His pee pee burned. It was all night tossing and turning. One might have said that some unadvised encounter with another should have been to blame! But then Herbert had given up on humanity long ago. Contact was strictly peripheral being limited to brief words exhanged with a counter clerk. Perhaps in an elevator to dissuade an untoward hostile look away by another occupant. But beyond that, not evern a handshake. No it was something purchased that despite public claims must have had another covert agenda. Of at least that was what his second sense had told him. It was dark and though he preferred to pad around in the day when he became too restless to stay put, he would rise to stumble about his small suite of rooms. So much jumbled information tossed about in his waking mind squeezing out any hope of rest. He couldn’t fathom when these annoying habitual obsessions had begun? Perhaps in childhood many many decades past. It was odd to him that the number of years afforded life was confined to but a single square root expression! Mathematics, so heavily relied upon by society could not accomodate the hard fast reality of animal existence. Didn’t that say something in itself? Something devised by others to distract and of course, dement one through the ritual assignment of commercial value in terms of quantifying one’s activity to routine menial tasks.
Everything in life was thrown into a shoebox. Some tiny little container so much like one of those Russian Orthodox eggs that lay one within the other, within the other, and so forth. He preferred two dimensional linearity where one could count on seeing things from horizon the horizon. Clear vision and plain speaking of a type that was now long out of fashion with the current bombarment or routine highly polished falsehood’s. Herbert had been brought up to have expected more. His square peg in a round hole too leaky for a world based upon machine tolerances applied to animal sensisbilities. Those damn aluminum cans were no doubt to be blamed for this distress. It had been so hot the days before that he had consumed five of them a day. But now he was paying a grevious price. The amount of institutional intrigue in daily life was staggering! It ws impossible to feel carefree. Not that he ever had? There seemed to always be something amiss that was so collectively elusive that he could never quite put his finger upon it. Not like some small annnoying gnat buzzing about on a morning window pane. Squish! He felt like that. Taking chances in the mind imagining that his own demise was so imminent and unavoidable that life was not longer to be counted upon save the very least available. Squeeze that same old toothpast tube carefully for almost a year in parsimonious pessimism that it was probably your last. Then at the end of its life throttle it until it surrendered the last bit of its goop upon the bristles of your overworn brush. The teeth within your head barely appreciative of such extraordinary efforts.
How he loved to dream about sin and sex! To his mind, women were but logs to throw upon the fire. Mentally useful but too demanding like himself to be able to be tolerated for too long. Their digitized animas more useful to engender titilating musings about animal matters that degraded all involved merely feeding the sigal of saturn. Useless stimulations summoning negnthrophy and social collapse. Still, his dreams remained a mystery those secretive adventures locked away at the approach of reach daylight. A muse before the mirrored sandpaper of his disappearing youth. The steady drip of aging flesh slowly erasing his own appreciation of identity and bygone youth. Dubious thoughts racing by his head in a frentic fastidious chase through his ears, one furtive thought in pursuit of the other. Nothing persisting past the mark of a few minutes. These appetites so reminicent of a lack of prospects for future existence. Their rattle in his insoucient sleep deprived consciousness a rhthym that night after night had increasingly plagued him. A derivision of a demented national form of fear porn that had swept the land. It’s rabid contemplation during day wrecking the expected peaceful sojourn of night.
His eyes unshuttered and awakened again! The startled interval of hazy blue morning light prying them apart. The fragments of what dreams lingering on pulling the rip cord to softly drift back past the veil of nothingness leaving him with the burden of an impression of their import fully beyond any possibliliy of useful means of any comprehension. The presence of the ghost of his own being safely cloaked beneath. Only the smoking embers of the cyclical trials of the day, or week, or month previous that had all run together into an amorphous one. His own reckoning pinned downed like a butterfly in the expected course of the coming day’s needful activities. Technical manuals and online tutorials to teach him what others felt important. Yet somehow never yielding a hope of oppportunity for him as they had theoretically produced for their authors. Old films of the past barely twenty years ago at year zero now reseen yielding a plethora of clues to his own demise of spirit. The ‘good old’ glory days that he could still recall from back then were so marked as the discards of decades past. When had there last been an electric touch? That prosaic hand of the lady softly placed in the loving grip of his bard? What odes of past joy had he left to farm for pleasent idles of his metaphoric king? What after all was the price of living through petty disasters if not the comfort of the promise of boundless love that much like all things in his shadowy existence had abrubtly ended then faded into the past?
The lapse of a brooding mind into a slow and steady beat of fingers arfully upon piano key progressions. An unexpected bump on the noggin discovered without regret. This mystery of a cluttered garden that if one bothered to look away from their troubles ever yielded suprises. Phantom hands offered almost beyond perception leading one there if one could be still enough to hear their silent invocations. Small decisions on the way to bigger things like minding one’s pace over errant insects taking care in their notice to avoid playing God with one’s careless gait. Great undiscovered rewards to be found in such charities that quickly taught one about their own insignificance. The task being to despite all daily distraction not get carried away to forget. That repeating question, again, and again! “What purpose to go out of one’s way just to be mean in spirit?” One’s own survival up to the moment guaranteed by the fact that a foot much more immense and less expected might suddenly hover above. Its shadow a preminition that all things everywhere come to a final end. The path to the end much more terrible than the fact of same itself. Making life easy by not abiding all those things that made it so difficult. And developing a low tolerance for so easily surrendering one’s self to be disgruntled.