The Same Weekly Chair Remains Open

What a time to be alive! A time when few if any really have any firm grip on the true nature of their own reality. So many look for a place of safety to harbor there lives but so often find a barrier of mischief making that precludes finding one. The search for even one’s own truth too heavily veiled in multiple meanings like backstops upon a theater stage. A false continuum of regularity that suggests a universal lie that there is a consensus. The hawk to the squirrel, the wolf to the hen, the dragon to the knight. Predator and prey fighting in what is loosely deemed the imagination. The real contest occurring outside what is considered rational but is so much more real than what is ascribed as real itself. Run and hide from it if you will! Or stand and fight and be torn asunder only to awaken into its world once again the next night to service this same choice afresh. Dark alleys and empty corridors with the presence of something angry and raging ever near.

People give up on you after a while. Nothing ever resolved. It’s the same old story where nothing new ever happens! He was in a terrible funk. His mood over the last few days as downcast as the unseasonably cold weather outside. The facts despoiling his fantasy of setting his life aright in light of the old way he was accustomed to having gone awry. His station in society having fallen through the roof of the newly burned French cathedral. The enemy was at his gates and his slings were out of commission and he was all out of arrows. His residence now fallen into the abyss within the belly of Sheol. If anyone needed a definition of Hell then they need not look any further. What other narrative would do I need to lay across my own? Self-image and self destruction. To draw upon the past there has to be a mutually respected past tense to draw upon. Destroy one’s public persona and they are left with overwhelming actions to persuade others. Or conversely to recede into ineffective anonymous invisible non-entities. The second option being the most chosen in these current times. The threat of those scrubbing bubbles of administrative social detergent if they catch on to the former threatening to apply overwhelming force to negate it. The art of survival in our Orwellian age is not taking either scenario too much to heart.

The man on the coach of the public transport appearing out of place. Everything about him being a paper doll mismatch of items that might have been claimed by three separate different types of characters. A brand new business suit a size or so too large. The pants cuffs of the same exposing old over-worn zippered ankle boots. A brown leather rucksack the strap of which being a worn bandoleer across the chest compressing the blue woolen tie so hard as to protrude like a second tongue from above the waistcoat. Nerdy dark plastic frame eyeglasses upon a head that looked like a bloodless slab of fat enriched beef. The entity within quite obviously maintaining an unsure stance stretched across several worlds each of which did not fully accept him.

This funny edgy morning of serial disappointments in doubtful alternate cuisines and diverted possibilities pointing one towards the worst of circumstances. The subtlety of the underbelly exposed to the randomness of subsidiary behaviors of unfamiliar strangers. The human form losing its panache turning to a nondescript lumpy approximations of collective crowd consciousness. The U.K. lad at the next tabled behind the bulk of his girlfriend in-between looking lizard-like above the plate just below his chin. Busily bending those hometown Midland’s vowels to an extreme. This host buildings architecture enclosing us speaking silent volumes of so many immediately identifiable familiar significations enjoyed by former generations that once ruled long past. Nothing like those old days of, “Pardon Me!” and “Excuse Me!“, when you can knock over some arthritic old fellow’s stick and not just obliviously pass by. A certain degree of inherent ability in unconsciously prognosticating future events by drawn imagery. Events and trends in black and white on the pages of one’s own personal iconography. Can one be happy in the company of one of these equality of outcome possessed sock puppets? Those worn down fellow creatures that have been cast into fatal mediocrity of continuously obsessive consensus in all things long before approach of adulthood. Each in possession of an equivalently important personal drama no better or worse than any other! Rote everyday survival triumphing over the possibility of engaging in chaotic romance. True love deposed to the status of an occasional hitchhiker relegated to an all too short ride in one’s back seat. Their youthful follies transformed incrementally into twisted caricatures barely resembling their former physical presence in youth. That “Once and Future Kingdom”, that they were to inherit now distant and too far beyond reach having been long ago lodged firmly in stone like Arthur’s sword within the firmament of what they never could be in the first place.

Eyesight getting ever worse and working towards an imminent rendezvous with legally blind. Passing youthful feminine arrogance showing it’s absence of petticoats in defiance of everything that it has been taught but has yet to begin to comprehend. Too apparently with one’s own in a room populated mainly by prosperous malade’s. No time for self pity, just learn to adapt! That characteristic open bowed leg positioning of a lifelong cellist waiting like an alligator’s jaws for an audience to entrap. Her sex open but not to repel! Cataracts covering over morbid self perception. The low spark of high heeled clip clop foreign femmes. Others in pantomime of, “When the body’s dimensions gets rowdy the clothes draped upon it look dowdy!” Once more the silent time worn chant of, “This is the point in life where the sum total of my entire existence has led me to!” That thought interposed with an equally persuasive recycling rendition of that old Vicki Carr song, “Is that all there is?” My patent response to the diminishing indifference of others as they pass being to demonstrably laugh at them. Perhaps then to put both hands to the cheeks of may face and violently rub them exclaiming “Two Weeks!” repetitively like that large female character in Total Recall?

A step ahead of human instinct. Those culturally adept swiftly wending their way to the last of available seating past the walking wounded of the aged. A couple make their long ellipse past the center of my solar orbit to land beside me. The latest spawn of the land of Germanicus bred in the spirit of Arminius translates the inscription upon the wall for his own Asian paramour. “Deutsche uber alles macht muss ordung sein haben!” “Get your griddle cakes!“, an internal mental voice rings out. There still are hunchbacks within this cathedral crowd. “Les pobre salo!” Coming closer from a distance, “An vieux homme ancien avec bard gris e une valise d’bombe!” “Il arrive!”

A bowed ennui! No doubt derived from the silent era of flickering moving pictures. A corner on the personal narrative that it recalls but the details of which in a personal sense that otherwise cannot be but barely remembered. The subsequent selections hearkening to the same silver nitrate ghostly world long expired. That brief in-between era of inferred drama by the collective post-war humanity frozen overhead in patterns of sparkling terrazzo. All those enraptured within that short seemingly bulletproof sojourn of physical beauty unaware of the quicksand of old age waiting just ahead. The low vibration of the cello summoning birds just outside the windows of this hall. The sad exclamation of my own mother just after my father died rising to my lips from nowhere that she will never be held in anyone’s arms ever again. One cough after another suddenly breaking the mood. Those susceptible to unconscious suggestion fall in line like dominoes. The high theater of personal existentialism by Ravel buttressed against the sonorous emotional abandon of Debussy. Hallowed notes and frenetic tempos. Perhaps it is true that one comes to have no other emotionally charged existence outside this hall from week to week every Wednesday? The man with the mystery of the satchel abruptly leaves his seat still carrying it. The absurdity of outrageous yips and yaps of respiratory distress breaks out yet again. The mood is once again despoiled. One can imagine the insoluble issues to be encountered in playing this music in the time of a spreading epidemic?

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Floating Through A Mental Distortion Out Of Focus

The sequence began with everything in the room being out of focus. The usual relics so familiar about the room barely distinguishable in a haze while strains of a snippet of the Doobie Brother’s song lyric from ‘Black Water’ recycling over and over again in the head. Gray morning light adding to the muddiness of the tableau.

Then the room suddenly snapping into a clear focus reminiscent of years past.

Dark morning and the strutting back and forth of black African ghetto mama CTA motor femme lecturing the front cabin on the minutia of safety demanding universal attention from everyone on the car. Has someone gotten killed the night before and management is trying to do damage control on the early morning Rush Hour crowd. But the longer the harangue lasts, the more evident it becomes that this old black crow is simply exceeding her authority along with her station in life. Her all too official Black-Splaining goes on interminably for a period of more minutes than digits on one’s left hand. This sort of inversion of authority is yet another first on this banjo train from suburbia through darkest ghetto Africa West side Chicago to the headwaters of its downtown Loop. Another symptom of fatal urban cancer striking this post-Rustbelt apocalyptic metropolitan burg. My only comment in response to another building block of wisdom upon my own already too shaky Tower of Babel is that the entire pile of experience has left me with a lasting ever prevalent cynicism in terms of human nature. You only seem to encounter the worst though you are told that somewhere the opposite still most probably exists.

Call me Bushmills! I recall growing up with my own dramas of life affected by major motion pictures that my parents were addicted to attending during the early years of their marriage. Not surprisingly, I caught their disease. Even today I still cannot be sure who really raised me, Kirk Douglas or Jean Simmons or my own loving blue collar forebears? The different events of my own life sharing the same soundtracks of the latest crop of blockbusters. Starting with the symphonic blustering horns announcing some pageantry of Roman empire dimensions in horn and string ensembles but eventually dying down to Jazz based riffs advancing the inner souls of down to earth every-men. My idle thoughts transformed into scenarios of action based widescreen sentiments now hopes and dreams for a future existence no less exciting. My most intimate thoughts in some ways a lubricant to a toy-like existence that signified hope and possible fulfillment from an otherwise affected dream scape. Writing for its own sake alone. For an audience that doesn’t exist. That will never see! Blindness on a seesaw with sight somewhere upon a tightrope between possessing character and surrendering to futility. How many airport terminals and train stations have caught my most valuable moments in gazes back into that deep crevice of my own soul? Decades past where frequent missteps too often gave their way to indolence and gluttony that would then hold me in their sway.

How time and the unwanted accumulation of years transforms us into funny little people that have no possible relevance to our former selves as we once hoped to be. Old wrinkled faces of gray-haired former friends summed up by those bygone tunes melting conscious experience into melancholy. It is difficult to be an unwitting icon of times that never existed summoning a specious fiction of the past for the benefit of a world of youngsters that do not really know what they expect to find in the present. The folly as presented on the big screen making that fiction real. That old talent for observation translated to eye to hand control upon the blank page. Taking bits and pieces of magic and reassembling them to fill the emptiness of too many solitary hours. So much passes in the light of day! Only the present offers the condolence of things the way they should be! Some there making a career of barging into the affairs of others both on and off duty. It is the movement of the hands and eyes that attract the most attention. To properly set up the muse requires not just practice by knowledge but the desires of those that one wishes to impress and what makes them return. Love, danger, tempo, connection, intelligence, stupidity and fashioning a narrative that plods and unsteady existence on the tightrope between these opposites until ten minutes before the finish of the last reel. Movement to movement inferring what would otherwise be considered a mystery. The worship of mystery being more seductive in its appeal to more active minds who totter on the brink of possibly realizing.

Present a positive pleasant person that shows their appreciation of a shared experience if you want to leave a good impression in your wake. Sometimes an exercise in the formality of pretense. There are some people that only wish to experience what they feel are the pleasanter parts of the world and steer clear of the nasty or too challenging ones. They miss so much of the totality of life and become brittle like a glass ornament. Why do so many too willingly trade their own long term comfort for temporal wealth? Sleepwaking through life distracted by the uninterrupted passage of railroad cars full of goods heading their way to intercede with their aspirations? All concerns subscribed to incomplete open ended solutions in the fantasy of now. Yet impossible to recall any resolution in the next moment? To be able to strike a notably remarkable figure at all occasions suggesting that all is possible may be summoned from within goaded on by an undetected insecurity? You can tell by the inherent posture in the style of walking the degree of self-importance that is manifested in that individual.

Dreams presenting three situations but at the same time. The atmosphere presented by background music in the hall exposing my weariness. I started reading again when I found the book permitting. And the free license once again of drinking allowing a filling out of my middle betraying a fall into such bad habits. The red (haired) knight (female) of Augsburg (Chicago). Boink! Depleted of energy on the edge of the stupor of unconsciousness. This feeling shackles, even threatening to suppress further thought or speculations. This lumbering carcass of an animal pinning the rider not allowing him to make an escape. The naked courtesan online with her pendulous soft oversized breasts. Their incredible mass bouncing heavily elastically contradicting her otherwise supple slender dimensions. Twin udders being manipulated from afar by strangers paying a tab online to push a button powering an internalized pink plastic jelly donut lodged within her snatch. The vibrations from it causing her to undulate he most obvious proportions before a blog cam resulting in seismic tremors of a very fleshy dimension. The exploitation of her most intimate parts by indifferent participants encouraging her twin demons to mesmerize these customers who toss away their wealth in B.F. Skinner idleness to fulfill a Maslow hierarchy of unfulfilled persistent continued neediness.

The muse interrupted by a skinny pencil thin Jew storms unrepentant across the stage surmounted by his black velvet yarmulke like a Machiavellian prince. Out of season but in full command of the exhibition space, or so he thinks, of all he sees. Such is the nature of our times to allow an empire of spiders to take hold of our society and squander it. Female musicians sweep back their hair while male counterparts fluff their tuxedo tails. How would you feel if you had a those things tugging if you bent over? The clap of the profane begins for those tittles as the performers return to the stage. This exceptional quality of youth remaining ever impressive before it begins to sag and then to fall away. How many times can one tolerate uninterrupted coughing in a concert even if it is by ignorant Germans or paper rattling ‘half and half‘ privileged pseudo Negros? Part of the performer’s task is to provide absolute silence between the notes! What could be a more memorable artifact of the performing than an overly empowered accolade recognizing nice titties? If we must descend to the level of dumb animals then why not go all the way! That goddamn fucking Kraut is coughing again for the twentieth time! These fucking animals belong in a barn for despoiling the subtlety of the performance with their careless give a shit attitude. Could everyone affecting this hall please die of congestive heart failure now? No respect for the many years of hard practice and familial sacrifice to then have to contend with these uneducated baboons today!

A castoff into emptiness. The material world slowly rejecting him without a single sustaining fantasy. One to know one’s fate far less better. Too focused on the all engrossing self protection of strictly enforced anonymity. The need to find some scarp of happiness as a life preserving tool. Naked like old Crusoe without his wreck to plunder to sustain him. The description of desolation in a modern transitional era of a mind fucking global world utopia. Indifference, it fits the fiction of the remnants of that former past tense world lost in space and time that one can no longer afford. The images faintly flickering like dying fire light lost in the mute breath of early morning. Some take up more space than others. Other too quickly put their business on the street as a matter of dollars and cents. Sentiment in the expected artifice that professional morons make all too apparent around the campfire by tittering away at their own telecommunicated trivial nonsense. Other reciting loudly from their phones as if they haven’t left their living rooms. Vinegar expressions through this same old ghetto faces wrested from forgotten generations of their current most mortal enemies. Vacant atmosphere of shivering latent fears by those that refuse to mind their own business. Human heads stacked one atop the other on the totem pole of doubt. This is a reverberate sense of loneliness. That common disease that afflicts its hosts irregardless of their awareness of its presence. Looking up from this traveling coach to see the world’s reflections passing over the silhouette of anonymous self.

Music for airports. All the usual requests subject to availability. The younger family members not knowing any better. The resident male of the establishment having a decided resemblance with an Istanbul train conductor from the Turkish trunk of the Orient Express. A noticeable exhale from a nearby table that exhausts steam. The instant of a random gaze that might dwell within the delayed reminiscence of a precocious seven year old princess on the other end for several generations. Behind the ears the scrivener plays a prop in an unknown drama. A play no doubt on real life. How children can ruin the hips of an otherwise perfect figure for an entire life? How the mind can juxtapose all these disparate elements into something resembling the most obvious of muses! Beauty and insanity crowned by what appears to be reasonable obsessions. Elastic wallpaper busily curling through the ages. Egg tempera and gesso wizened expressions gone permanently sour. Petty annoyances from menstrual flow interrupting Star Wars expectation. Shadows where people once stood. Near proximity’s where the seer sat fading quickly past.

Time out on the cattle car back. Building after building, after building, after building, after . . .

Baby Boomer Bashing

[A response addressed to Paul Begata on the topic of his Esquire article, “The Worst Generation – Or how I stopped worrying and learned to hate the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation”]

 

Dear ‘asshole’,

I think that you have earned the pejorative form of address. Why? Well, it is always easy to prostitute yourself for the hope of gain by dissing those who were once well-established but are now ceding over the care and feeding of society to the successive generation. An easy target to be sure, now that the conglomerates that you work under have vouchsafed the transfer of their wealth to that malicious instrument of social dislocation of the aged by a wealth depleting medical system known as ACA, AKA, Obamacare. I suspect that there might be some penis envy abounding in your cherry picked examples that I am sure you thought would strike click bait chords of reference in the minds of current readers finding themselves a bit further down the Fallopian tubed pipeline. I hope that you and your crew don’t really expect to be called journalists so much as petty carnival midway showman that simply pretend mastery of topics that you so obviously know little if nothing about. Data mining tidbits from Nexus Lexus and stringing them together irregardless of logical associations of historical connections or inadvertent legacies. Thus you are only able to describe this period in terms of the same exponents that were derived from the previous incarnations of the same organizations that you now received a check from. If you want to uncover decadence and it effects then why not exhume some back issues of Look, Life or your own most beloved Esquire! Why not peer into the soupy consciousness of your predecessors to see how their spew was actively attempting to foul the already muddy waters of what we the Boomers already knew? That the classic Shakespearean drama of our age in the insider driven internationally based corporate coup to murder our own King Andrew by the hermetic machinations of a maliciously duplicitous LBJ. Your particular social ‘estate’ being tasked to foster a transition from this Macbeth-like sequel that led so many other successive generations astray. At least these same Boomer’s that you so lovingly despise dealt with the insecurity of the time making many false steps along the way through illegitimate wars and a virus-like malaise of commercial exploitation of their distress until they found stability such as it was in building families and the careers necessary to support self-sanctimonious egocentric career happy turds of this present era just like you. Do you, and your own, ever consider the risk of quitting that all so important upwardly rising career that is ever busy with composing some corporate agenda based momentary drivel of the day as instructed by your editorial board? Who then are the real sellouts? Those that stumbled to find themselves and made mistakes along the way or that current cell phone obsessed proletariat that simply finds trendy platitudes to bolster their own narrow agendas while chewing their way to the top of momentary national visibility like some pack of poorly informed hyenas? I cannot feel sorry for you or your class of clueless mercenaries that feel so easily inspired to brush off the vagaries of truth all for the privilege of being demonstratively at the forefront of leading this current generation astray with your thinly veiled rhetoric favoring some ultimate Orwellian sense of superiority. What a shame that Boomer’s like us were all too worried about the world as it was being surreptitiously aggrandized about our ears to allow such foul concepts as radical Feminism and a persistent Socialist fervor to take hold. We should have been more like our Politically Incorrect fathers and flushed the lot of you down the sink.

Boris Wittinsky

A Serial Hermetic’s Description

Hermetic could be the proper term from a subset of popular terminology to describe the nature of contemporary individual existence. Whatever that was? How could one make proper judgements in a world they no longer traveled within? The world that he knew was a silent place bereft for the most part of all sounds of others save for occasional random intrusions. Had he been a prisoner incarcerated he might have had more contact on a regular basis. Existence tightly moderated in a world of extremes. The boundary between the vast distances that were inferred a ‘touch and go‘ no man’s land where one was careful not to stray too far in either direction. The old days where one was unbounded as a traveler now gone along with the blissful confidence of youthful ignorance. The notion of a hope of regaining the same lay impatiently behind tightly shut eyelids waiting impatiently for another dawning.

The face blankly staring forth into itself. Emotionless, it claimed no ownership beyond that of a possible one-time passing acquaintance. A worn block of wood extent as a fragment of what had once been a beam that had by some random chance of fate made its way from the waters edge to this place. The home of our species his mind instantly quipped having been the sea. This thought shifted along with its inconsequential memory of the morning before as he turned his head and propelled himself to a sitting position on the edge of his cot with his arms. The mental comfort of his own things in surround within the small bed chamber still remained despite the peripheral sentiment of angst that worried his gut. “Strange?“, he thought. Strange how the stomach seemed the final source of all existential concerns. So odd to that civilized society would freely provided those that it had formally condemned with a last meal of their choosing. Albeit within the confines of the same level of mediocrity that the institution that held them would generally provide. To all others without, the responsibility for their last meals was totally on them!

Did his mind dare to wonder what lay beyond same anymore? Life would struggle on from this point for a number of hours until the inverse would bring the passing of all natural light. Such was the cycle what was for him in particular simply the random turn of a page in some old discarded phone book. The furthest one might hope for was outside the windows this morning with the coming of a dawn rising behind the somber low gray curtain of clouds that draped the edge of the horizon. There had once been singular motivations that had affected him past the point of obsession causing him to risk all so many times. That need for satiating an impulse to stalk favor with the other sex according to the current acceptable precepts of the day, presumably to mate, also a fleeting memory. The episodes having so often extended into futile expeditions that cost much in terms of time and emotions but yielded little in terms of frivolity. Like an wounded animal stung too many times from challenging an electric fence his desires had cooled to the point of freezing. One dare not play the dreamer in this world of man as his one and only God! Dare on see one’s own reflection of actual existence as it really was?

The illumination come of the approach of late afternoon lighting the inside of the personal museum where once familiar others tread, sat, contemplated and called home. A languid static long lasting moment that quietly whispers to one that they might have simply left the room in the brief span of an instant past rather than a decade or more past their deaths. Time shown up by the impression of their persistent lingering presences. One wonders if they every really left playing the music that they knew in their most promising era now unimaginable lost in ancient history. Outside the imminent departure of the Sun is cast by the length of building shadows reaching slowly across sidewalks and streets. Catching the moment between one’s eyebrows straight center through to that weak spot in one’s chest where armor plate imperfectly protects. Putting on the regular raiment’s over worn and frayed but indulging in the realization that different garbs assumed affect one accordingly to the stature they suggest.

Verbal Scribble’s From An Incontinent ID

A fetal figure in a darkened room curled around itself upon a ragged cot stirs and begins mumbling a series of muffled utterances. Mute figures adjoining him grumble as they spiral away from his direction.

I suffer the sleep of old men that can only dream in the light of their past. Yet I can never again awaken to it.
Though the good old days always remain golden.
No one can ever recall the bad times leveraged in-between.
They get swept aside by the raging current of the new ones.

The room sinks to absolute stillness for a moment, then the whispering voice resumes.

I think! I think?
Well, it’s up to . . ?
Up to what? Hmm?
What’s my problem?
Why must I think so tough?
Maybe because I am too worried about number
One?

I’m not worried about anything around me.
Interesting isn’t it?
I’ve done all sorts of stuff!
. . . and yet nobody knows it.
You’d think they’d know it?
But they don’t!

Who’s fault is that?
I don’t know?
It’s say to play a morality game.
Oh yeah!
Never blame anybody else.
Always blame yourself.

(pause)

Am I right?
Point taken.
If I don’t go out of my way to let people know . . . 
. . . then what can I expect them to do?

And now of course I am in an era where people are very narrow in their acceptabilities.
And they rely on being behind a firewall of electronic technology.
Witness their phones, their websites, the way society has been re-patterned over the last twenty years to create a bunch of barriers and narrowed gateways.
But still . . .
It’s not enough to say, “Oh well!”, get one off the hook.
Because it doesn’t!.
So what do I start doing right now?

“Shut Up!”, a voice cries out from the darkness in the corner of the room.

Number One, you’ve got to stop being mad at everybody.
Because really, you’re not mad at them.
You’re mad at yourself!
You’re just using them as a convenient scapegoat.
Somebody else has a problem?

“Put a sock in it!“, another voice calls out.

It’s their problem, not your problem.
You want to get mad at them?
Why?
It’s not going to change anything.
It’s just going to make you feel a whole lot worse.
You don’t need that.
You’ve got to start showing some smarts.
Start acting better.
Start thinking better!

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!“, another small chorus shouts out.

Let’s put it this way.
This is a prison and you’re on parole.
Start acting like it!
Or else ways . . .

“PIPE DOWN!“, a silhouette spits out in a commanding authoritarian voice from the opening of a steel doorway.

. . . you end up staying in this goddamn rotten cell for the rest of your like.
Maybe longer?
Strange huh?
Well, that’s the way it is.

“Get used to it!”

The Thousand, And One Clown

I recall that I just wanted to become successful when I was in high school. Someone that had power, smarts and other people looked up to as same. Little did I ever realize that others within my small group of friends that seemed less likely would reach those height of above average conventionality. To hear me now, a half a century later, you would think that the term success had never been coined for me within my own customary lexicon. Yet, happenstance birthed of boredom had revealed over social media that this very situation had come to pass. A gentle unprepossessing fellow seemingly indecisive and socially inept now on the other side of years of study in select universities had climbed the corporate ladder. I had not. He ran a major corporate division directly effecting the lives of tens of thousands and I had been found wanting in reliably functioning within my own. He was by the standards of this day a dynamic and trendsetter. And I for all my efforts could not influence anyone save for some occasional temporal pity for my own tenuous ongoing situation in a protracted history of serial lifetime failures.

It was a shock of sorts to wake up to such a bitter realization. And I began to weigh myself accordingly against my approximation of what I imagined my friendly rival had achieved over the intervening years. What had he given up and how had he been changed by that subsequent path through life? What would have remained that I could recognize or relate to in terms of who he formerly was? Who then was the fool that had gone to rot? And who was the sturdy hand upon the wheel that had kept their humanity throughout? It would have been easy to dismiss his achievements as falling prey to the evil false material focused gods of the day. And then toss them off to their being but a corollary of a larger more self-destructive demented mentality fostered by current society. One that seemed Hellbent on convincing the entire planet to consume itself out of existence. But the many decades of my own varied existence within another portion of this same fishbowl suggested that reality of one’s expectations had to take into account personal survival within that equation. Monetary success aside, the ability to build relationships while fending off the aggression’s of a myriad of competing rivals was a notable achievement of its own to be celebrated. And what had I to show over that same period of time but an uncountable number of ideas and false starts that all eventually petered out to go nowhere.

Could it have been any wonder that this adulthood of my own had mirrored that same fantasy world of a childhood bound adolescence in constructing a protective shell of self-delusion? One that daily suggested to me that the true path of sanity rested within my own notions alone? Now, having unexpectedly been taken aback that someone that I once knew and had not taken note of had become a meteor on his way to the top, there were grave doubts. As far as society was concerned I was the Jason Robards character but without the support of the Broadway theater crowd’s acclaim. The measure of my own beam no different, if not insubstantially much less, than all the many faceless entities throughout the planet that lived out an innocuous existence only to go quietly unnoticed back into the vast anonymous pool of eternity. Though one could equivocate that all the great works and wealth of countless ancient undiscovered empire lay within the dust on one’s credenza, the sting of the personal awareness of devoting so much effort over the bulk of my life considered frivolously misspent by common standards weighed heavily. The individual self had been too routinely catered too and satiated at the expense of everything considered respectable by that larger unspoken covenant of society that set the rules by which all humans in civilized society abide.

But then, what could this mean to me? Could it explain the persistence of an isolation that marked so many years of friends and acquaintances drifting away as their lives progressed passed all the many milestones of conventionality? Each successive era’s shifting viewpoints evolving passed what remained forever static and immutable in my own case. That unchanging focus upon one’s self alone come of unrelenting solitude clashing more and more with those others around me who were slowly building families and banding together in small communities to shelter and protect them from radical characters like me. The only thing left on my own side of the equation to recommend some validity being simply the fact of myself. So what if there was no equity of existence because there was no immortality! So what if all the material works that one had struggled hard to produce would end up  unacknowledged save by a municipal worker hoisting them from the curb into that waiting maw at the back of his garbage truck for a one way ride to oblivion. So what if all one’s intellectual postulating and long winded redefining of human experience that had  taken in from ‘outside the box’ would mean nothing to the average ‘schmo‘ or ‘schmo-ette‘! The world was chaos and constant war! And society was, and would always be for better or worse, the roof over one’s head no matter how hard one tried to ignore it! Better to be a captain in Hell than a slave to an illusory paradise!

Did that mean that society was absolutely right and I was completely wrong just because it was the only game in town? Even if the people with the worst sense of human nature represented in their stated goals seemed to be in totally charge of it? Was my friend of yesteryear on the leading end of so many others of our own misguided  generation that had been spirited away by a false call for instant Utopia? But had been struck by reason and relented to embrace common sense rationality? One that stated in order to survive one had to ‘go along to get along‘? The price of everyday survival did possibly include a willingness to chip off pieces of your own free and unbounded soul and trade them in for a piece of the action in a lion’s share of a perpetually entrepreneurial spirit. In spite of same, I myself would continue on writing my own daily editions of incendiary angst ridden sonnets belying what freedom meant in my own terms. Feigning cleverness in leaving liberal clues gleaned from my own occasional forays into the ‘straight world‘, most of them now twenty years long past stale. The overreach of current times setting loose upon all mentally stultifying stratagems both physical and psychological. Regiments of successive versions of trendy little boxes in varying dimensions. Some with handy headphone jacks that could fit in the palm of your hand and take along with you. And some with four tires that one would pay for each month for the privilege of keeping washed and waxed to stay shiny in a garage. The overload of overlapping everyday conventions needed to be observed in order to get ahead beyond crushing to the sensibilities of someone who not only did not believe in them but abhorred them.

It was hard now to clearly resurrect any lucid memories from better times under all this mounting scar tissue. That projector bulb in picture box within had grown too dim to the point that even old familiar shadows were now unrecognizable. The hardest most bitter reality of one’s existence being an increasing inability to maintain ownership over one’s own daytime’s. And not just simple sovereignty over increasingly frequent sleepless empty black angst ridden night. What counterbalance could I offer now to that mounting banality of unexceptional sameness that presented itself each day all around me beyond a constant sense of conventional competitiveness with myself to try to outwit it for the sake of preserving animal survival within a technologically oppressive system based mentality that treated you like just another disposable commodity? But business is business! And there was no longer any surviving community that noted a God in the heavens to reprimand this earthly paradise of man’s initiatives to care one way or another what might be right. The only law now in force being one of survival. And ultimately not getting caught! That old term, ‘Law of the Jungle‘, redefined from one of being stalked by a hungry tiger to satisfying the monthly demands for prompt payment of one’s bills on account. The true art of modern ‘success‘ being the preservation of some form of individuality while also doing one’s best to forestall those many institutionally imposed inevitable’s that like a mighty unstoppable Juggernaut would eventually crush one in the end. True respect in the popular sense of the same being reserved to those who could muster an exceptional degree of endurance to persist beyond the efforts of most all other cogs to survive this perpetual machine.

A Slowly Passing Nighttime Fancy

A man is laying flat on his back with half a cigarette burning in his hand staring straight up watching the shadows from headlights dance across his ceiling. His eyes moving sightless across following the arcing movements as he talks to himself in a low vacant tone. The narration starts slowly almost haphazardly but then picks momentum as if he is explaining the story of his own life to an unseen audience.

One thing that you learn in life is that you end up running down many dark corridors throughout your life. And if you are lucky, you come out the other end. The funny thing about optimism being that those that chase dreams for a living never seem to want to stop no matter what. Maybe some think that they are motivated from birth to be alpha types that don’t know any better? But then there is another theory that runs along the lines that they are afraid that if they stop then they won’t know what to do with themselves!

As he continues to speak a montage of shadowy mental images form from mist and then come into view. Each transitioning from scene to scene shifting as he continues his narration.

It was another of those unexpectedly sexually charged episode where you think that it is going to go somewhere. Somewhere extraordinary. Somewhere great! This time in a courtyard building that was about three or four stories tall. He was on one side of the court and a random silhouette in the window across on the other. An occasional glint of light behind the figure darting back and forth suggesting that it was one of two that was somehow auto-eroticizing? Who knew exactly what they were doing. Suddenly the other shadow realized he was also being watched from exactly that same opposite apartment right across the way. Something like getting caught sucking your thumb or masturbating in public? Embarrassing, to say the least! I don’t know? The second starts sinking down, sliding down, trying not to be noticed. So now it’s harder and harder to see them from the other vantage point. Who at that point could remember exactly what was going on! But it was as if one was under surveillance from someone that they were jealous of. Or maybe scared of! Maybe somebody was cheating on somebody else? Who really knew what was going on! But whatever it was, it was weird!

At one point, I recall laying there under the covers of a double mattress in the middle of the room. She’s walking around the darkened room doing things. A lithe shadowy figure arranging nondescript things here and there circling around the head of the bed. She’s not dressed but I am. A large low platform to my right with a bunch of architectural model-like things on top of it just at eye level. Here I am a stranger, thinking to myself, “What gave me the right and the courage?” The temerity! To be under those covers like that? And then, musing on for what seemed like an hour or two, all three of us are there on the bed. And she’s next to me! He’s laying there just on the other side of her his bulk barely in sight. And I’m looking at his shadow in a daze. I start asking him questions about his dioramas and what he does and routinely inquire about his struggles as if I’m dispassionately conducting an interview. Nothing! He doesn’t move an inch or make a peep. And I am having a hard time making a question sound like a question. Like I even know what’s going on. Because now I’m enthralled with her. The room is heating up. In the back of my mind, as I go on talking gibberish, she is there. I want her so bad. So damn bad! That’s what I came over for. But looking over to my right on the other side I’m looking at all this stuff of his. This one big diorama in particular. This rock canyon with all these different kinds of fragments of painted plaster rock and tiny man-made earth moving equipment. It’s a marvel of miniaturization that looks like the real thing and I’m impressed with it’s detail and everything.

And she’s next to me now! I feel how warm she is. And I can feel her body. And I haven’t even touched it yet! And I am thinking to myself, “My God!” I have no pants on. Nothing underneath. And what if the other ‘he’ finds out? What’s he going to do, Kill Me? How do I get out of here? And part of me says, “You ain’t going to get out of here! You got to choose, man!” And then she suddenly puts her leg over my leg. It’s running from the calf dragging up over thigh to thigh and it starts pulling me towards her. And my arm slips around her back and down her spine. And now we’re on top of each other. Her mouth finds mine and my mouth is hard on her’s. The friction creating fire and sparks like the surface of a cauldron of molten steel. And I’m burning inside now. I feel the heat rising out of the two of us.

But in the back of my mind in some tiny corner I’m thinking about that guy in the corner on the other side. What happened to him? How could he let this happen to him! But I don’t care now because I’m committed. My dick is going to be in his wife and I don’t give a shit! All I’ll do is fuck her and make love to her. And that’s all she wants to do with me. My God is it hot!

[blackout]

I was staying over at a friend’s house in a room in the front that had a couple of beds. It wasn’t very posh. Just a neighborhood kind of place. Some place far from where my family and I had once lived decades back. All of a sudden my father walks in and he was really old. He walks in and you can tell he is really bone tired. He goes the other bed and lays down. He is just really really whipped out. He takes off his coat and I get up and say, “Are you OK?” I’m afraid he has really kind of had it. He might just die right there! And I was going to leave and well, because maybe I shouldn’t have been there, maybe I should have been home with my mother? I don’t know. I can’t just leave him there. And I can’t disturb him. I’m not sure he’s going to make it. He’s so wiped out. I said let me get up and get you a blanket or something. I look over at the coat and it’s definitely my mother’s. It’s a woman’s coat! And he’s just laying there, he’s wiped out like he came from a couple day card playing session. And eh . . .? I lay back down in the other bed next to him really upset still really kind of feeling like what should I do? And I start thinking that maybe it’s a good time to talk to him even though you can’t talk to him because he’s asleep? He’s wiped out. He’s gone! I keep thinking about all the kind of stuff I could talk to him about. I start asking questions about, just out loud . . . and of course he doesn’t answer them. But, he’s there! He once was. He’s dead. They’ve both been dead for more than a decade.

The man lies there on his back now silent, his eyes awake, continuing to stare at the ceiling. The cigarette in his fingers barely glowing, smouldering away.