Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Danger of Drugs: Documentation of a Mind Under the Influence of Caffiene

The tired mind wanders looking for an out of this paper box, glued to the ink on the page. Maybe with enough force I can shove these stale words far along, over several pages, off the lemming cliff. They come from nothing and return to nothing (and other abstractions as well.) Start with something simple: a house. Maybe it’s made of wood and has a face in the wall that repeats, “I’m the basketball.” The drywall crumbles and congregates on the kitchen floor. Matthew comes chewing his bubble gum, slips on the sandy stuff, bites his tongue, gets the gum lodged in his throat and chokes to death with a mouth full of blood. What are you going to do with that? Matthew is dead. The words continue along without a care. On to the next victim. The front half of a bicycle sticking out from behind a cracked brick wall. Amy rides it to and from work, indulging her perversion, skirt and no panties, hoping they get a look at her ripe ass. When she gets really horny she takes the seat off. The gynecologist, “how did you get these cuts inside your labia?” “He promised he’d be gentle.” Of course that’s an old fantasy, a cliche even. Testament of my fatigued wordbrain. How about coffee on a rainy day– and no burnt prison trash they sell to the students and the ignorant, a real cup of coffee. Mmm. The words are pushed along, spew out and flow along the tubular rapids laid out just for the occasion by the gnome engineers. Then there’s the tired experimental musician leaning on the counter at the record store. Red eyelids drooping, bugs crawling on his skin because a coworker brought his collection of wasps and pincher bugs today. For show and tell. Outside it rains on the construction work, sealed off with yellow tape, where the tables and chairs are supposed to be. The ink is setting into the paper where– and we better hurry, for there’s little time to correct the matter– it will settle forever, strange record of the rambling falsifications of the one thought of Eternal Holy Youth (which thought itself is untrue.)Well not exactly forever, but as forever as we care to think about. The fruit fly officer to the judge: “how long do you want us to lock him up?” “Forever!” Three days later: they are all dead (may their sweet little souls rest in peace), the remains of the prisoner decomposed, energy continued forward in the next manifestation (as predicted clearly by the first law of thermodynamics.), any record of the incident erased. Forever. Frames per minute: order: timing. Now with the analog click of a digital button we can travel time, forward, backward, at various paces, even up and out (only if you have the strength to walk away from the computer monitor). Onward ho! To the red rain over Africa, falling in heaps of organic mush, divine silly putty. The locals gather round it and celebrate with trance-inducing rhythms. The party is much greater than we first imagine, each drop of rain chattering its tiny voice into the shamanic song, clapping hands for the real winners of this Oscar. The obsessed fanboy: “I don’t want to sound like an obsessed fanboy or anything, but maybe the judges should reconsider.” “Maybe you should reconsider when to keep your mouth shut.” And with the that the Upholder of Convention blows shot through his insolent skull. The blood and bone sinks deep into the soily earth where it collects in a pool to be swallowed up by the Cosmic Fish and spit out as red rain of the new world. Now, the good news is I’ve been digging for the missing body of Matthew. It’s hard with a pen, digging that is. The task isn’t made much easier by the fact that the earth is made up entirely of bubble gum. Three layers in and I’ve got spearmint, soda bubble, and ashen oat (for the eaters of the dead). Impossible to dig through this goop. I’ve been digging for seven days and it’s all I’ve managed. I know his body, exactly what I’m looking for: limbs sprawled out stiff with rigor mortis, red baseball cap sitting just above the remains of his head, left cheek bitten off by a rat. Then it hits me all at once: this is the wrong house I’ve been digging in. Everything’s the same, but it’s a decoy. Oh well, I guess little Matthew’s body will have to wait. If we hit the rewind button on this wad of spearmint gum, we can get back between Amy’s red lips. The haughty hotty: look here at the red spittle running out the edge of her mouth. This time when she lifts her skirt (pleated to fulfill those Catholic fantasies) there is nothing you expect, no perfectly formed downy white cheeks or tumescent outer labia. This time there is the vastness of known and unknown space, head gets sucked in; galaxies, stars, black holes, nebulas and more, strange things that you may never see again, things that may heap a thousand more models of misunderstanding on the already burdened discipline of quantum physics. You follow the trail of her starry body into the swirling solar system, into a stirring leafy green planet, into a patch of forest to the tip of an arrow loaded in the bow of an amazonian girl wearing a leather toga, hair pulled back into a ponytail, loose strands framing her porcelain face. You look down the shaft, past the knuckles of the hand holding the string taught and realize you are looking into the black eyes of god. Perched up in a tree is the filthy joker, motley suit getting stained by dirt and rainwater. “We speak of nothing, but know nothing of what is meant. Nothing must refer to something. It can never really mean nothing, but only the absence of what is expected in the context of some something.” Then he cackles and throws apples, because the pain and acidic sting of apple juice is the only thing these tourists understand.

2 comments:

soluss said...

I am now a fan of your stuff. I like!

L.O. said...

best stuff on the block!!