Tag Archives: anti-Social

Over the Mountains

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If you’re going to do something extraordinary with your life, you need to start at it young. What you’re attempting is life outside the crowd which is where all the opportunities are, the money and the resources. Not just mansions and nice suits but even rental apartments and being able to buy enough food for your (eventual) family, you need to be in the crowd, or at least nibbling what they drop; even if you aren’t in an office and looking forward to casual Fridays, you’re making ends meet by serving those types of people, the crowd. So if you want out of the crowd you need to start at it early, because you need to learn how to eat + sleep + shower (if that’s your things) + fuck + survive in the shadows on the other side of the mountain range. If you want absolutely anything the crowd has — a cabin in the woods, a motorcycle, clothing, children, a stable life, a calm death — at any point in your life, you need to start early because the crowd has a monopoly on all of those decent things and so if you dream of finding them on the other side of the mountains, you need to start early. You’re attempting to do what few people have lately done. You’re starting from scratch, with no guidebook, few resources and few friends; no friends who can help.

But what you’re doing is worth it. Because at no time in history have basic human goals, a piece of property, food, clothing, an honest death, been so monopolized and guarded by the crowd, the mountain passes so completely avoided by highways and main streets and side roads, that to find them and understand what they offer is a feat worth its own weight.

And what I have to say here is something about college, the social pipeline from school to school, desk to desk, a new desk when you graduate from your college desk. It’s a pipeline. And I’ve run out steam to keep this rant going.

Throwing kitsch at passing cars

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Skunked beer spills the counter and soaks into the food. Cans flung at walls, at furniture and doors; cans scatter the floor. Head lolling in lonesome; drunk, happy isolation. Enjoyed for the moment from my kitchen chair. Last week I had a bar-mate tattoo on my chest at random his choice of senseless petroglyphs. I passed out in the dirt at the park, shirtless, inviting Earth into fresh open ink wounds. I woke up to an 8-year-old stealing my shoes. She argued for ownership and I did not contest. It seemed like the price to pay. Because I can’t keep a job and I can’t see your face ever looking pretty in a wedding dress. Sorry, but grocery shopping is for douchebags and I won’t build a crib for a single little person. I am trying to think. Beer cans swept into closets and fist-sized decorative decisions through the drywall. These are the only arrangements I can live with. I am trying to think. My arm sticks to the table, old sweat and PBR, and I can hear the termites eating through the wall. A moment of awareness, crystal and pure, and what I hear are the termites eating through the fucking wall. My chest is paper-thin, eyes wide and skull gaping like the crust of an orange lava flow. Brain matter exposed. Walk through the house crushing beer cans under boots, finding furniture insufficiently destroyed. Shelves dashed to the ground, chairs smashed on the walls, throw myself on the table till I shatter to the floor. There are a dozen points of bright starlight on my naked bleeding body. Sore and abraded. And broken: these twelve points of starlight feel warm and intense. I am only your symptom. But I can honestly attest that the purpose of reality is no longer ours.

Modern Man Don’t Stand No Chance

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I don’t know what brought me here, I’ve awoken from a nightmare 4 years in the making and find myself strangling with a JC Penny tie around my neck. I sit in bed in the early a.m. and I don’t look at you – I don’t look at the bed or the dusty typewriter on my desk, I stare at the wall until my brain turns numb. I won’t think of it; I won’t think of us or anything at all. Willingly brain-dead the morning routine before the commute down Route 80 – neurons shriveling, a brain matter withering into the mundane hum of the skull. I find myself at work with a tire-iron bashing the hood of my car. I don’t want a Keurig or all the clothes in your closet and I will go through life with a single pair of jeans. I’ve thrown in the trash every little gift you’ve bought me. I’ve been drinking beer every evening on the drive home, just so I can stand walking into our house. I’ve blown out the speakers to heavy death metal and dreamt of wrapping the car ‘round the tree in our front yard: a windshield shattering in my face and a welcomed wave of fresh air. I want to be free of this life, from washing machines and office PC’s and the nights we sit through in silence because three years ago I choose to say I Love You. And I still do. But I can’t live with myself enslaved to shitty illusions and the delusion that plunging a career through my chest is somehow what’s best for ourselves. This morning I put our kid’s chair through the flat-screen: no more watching Sesame Street. No more watching ER dramas or those lying commercial comedies. There isn’t a single thing to laugh at here. This morning I screamed that would you please just shut your mouth, we’ll pay the god damned thieving bills when they turn the power off. There’s still a shattered refrigerator pitcher on the floor that I refuse to sweep up. There are holes in the dry-wall. I broke your precious bathroom mirror and flushed his toys down the toilet. I’ve lost it. I woke up this morning and shaved my head with a number 2. No more pompadour comb-over, this sweet rider on the storm, I woke myself up this morning and can’t see that it’ll ever come back.

Depths of Something Disturbing

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It began with a long day in bed when I slipped too deeply into my head… Short walk to class, an hour long now trying to avoid the eyes of each person I pass by.

I am the person walking up and down the same flight of stairs, convinced, utterly convinced this is the quickest way to nowhere.

I am the hollow-eyed nightmare shaking, standing in the campus square, trying to ascertain which direction I was supposed to go.

I am the unreachable stranger walking laps through the mall bundled thick in winter jackets on an August hot day, speaking nothing to no one, softly muttered to no one.

These are the gaps in my flesh – please come take a peer at this hollowness, the oblivion inside these cracks.

This is the fragile waste bucket seated beside you in class, huddle forward on my desk with a face distantly pacing the floor beside my chair; that is my spunk right there on the desk, naked and scared and bared boneless for all to feast.

Bury yourself face-first in the muck of this mire, self-negated with nothing left to hide, nothing to strive for or to die; the wandering days melting down the clock-faces into a formless pulp rid of meaning.

These are troubled times.

The skeleton stalks through the bookshelves for something to eat, having found behind his eyes the rats that infest the manifolds of his brain; having found nothing of interest, he wastes 7 hours browsing internet trash, and then goes back to sleep.

This is the trouble with trying to complete the litany of tasks dictated by a dream of socially-acceptable success – these dents in the table are the blood-smudges of a forehead that bears repeating: It cannot fucking focus. Have you paid your fucking speeding tickets?

Did you finish your homework on time?

Did you remember to pay the bills your wife keeps asking you to pay the bills but instead I put rat-traps in the ceiling is what I did for all of fifteen minutes yesterday. That is what I did yesterday. The rats haven’t been heard again and I am safely huddled in my bed trying not to openly weep; it is now my new belief the rats are dead.

There is a purpose here buried in the interference and the babble of a family speaking distantly at Christmastime – distantly from across the dinner table. And the task here is keeping track of the echoes to listen for my name while simultaneously keeping track of the little sparking flashes fluttering ‘cross my corneas. The fluttering it needs to be pinned…

to stick them to the wall with nails pulled from this cranial rot, stick them to the walls the butterflies with their wings spread wide and poke at them, the wings, until I’m sure each one has died.

But I am utterly convinced it is just as futile to die.

I can’t be sure where I was supposed to be

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The store is harsh white bright lights with splashes of green the brand color, peach square floor tiles and faux-mahogany wood, and the person behind the register with hands squarely planted on the counter shoulders up, What Can I Do For You? in a tone done repeating himself. I have come to the wrong place. Are you the new hire? he asks. Yes, yes I’m here to…, I haven’t spoken a word to a person all day it’s maybe 9pm. Who hired you? he asks. I talked to, Mary, I tell him. Customers passing in and out a filing line of swiping goods and moving on, the man at the register in glimpses between the coming-going customers. Where should I park? I ask. Where did you park? this the woman standing beside me, Mary she’s also facing the register. She repeats herself. She has a thick accent I place as maybe Azerbaijani because it’s something I’ve never heard of. On the side, I answer. You need to park at the gas pumps, she says facing me now with a palm outstretched towards the gas pumps out the front windows. I stammer because sweat prickles under my face and I’m in a thick sweatshirt because I thought it was going to be cold outside but with these bright white lights hot and the body heat of the people who won’t stop moving, just appearing at the register quick-swipe their goods goodbye. The man at the register’s come out from behind the register walking hastily to stand before me, he is short maybe Vietnamese or Turkish or Peruvian but I can’t understand him and he’s right in front of me looking closely at me and asking, Where are you supposed to be? Who hired you? What are you doing in my store? I thought you called me, I answer.