the basement can climb up if it wanted to. I try not to think about that space. Sometimes I come home and that door is open. The lock on it is broken. Or maybe it never worked. I stuff socks in the door jamb to keep it shut, but socks don't have magical powers and it doesn't stay shut. I'm thinking about nailing it up.

Yesterday I was working so hard I started drooling and I didn't realize it until I felt the little tug on your shirt that tells you your taco just let a glob of skin temperature oil loose on the middle of your chest. I took it down a notch. The work is hard, but not hard enough. I like it when it's demanding. It helps me forget who I am. I'm no longer me. I'm levers and pulleys and little motors and wires and for loops and if then switches and I love that. Part of me wants that to be all. To rip away from the rest in a maniac's pursuit of perfectly synchronized movement. I'm clumsy. But when I've memorized all the actions it feels so good to make the calls to the functions and then revise them knowing they can't become worse.

I'm thinking about teaching myself to be a butcher, since I didn't get the post. It would be a fun pastime. By the time I can afford to buy the animals I'll be able to afford a freezer to put the parts in and have a nice place for all the tools too. Then I can extend the work from my job through the anxiety of my home and feel that relaxedness roll through me again. But that's a little ways off. It'll be fun.

I had this dream that I went forward in time to the same burned out bakery next to the house I want to buy. The house with the door boarded up in the front and all the doors and balconies open in the back where there was a fire that started at the furnace exhaust and worked it's way forward across the roof and slashed through the face of the third floor like a stroke of side armed bull whip. The place wasn't lived in. Or at least, when I looked in the one open window at ground level I didn't see any blankets in there. The day was already getting on by the time I came to and walked next door so I decided to head East toward the blight and see if I bought any property down that way since I didn't end up taking the home in the shadow of the bakery after all. It was a long walk and things were turning the blue gray of a rainy evening going dark for coming overcast more than precession. I came to the fields of weeds and tumble bricks and lost shopping bags and knit hats from past years turned into multicolored sidewalk band aids glued to the ground by leaves and dog pee and I started stopping at each building standing singular and appearing unoccupied, but none of them were mine. It took me an entire season to move as far ahead as I did and the trees were shedding and blowing across the ground and I was watching them go when my eye took on charcoal writing on the wide boards of a porch with empty windows. There was writing everywhere and it cut and curled like the shadows of crossing tree limbs if the sun were striking at first daylight. I didn't know whose house it was, but I had to know who would trace the veins of a building like that so I walking across another field where a home was knocked down into it's basement and covered over with dirt and crossed a street empty of cars and kicked an empty milk carton on my way up the stairs. There was thick black writing everywhere and on every single step and some dead vines that tried to impress, but were cut at the roots and left to rot. I went inside through the window into the dimness and walked through a living room that sagged in the middle where rain must have collected year in and year out. Walking along the walls to avoid the softest parts of the floor I found a sleeping bag with me inside and I took off my gloves to maintain a slip free grip and I started strangling myself until I felt my larynx collapse like a matchbox and I knelt there squeezing as hard as I could waiting for my eyes to open, but they never did. I left. I went back to the bakery beneath a starless sky and I didn't lay down to go back to my own time until the rain threatened earlier started to fall and I felt peaceful. I slept so good. And then I woke up.

The whole thing made me wonder how many unsolved murders are suicides. It's probably in horrible taste. I'm sure someone somewhere is probably being brutally raped and murdered by someone else who will never be caught. Maybe I'm already on some course for that to happen to me in my bids to connect with people I don't know. But how many people are killed by their time traveling suicidal selves. I don't want to meet myself. Not yet anyway, but I'm counting down the seconds until I have to go outside. I need some time to work on things. I hope I get some time off soon, even though I don't want it. My head hurts.

///Groove Armada - "At The River" Let's dance a little. Please? Don't make me dance by myself again.