Story, you're an archetype for me, a metaphoric scene in which a certain set of problems can be addressed and worked out, a nexus of perspectives in the laboratory of the stage.
Maybe you aren't a play at all, but a dialogue in the old menippean sense. Staging is one thing, but you'll be okay. You'll be okay either way ma petite piece.
Roger: Eventually we'll just stop talking to one another. We'll sit here kicking stones in the dust. For awhile maybe at each other, but then just to see the dust rise and then not at all. At point does society stop being society? Was it yesterday when we could still laugh with each other? Or right after the event when we were still hoping there'd be other? Or is it just a pure numbers game?--We're fine right now, but if we lose another, that'll be the end of it. Or maybe if we just keep talking...if I filibuster...filibuster the future...
Abigail: The year is 2525. When the bombs fell we weren't ready...we hadn't expected it...at first we thought we were the lucky ones to have survived...by pure luck...by pure change...but now we know, the lucky ones went first...fast...crossed over into the unknown without all this tugging and gnawing at their own hide.
Abigail: The year is 2525. When the outbreak started, we figured the government would handle it. They always had, we had some unexplored faith in that. And when it spread we weren't ready. We hid in our cupboard and under the floors. We whispered prayers in the night, in our silent exultations as the bodies of the diseased slumped by overhead.
Abigail: The year is 2525. When the alien extermination force came, we weren't ready. It was quick...too quick. Some they rounded up into camps, or we assumed they did. But all they wanted was our death, our total absence in the universe. Jealous lovers of the universe.
Janet: Abby. Quit it. I don't think it's funny to make light of it.
Abigail: Too soon?
Markus: Too soon. Not soon enough?
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Fun in the Sun EP
On the other hand it's always sort of nice and warm here. And even when it's not, it still sort of is.
I don't make it to the beach often enough, but I'm always reassured that it's out there waiting for me, keeping the same cycles of ebb and flow. I've never actually seen anyone walk flat out into the ocean with all their clothes on except in movies, but that's the feeling it gives me knowing it's out there waiting. My friends are better about getting out to it even if it is just to walk the boardwalk or read on the sand. I'm reassured by them doing that too. And of course I do know some people who surf. But they get a little hippy about it all and it's generally best not to talk to them too much about the ocean, especially at parties where it comes off as an invitation either for a long abstract stoned conversation about the oneness of things or for them to hook up with you in the back of their Outback—none of them actually ever drive woodies anymore, but you have to assume they imagine their cars to be the modern equivalent and do you have to appreciate that they've chosen their vehicles with a certain amount of functionality in mind, tho still there's this weird smugness vibe that I can't stand.
What what I really wanted to say was that the ocean is sort of eternally present for us here and not in some daunting jagged cliffs and storm clouds way. I think it's because we're on the same level with it and it just sort of laps up at us. I work in a pizza shop. I'm not sure why that fits with what I was just saying about the ocean. But somehow it does right? I sort of own the place, but only in this loose sense where we all sort of own the place which really just means that none of us make any money. We're like the least fancy place ever, but the surfers love us. Maybe that's why I feel like I'm always with the beach even when I'm not at it: there are always these barefoot beach people in and out tracking sand around—like the ocean coming up to great us. The place, like I said, is super simple in part because we always have to hose out the sand. It's all just white one by one tile, a counter and some seats. I honestly think it's the simplicity and the hours—which incidentally we had to fight the city tooth and fucking nail to stay open an hour later than's generally allowed—that have turned it into sort of a hub.
I'm a transferrer of pizza. And they're transferrers of sand. And money I guess.
___________________
What I was staying before was sort of like, the town has this really simple circuit of communication and we're at the center of it. On one hand the town is made up of beach people. It really is the only thing we have. It brings tourists some, but we're a bit too slummy for that. Mostly it's surfers that pour through, or those perpetual beach dwellers that just find their way to ocean and sand. It's hard to explain them. But the other side of the circuit is this thin skeleton of town infrastructure. The town is old and it's got this bizarre permanent population of old people from a series of care homes around the area. I can't explain how it happens tho. Somehow people come here right before they retire and settle into the community, buying up the little bungalow homes. And it seems, once they're entrenched, right then, they get too old and shipped off to the folk's homes. But by then they have some serious stake in the community. They run all these shops that one can't imagine how they stay in business. Trophy shops and model shops, repair for things that nobody gets repaired anymore. And they're all dusty and stuffy. But the whole business community of the town is these types of stores owned by these semi-retired old people and their peripherally.
Which leaves us. We're the only point that connects the town to its most lucrative clientele. I mean, we're the only ones that can actually open up lines of communication. Which was how, eventually, we got the extra open hour.
[Eventually this story should be about a central couple, a band and some maybe its a 'surfer pastoral.' They story should blaze like the sun in an overexposed 70s photograph, color washed out in a brilliant haze. Plot-wise I see it working on this level of drifting, i.e. like everything I write no plot. Maybe somebody dies? Nah. Maybe its just the story of a bon fire party? Man, I hate plots.]
_________________
Beach towns are weird because the beach enforces a casual atmosphere. The secret to our success is in that. Our whole place is hospital white with terrible fluorescent bulbs. Our tables and chairs are the cheapest restaurant supply variety. Anywhere else the whole thing'd be hideous. But here it gets the charm of surf bums and their sand, like barnacles. Like I said, we literally have to hose the place out. Plus, I've always thought that the neon signs were really our calling card and those wouldn't work quite right without the utter whitewash.
Anyway, the kids are sort of the point of it all. Sometimes I feel like a substitute mom to them. Tho older sister is more fair to myself and to them. Along with the rotating band and the bums who scrape enough together for a slice, there is a central crew that I get to be the provider for. Not all of them surf, but it's hard to tell that kind of thing. They all basically live on the beach. Their sweet kids. They care about the place, the whole town, the ocean, in a really thoughtful way. They're quiet and deep as far as surfer kids go. They manage to avoid both the stoner hippy and the bro side of it all. I can't say how.
They like their pizza cheap. Which, despite my quite literal investment in the stuff, makes me unreasonably happy. They come in for cheese, always extra large, because there is a minimum of mass that they require. What's fun is the days when they're feeling a little more free with their wallets. They only allow themselves one topping—tho I've seen them try to get to two once, which resulted in sort of an infinite calculus that proved too much for them and shot them right back to cheese. They're artful and democratic trying to establish the best possible one topping. It's never pepperoni too, which I like—I mean both: I like pepperoni and I like that they never get it. Mushroom is a standard that I think makes them feel healthy. Sausage for fogged in days when they're really had to work. Pineapple seems to be for days that have gone really right somehow. Tho, if they have a system, they aren't aware of it. Every time it's this intense debate and weighing of various emotional and intellectual states. They really love it all.
I like to fuck with them. I've tended to choose secondary toppings for them and even tertiary. We're not a fancy place, as I've said. But there is a sweet spot at three toppings that is almost always a perfect union of flavors. Think pomodoro or margarita. Of course they could never get there. That's the problem with democratic processes. They can't ever really get into the higher math. But I'll pretty much give them whatever I want. And tell them to fuck off. Their spend-thrift keeps them from complaining. And I part-own the damned place so I don't really have to care.
They're too old to only eat pizza. Or even primarily. But of course no one can tell them anything. I can't imagine them working whatever jobs they have. I know one of the guys does things with computers. Two of the girls are the mid-day staff at a coffee shop that is actually an old-person diner. But their lives are beach-centric so it doesn't come up much what they do. Whatever it is is just the thin edge of sustenance that keeps them on boards, sand and in pizza. Which makes it all sound a bit ridiculous. But there is a zen to it all. I'll get to that.
There isn't a thing that happened, that is sort of the point of me saying anything I guess. It was through them that I got that point, that things don't really happen. There aren't events. Which I guess is also to say that the thing that happened was that I learned that nothing ever really happens. But I got to know these kids more—and still I don't know what the fuck they do for work.
Pretty much from here on out it's beach parties and surfing. Which I suppose isn't all that bad a thing.
_____________________
So I'm the den mother, provider of pie, the matron saint of burnout surfers. Thankfully not fuckable thanks to some cognitive distortion that only allows the dudes to see me in a motherly way and the birds as a big sister.
All that sorted, I started, recently, dropping by their beach fires. The night beach is a different world. We're one of the few strands of Pacific, it seems, where it's still marginally legal to make use of the beach at night. Moon or no, you have the waves in the distance rolling at you in the ambient night lights.
I suppose I can name the main players for you so they aren't just this etherial bunch of long haired stoner types meandering through my words.
[It turns out I don't like writing characters.]
The two of them were going out, attending parties in each other's arms, making their way through the strip shopping streets at night. Luckily he was smart enough not to wine and dine her in our pie shop. Word was they'd had their first official thing at the one real nice Italian place in town. No pizza there. This was long before the world sort of got conscious or self-conscious about food. The Italians were the Italians. It was all old grandma's and their sauces. Your other ethnic options at the time were Chinese—always a bit divey—and French for the high class—and it was always only high class. Our emergence form this triumvirate has been abrupt. In my own personal sense of it, it was only then that Americans really discovered the rest of the world. When we learned to eat like other people. Of course we haven't actually learned that yet. We're still just tourists. But I suppose, at least tourists know there is something else out there? Even if they treat it like shit. Play it like a vacation.
Regardless. The love birds hit the the Italian joint, cause that's pretty much what young couples do. Dressed to the nines they looked like play acting children. It's adorable to catch a surfer with his hair combed in a button down that's a print you can't imagine him owning, too big, improperly tucked. What a doll. The girl was no better. Her options are either staid summer dress or slutty going out clothes, too tight, too short. This one was a peach tho and could make classy even the worst. In a little summery thing, she'd have been a touch too cute—cutesy?—if her hair hadn't kept the tangle of beach and sun bleached matte. Thing was, she was a real surfer, not some hang along babe. Held her own. But they weren't competitors, nobody surfed for sport, but more something like life. Surfed like religion. And that's why neither of them couldn't not do it. They would be incomprehensible entities to each other if they were the type to lay on the beach and read magazines instead of hit the waves. The toss and tumult. Maybe she didn't get pizza like he did. But that's my own thing.
___________
So I suppose I'm telling about them because it seemed like something special to me at the time. Like, as if, before seeing them together I hadn't really understood what it would be to be in love in some real way. It sounds silly sure. I mean the word love has been beaten up and mangled, emptied out, to such an extent that it makes me wish there were another word for it. There isn't tho. Except to say that they were cool. From that first dinner on they were this profoundly linked unit. Not that they became Tim & Jessica in some inextricable new proper noun implying their eternal codependence. Nah. They were this extremely modular and almost frightening effective grouping. I have the image of a bola flying through the air and tripping up an escaping villain. Or something molecular. Which is all to say that typical ways of saying that a couple are one thing and not one thing aren't good enough to express what they were like. But obviously not just them: anyone. We need to metaphors to express and talk about the way two people can choose to enter each other's specific orbit and remain amazingly malleable in relation to each other and the rest of the world.
So they were a good couple right? He had a bit of the zen on him, as I've already alluded with the whole "getting pizza" thing. It can't help but sound spacey and 'we're all made to stars' star-eyed, but pizza—for some of us at least—has come to stand in as some eternal awesome. Maybe it is the sublime in a really technical sense. It is something like goodness itself. It has a profound simplicity. Truth is I can't explain it and that's the point of it. It wouldn't be sublime it I could grasp and name the individual elements and their combination. I see its goodness and I balk. And that's how I know. Which keeps sounding silly. But I'm in the right business I guess?
Like I said from the start I don't get to the beach enough, but it is there for me. It pervades my consciousness because it defines my world. But I don't have it like I have pizza. Tim and Jessica had the ocean in that way I mean. So many I'm telling you right now about I started to get it a bit too. And also I guess about the thing they had that was new or special for the world. New because it's a new context. And these things don't exist abstractly, only ever embedded in material context. In the midst of the mess and the muck. The seaweed reek of the shoreline.
I don't make it to the beach often enough, but I'm always reassured that it's out there waiting for me, keeping the same cycles of ebb and flow. I've never actually seen anyone walk flat out into the ocean with all their clothes on except in movies, but that's the feeling it gives me knowing it's out there waiting. My friends are better about getting out to it even if it is just to walk the boardwalk or read on the sand. I'm reassured by them doing that too. And of course I do know some people who surf. But they get a little hippy about it all and it's generally best not to talk to them too much about the ocean, especially at parties where it comes off as an invitation either for a long abstract stoned conversation about the oneness of things or for them to hook up with you in the back of their Outback—none of them actually ever drive woodies anymore, but you have to assume they imagine their cars to be the modern equivalent and do you have to appreciate that they've chosen their vehicles with a certain amount of functionality in mind, tho still there's this weird smugness vibe that I can't stand.
What what I really wanted to say was that the ocean is sort of eternally present for us here and not in some daunting jagged cliffs and storm clouds way. I think it's because we're on the same level with it and it just sort of laps up at us. I work in a pizza shop. I'm not sure why that fits with what I was just saying about the ocean. But somehow it does right? I sort of own the place, but only in this loose sense where we all sort of own the place which really just means that none of us make any money. We're like the least fancy place ever, but the surfers love us. Maybe that's why I feel like I'm always with the beach even when I'm not at it: there are always these barefoot beach people in and out tracking sand around—like the ocean coming up to great us. The place, like I said, is super simple in part because we always have to hose out the sand. It's all just white one by one tile, a counter and some seats. I honestly think it's the simplicity and the hours—which incidentally we had to fight the city tooth and fucking nail to stay open an hour later than's generally allowed—that have turned it into sort of a hub.
I'm a transferrer of pizza. And they're transferrers of sand. And money I guess.
___________________
What I was staying before was sort of like, the town has this really simple circuit of communication and we're at the center of it. On one hand the town is made up of beach people. It really is the only thing we have. It brings tourists some, but we're a bit too slummy for that. Mostly it's surfers that pour through, or those perpetual beach dwellers that just find their way to ocean and sand. It's hard to explain them. But the other side of the circuit is this thin skeleton of town infrastructure. The town is old and it's got this bizarre permanent population of old people from a series of care homes around the area. I can't explain how it happens tho. Somehow people come here right before they retire and settle into the community, buying up the little bungalow homes. And it seems, once they're entrenched, right then, they get too old and shipped off to the folk's homes. But by then they have some serious stake in the community. They run all these shops that one can't imagine how they stay in business. Trophy shops and model shops, repair for things that nobody gets repaired anymore. And they're all dusty and stuffy. But the whole business community of the town is these types of stores owned by these semi-retired old people and their peripherally.
Which leaves us. We're the only point that connects the town to its most lucrative clientele. I mean, we're the only ones that can actually open up lines of communication. Which was how, eventually, we got the extra open hour.
[Eventually this story should be about a central couple, a band and some maybe its a 'surfer pastoral.' They story should blaze like the sun in an overexposed 70s photograph, color washed out in a brilliant haze. Plot-wise I see it working on this level of drifting, i.e. like everything I write no plot. Maybe somebody dies? Nah. Maybe its just the story of a bon fire party? Man, I hate plots.]
_________________
Beach towns are weird because the beach enforces a casual atmosphere. The secret to our success is in that. Our whole place is hospital white with terrible fluorescent bulbs. Our tables and chairs are the cheapest restaurant supply variety. Anywhere else the whole thing'd be hideous. But here it gets the charm of surf bums and their sand, like barnacles. Like I said, we literally have to hose the place out. Plus, I've always thought that the neon signs were really our calling card and those wouldn't work quite right without the utter whitewash.
Anyway, the kids are sort of the point of it all. Sometimes I feel like a substitute mom to them. Tho older sister is more fair to myself and to them. Along with the rotating band and the bums who scrape enough together for a slice, there is a central crew that I get to be the provider for. Not all of them surf, but it's hard to tell that kind of thing. They all basically live on the beach. Their sweet kids. They care about the place, the whole town, the ocean, in a really thoughtful way. They're quiet and deep as far as surfer kids go. They manage to avoid both the stoner hippy and the bro side of it all. I can't say how.
They like their pizza cheap. Which, despite my quite literal investment in the stuff, makes me unreasonably happy. They come in for cheese, always extra large, because there is a minimum of mass that they require. What's fun is the days when they're feeling a little more free with their wallets. They only allow themselves one topping—tho I've seen them try to get to two once, which resulted in sort of an infinite calculus that proved too much for them and shot them right back to cheese. They're artful and democratic trying to establish the best possible one topping. It's never pepperoni too, which I like—I mean both: I like pepperoni and I like that they never get it. Mushroom is a standard that I think makes them feel healthy. Sausage for fogged in days when they're really had to work. Pineapple seems to be for days that have gone really right somehow. Tho, if they have a system, they aren't aware of it. Every time it's this intense debate and weighing of various emotional and intellectual states. They really love it all.
I like to fuck with them. I've tended to choose secondary toppings for them and even tertiary. We're not a fancy place, as I've said. But there is a sweet spot at three toppings that is almost always a perfect union of flavors. Think pomodoro or margarita. Of course they could never get there. That's the problem with democratic processes. They can't ever really get into the higher math. But I'll pretty much give them whatever I want. And tell them to fuck off. Their spend-thrift keeps them from complaining. And I part-own the damned place so I don't really have to care.
They're too old to only eat pizza. Or even primarily. But of course no one can tell them anything. I can't imagine them working whatever jobs they have. I know one of the guys does things with computers. Two of the girls are the mid-day staff at a coffee shop that is actually an old-person diner. But their lives are beach-centric so it doesn't come up much what they do. Whatever it is is just the thin edge of sustenance that keeps them on boards, sand and in pizza. Which makes it all sound a bit ridiculous. But there is a zen to it all. I'll get to that.
There isn't a thing that happened, that is sort of the point of me saying anything I guess. It was through them that I got that point, that things don't really happen. There aren't events. Which I guess is also to say that the thing that happened was that I learned that nothing ever really happens. But I got to know these kids more—and still I don't know what the fuck they do for work.
Pretty much from here on out it's beach parties and surfing. Which I suppose isn't all that bad a thing.
_____________________
So I'm the den mother, provider of pie, the matron saint of burnout surfers. Thankfully not fuckable thanks to some cognitive distortion that only allows the dudes to see me in a motherly way and the birds as a big sister.
All that sorted, I started, recently, dropping by their beach fires. The night beach is a different world. We're one of the few strands of Pacific, it seems, where it's still marginally legal to make use of the beach at night. Moon or no, you have the waves in the distance rolling at you in the ambient night lights.
I suppose I can name the main players for you so they aren't just this etherial bunch of long haired stoner types meandering through my words.
[It turns out I don't like writing characters.]
The two of them were going out, attending parties in each other's arms, making their way through the strip shopping streets at night. Luckily he was smart enough not to wine and dine her in our pie shop. Word was they'd had their first official thing at the one real nice Italian place in town. No pizza there. This was long before the world sort of got conscious or self-conscious about food. The Italians were the Italians. It was all old grandma's and their sauces. Your other ethnic options at the time were Chinese—always a bit divey—and French for the high class—and it was always only high class. Our emergence form this triumvirate has been abrupt. In my own personal sense of it, it was only then that Americans really discovered the rest of the world. When we learned to eat like other people. Of course we haven't actually learned that yet. We're still just tourists. But I suppose, at least tourists know there is something else out there? Even if they treat it like shit. Play it like a vacation.
Regardless. The love birds hit the the Italian joint, cause that's pretty much what young couples do. Dressed to the nines they looked like play acting children. It's adorable to catch a surfer with his hair combed in a button down that's a print you can't imagine him owning, too big, improperly tucked. What a doll. The girl was no better. Her options are either staid summer dress or slutty going out clothes, too tight, too short. This one was a peach tho and could make classy even the worst. In a little summery thing, she'd have been a touch too cute—cutesy?—if her hair hadn't kept the tangle of beach and sun bleached matte. Thing was, she was a real surfer, not some hang along babe. Held her own. But they weren't competitors, nobody surfed for sport, but more something like life. Surfed like religion. And that's why neither of them couldn't not do it. They would be incomprehensible entities to each other if they were the type to lay on the beach and read magazines instead of hit the waves. The toss and tumult. Maybe she didn't get pizza like he did. But that's my own thing.
___________
So I suppose I'm telling about them because it seemed like something special to me at the time. Like, as if, before seeing them together I hadn't really understood what it would be to be in love in some real way. It sounds silly sure. I mean the word love has been beaten up and mangled, emptied out, to such an extent that it makes me wish there were another word for it. There isn't tho. Except to say that they were cool. From that first dinner on they were this profoundly linked unit. Not that they became Tim & Jessica in some inextricable new proper noun implying their eternal codependence. Nah. They were this extremely modular and almost frightening effective grouping. I have the image of a bola flying through the air and tripping up an escaping villain. Or something molecular. Which is all to say that typical ways of saying that a couple are one thing and not one thing aren't good enough to express what they were like. But obviously not just them: anyone. We need to metaphors to express and talk about the way two people can choose to enter each other's specific orbit and remain amazingly malleable in relation to each other and the rest of the world.
So they were a good couple right? He had a bit of the zen on him, as I've already alluded with the whole "getting pizza" thing. It can't help but sound spacey and 'we're all made to stars' star-eyed, but pizza—for some of us at least—has come to stand in as some eternal awesome. Maybe it is the sublime in a really technical sense. It is something like goodness itself. It has a profound simplicity. Truth is I can't explain it and that's the point of it. It wouldn't be sublime it I could grasp and name the individual elements and their combination. I see its goodness and I balk. And that's how I know. Which keeps sounding silly. But I'm in the right business I guess?
Like I said from the start I don't get to the beach enough, but it is there for me. It pervades my consciousness because it defines my world. But I don't have it like I have pizza. Tim and Jessica had the ocean in that way I mean. So many I'm telling you right now about I started to get it a bit too. And also I guess about the thing they had that was new or special for the world. New because it's a new context. And these things don't exist abstractly, only ever embedded in material context. In the midst of the mess and the muck. The seaweed reek of the shoreline.
A Bunch of Fucking Punk Kids
A Bunch of Fucking Punk Kids
James stared himself down in the mirror posing with a little snarl. Seeing himself affecting a look he flipped himself off with one hand and then the other doing a little dance. The dance became a series of head banging moves. Moving more and more erratically he started slamming into the walls. He hopped up on the toilet and started strumming a fake guitar with a neck at least the length of a bass, tho he was strumming it loose in full, raw strumming motion. If it was a bass it'd be making muddy and muffled scratching in the midst of each true note. Probably the amp would push it out in a bright distortion. Probably he hadn't bought a bass amp, but had borrowed some friend—who incidentally had a bit of money—'s guitar amp and was currently blowing the speakers out. He slammed himself off the back wall and went to jump the toilet still holding the fake bass. His foot got caught on the edge of the sink and he went down hard. On the floor, in a fetal ball the snarl came back and soon he started laughing, blood coming from his nose and little gash on his cheek which must of hit the counter on the way down. He started kicking his legs out with the rhythm of the song he wasn't playing but still strumming away at, just laughing.
Jen and Andrea weren't any sort of fucking sluts. But they had adopted the term to refer to each other. They fucking hated punk girl sluts who were buying shit from the fashion punk store in the mall and cozying up on the guys in the band. They were whores who didn't give a shit about the lifestyle, but liked playing makeup and liked fucking dirty guys who treated their dicks like guitars. At least, as consolation, the guys were fucking retarded and neither of the friends wanted much of anything to do with them. The boys who came to the shows, who weren't all fucking showy, just there in jeans or whatever, no totally overly produce rips and tears. Just guys. They were fine unless they were the kind to get drunk and turn into a real asshole. But mostly Jen and Andrea just liked to hang out and listen to the music and hang around the gutters fucking with people. Neither of them came from nice homes or anything either. That was the thing that bugged them probably the most was when people—like the sluts—were just running daddies money down the gutter. They—the sluts—didn't come to the scene in the way you're supposed to. There was a fun in it that anybody could behind, they were agreed on that. Being a freak and fucking with normal folks. That's just good fun. But the gutter was a specific thing and not something you should put on like a gay as shit plaid skirt—that's way too fucking short—and perfectly factory ripped tights. The gutter was just where you ended up when you left something shittier behind and decided there was a way you had to do things. It meant begging for a bit of money. It meant flophouses and it meant traveling. It meant all that, but that wasn't how you got there. You got there because there was a way you had to live for you that whoever it was was keeping you from. For Andrea it was this bullshit border South 'being a lady' that had all her life put her in the way of assholes, had made her subject to taunts and flirtations that rode up close on her and wouldn't leave her alone. She had to split her house first because of some shit she doesn't talk about. And then free of the house, she got that it was the whole bullshit city and then the whole bullshit state. She made it out west where that shit didn't fly and even if there were still the straight versus the gutter, at least there was some sort of pervasive sense that you were a person and could find ourself somewhere outside of the bounds of things and still continue being one. She met Jen from here and she was just a fucking doll, already on the street for years. For her it was a mom that was too fucked up on much of anything to figure out the up and the down of having a kid. Things changed in the home sitch all the time and almost never for the better. So leaving wasn't that much different and the gutter at least meant she was in a bit more control of the ups and the downs. They were pals in some serious way. And they weren't going to fuck it up for anything.
Friday, January 21, 2011
[untitled]
It was the last days of sun, she said. It's hard to tell because there was a high point and there is a low point and we're somewhere in the midst of them. But it's an unknown place. It's an intangible center that is perceptible, but maybe only in its aftereffects.
You start getting really grumpy. That's how you tend to know. But yeah, maybe it was a few weeks back and you didn't realize that you'd crossed the threshold into the zone in which you'd start to get grumpy.
Exactly. But what it means for us is catch the dying year. Like if we notice the decline even before it starts and we ride it all the way down, we'll suck the life out of it. And when it's dark, we won't be pissed because we'll have watched the whole thing descend consciously and actively. We'll have made our way into the depths.
But the depths are still depths. And paddling out of them is still going to be a bit of hell. And if all you're doing is cruising down to hell, what happens once you're fully mired in it? Isn't that going to be worse in a way?
Nah. It'll change the depths too. Like you'll be winded from all the joy you've just had in that sort of blissful radiance of exertion. And you'll look around and say, not half bad. What if I were to start climbing that thing over there? What if I were to dig it down here for awhile and see where its slopes take me?
But that's just fucking optimism right? You're pulling some silver lining shit on me. Glass half full and the little drop of honey. Little drop of poison is more like. And you pull that poison with you and spill it all over the new day. Nah. You can't have a good all the time.
Who said it was all going to be good? That shit is hard man. You're going to be exhausted riding down the days. You might even hate the god damned light for being so shimmery shinny while you're goading it all on. Whipping yourself up in a lather and grinding your bones into that good night.
I'm not saying I buy it. That's a lot of fucking work just to get over the blues for a few days.
Half the fucking year man. More so if you let it seep on you.
Lot of fucking work. But say you burn those days to their stump. Say you drive down those nails til their flush. Say you take an ax to the misery of man and you're ready to go to work. Say you do all that and you just want to fucking chill out for a little bit?
It'll come man. You ride the crest of the day. You dig your heels in the sand and push yourself up out of it. You sprint your way up a dune always falling back, always falling back. You crest and you ride that shit down again, not like a passive freefall, but a skilled technician of sliding catching swiftly every little edge and curl and its just as fucking intense as the climb but in a way that feels totally different. In a way that feels in a certain respect like mastery, but without the control and dominance that word entails. And then the climb again. That starts to feel different too. Every foot you dig in and the burn of lifting your sorry ass up one more step. Every fucking inch of it is its own form of coasting. It's just the flip side of freefall. You think you're the master of every step, but really you're letting yourself get right up inside and entangled in the chaos of it all. You're outside of gravity. You can't climb against it really. You can't fall into it either. And you're better for it both ways.
It'll be sun up soon.
Good.
You start getting really grumpy. That's how you tend to know. But yeah, maybe it was a few weeks back and you didn't realize that you'd crossed the threshold into the zone in which you'd start to get grumpy.
Exactly. But what it means for us is catch the dying year. Like if we notice the decline even before it starts and we ride it all the way down, we'll suck the life out of it. And when it's dark, we won't be pissed because we'll have watched the whole thing descend consciously and actively. We'll have made our way into the depths.
But the depths are still depths. And paddling out of them is still going to be a bit of hell. And if all you're doing is cruising down to hell, what happens once you're fully mired in it? Isn't that going to be worse in a way?
Nah. It'll change the depths too. Like you'll be winded from all the joy you've just had in that sort of blissful radiance of exertion. And you'll look around and say, not half bad. What if I were to start climbing that thing over there? What if I were to dig it down here for awhile and see where its slopes take me?
But that's just fucking optimism right? You're pulling some silver lining shit on me. Glass half full and the little drop of honey. Little drop of poison is more like. And you pull that poison with you and spill it all over the new day. Nah. You can't have a good all the time.
Who said it was all going to be good? That shit is hard man. You're going to be exhausted riding down the days. You might even hate the god damned light for being so shimmery shinny while you're goading it all on. Whipping yourself up in a lather and grinding your bones into that good night.
I'm not saying I buy it. That's a lot of fucking work just to get over the blues for a few days.
Half the fucking year man. More so if you let it seep on you.
Lot of fucking work. But say you burn those days to their stump. Say you drive down those nails til their flush. Say you take an ax to the misery of man and you're ready to go to work. Say you do all that and you just want to fucking chill out for a little bit?
It'll come man. You ride the crest of the day. You dig your heels in the sand and push yourself up out of it. You sprint your way up a dune always falling back, always falling back. You crest and you ride that shit down again, not like a passive freefall, but a skilled technician of sliding catching swiftly every little edge and curl and its just as fucking intense as the climb but in a way that feels totally different. In a way that feels in a certain respect like mastery, but without the control and dominance that word entails. And then the climb again. That starts to feel different too. Every foot you dig in and the burn of lifting your sorry ass up one more step. Every fucking inch of it is its own form of coasting. It's just the flip side of freefall. You think you're the master of every step, but really you're letting yourself get right up inside and entangled in the chaos of it all. You're outside of gravity. You can't climb against it really. You can't fall into it either. And you're better for it both ways.
It'll be sun up soon.
Good.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Blackest Blue
Violet was at peace with however she was told about. Like a black hole the only evidence she gave off of existing at all was in her effects. If she’d hit a girl in kindergarten, that was more a part of her description than her hair color, which was black. She existed in people’s minds as an amalgamation of these stories and events until she was a rough impressionist mush. Medium height, medium build, medium pretty, jet black hair. That’s about all anyone could say about her from boyfriend to convenience store mug shot.
________________
Now it was a man with a record collection and too skinny jeans and a fairly morbid self-loathing that, while hidden by the aforementioned effects, offered her no true solace. And this wasn't going to be about finding a way to get through the mire of her own stories and form a true connection with someone's inner soul. She was damned fucking sure of that. People were still unreliable schmucks. Probably more so now than when she'd first more or less consciously cocooned herself in talk all those years ago.
They guy had all the charm of his variant forms of superiority. That, more than any other single element of his discernible personality, was certainly my Violet had gotten attached to him. He willfully projected these terrible self-centered parts of himself, his collections of records or whatever else. A certain set of knowledge he'd accrued that could battle off anyone who'd try to talk to him. It was the most blatant kind of armour, but it was a devotion to the ability of knowledge to shield self that Violet assumed had to be consciously put on.
What had happened tho was that she realized that he was just a hurt kid. Probably she should have known that having consorted with these types before. But I guess she let the romance of her own system cloud her vision and imagine she saw sometime more in him than there was.
And that was the worst thing now because it implied that she was imagining some beautiful soul for him that she'd spent years believing she didn't care about or have herself. True, her version of a beautiful soul was an intelligent and calculating consciousness that understood the limits of representation in the world and desired simply to navigate social space all the while maintaining a comfortable anonymity. But now she was forced to admit, seeing this rank amateur version of herself, that the truth of it was that she was all along imagining some inner self of her own that was too good for the world of tales and tellers that had to recluse up inside of herself to stay pure. It was silly, but she was insistent even with this new knowledge that she'd glimpsed a serious truth in making herself up out of stories and she was damned fucking insistent that she'd carry it through and figure out what it meant.
The first step was to excise the guy. Which meant smashing a good deal of his record collection. She grabbed a handful, compressed to lift them out from the milk crate storage like a gripper claw in those arcade games. Her over extended grip let two or three slip. They fell nicely to the floor and flopped around. It was a good start. With space in the crate, she next grabbed a particularly hip looking record and holding either side of it broke it over her knee. She stopped momentarily to think if she had ever broken anything over her knee. She hadn't. It was a satisfying feeling. It was a feeling of full success as the record crisped in half and the cardboard broke and bent. But also satisfying because it validated the tale telling of culture itself. Without ever having crazily shattered records, she already knew the best way to do it. Culture worked. It had taught her through unknown routes how to destroy effectively and efficiently. Next she tried to crack one using just her hands. No luck. So the knee again. So smart that culture of hers.
He'd come home in the midst of it and write it into his own legend of the psycho ex girlfriend. It'd look just like every movie where clothes go flying out of the window to the plaintive guy on the street. But they lived in a terrible little duplex with paper thin walls. On the ground floor nothing could be so grandiose. And this is why Violet knew she had to get out. Her own version of things coped perfectly well with reality. But reality included a lot of stories, even his grandiose ones. It was just the way he got caught up in them that upset her. So she had to get out. Even if the reason bespoke a flaw in her own system. She needed the space to rework the system. Oh well. She went on breaking records. Until it got monotonous and then she picked a last couple good ones and headed out.
_____________
He hadn't come storming in before she left. So that fucked that up. She hit the streets on foot. She'd left everything but a quick packed backpack over her shoulder. She walked downtown, which in this shabby burg was something like a quaint little main street. There were only the first terrible signs of self-consciously gilt charm. A shop here or there realized that soon this little strip would be pulsing with a inward turning nostalgia for a by gone era. What there era was nobody could be sure. Anything but strip malls seemed like the obvious answer. But more than that it was anything but the planned shopping complex that wasn't even an obviously odious as the strip mall. Violet sensed a time not far away when the strip mall itself would have a special charm as it became outmoded.
But no, the downtown wasn't quite self-aware yet. It was still peopled by busted down trophy shops and cold meat stores. A leather work shop and a cobbler/dry cleaner tandem. They were shops that had some realer seeming charm for not having anything to do with a visual aesthetic. They were all shops that were manned by someone of a specific knowledge, nearly a trade. Most of the time people wouldn't be in the shops at all. There wasn't a thing in them that let onto browsing. You'd only ever come by with a specific needs. And they'd fill that service for you. But now she was nostalgic for the present that was right in front of her, sad to know that it must be collapsing, that it was already an anomaly and not one that other people saw as fittingly charming to maintain. She made herself pukey. She was just as god damned caught up in these stories as anybody and not quite on the leading edge she kept telling herself she was. She'd have to sort it all out somewhere. Somewhere where she could think. But where could she get that was to the side of the problem instead of in the heart of it?
She was aimless. In a sort of fugue space. Absent of motivation she let herself be guided by her feet in big blocky motions. Her pacing becomes a blur and then a quick invisibility. If she was only ever the stories that could be told about her and now she was alone in a street without a motive, she must of necessity disappear. No reason to think that she hadn't. When someone else walked on the street tho, she had to reappear someone. Still she's not much more than a blocky set of colors, black hair, leather bag, whatever color clothing she happens to be wearing. This was always the sort of encounter that had troubled her because she had no idea what image she would strike. Not that she'd ever been able—or ever desired—to completely control the impressions she made on people. But she liked having been the root cause of it. And sure she could pick her clothes and her hair color or whatever, but that wasn't the same as having planted some wisp of history to articulate her every motion. Thus far in life, she'd been able to thread a connection through her social field that still maintain those faint lines of flight from her earliest decision. It was a virtuoso effort even. Finding little links to make the connections. Fanning flames of the littlest knowledge.
[Some quick discussion of this story's plot: Violet breaks with her own life in an attempt to understand a narrative/composite identity. The story becomes a story of stories. She tells made up tales of her own past in an attempt to implode her own identity. Scenes of her at parties, in the library, sitting out at parks. A tour of a small town as seen by a women evading/creating her own life. The end game has to be that she ride some edge of narrative, self-propelled. Which, you know, none of this makes any sense. The things I'm looking to get at are: non-identical self-identity and maybe thats it.]
Sitting long enough, Violet started to come into herself again. Only because she had started telling herself stories again. I'm sitting here on a park bench. My ass on the top of the back rest. I'm surveying the community fountain that something between bad public art and nice real public space. I'm looking like a badass, a badegg. I'm scowling at old ladies and middle aged ladies with their young pups as they walk by. They see me as the quiet loner type. Someone daddy never loved enough. They even see a black eye that isn't there from a guy that couldn't beat me up if he tried. They think I'm a sweet little poison keeps putting herself in harms way when really its harm that keeps putting itself in my way and getting the raw end of the deal, ending up with its own black eyes and broken records.
The park was cast out before her, not much more than a few lolling grass hills and a soccer field giving away to an unincorporated brown hillside that rose steeply for what had to be two hundred feet. The sky was high gray clouds that wouldn't do a thing. They weren't even distinct clouds that you could imagine floating past, just a big mass coating the upper atmosphere. Not threatening rain. Maybe they'd break, allow a little fissure of blue. Or maybe they wouldn't.
I'm a stealth object. Light comes off of me in big glancing blocks, like a rough cut diamond. People seeing some single feature of me can only manage a quick reference to something they already know. And in that second I can slide through them. I'll transmute to whatever is required of me to slip past.
_________
Where'd you ever get pretending you were who you woke up being? Being embodied doesn't mean you have to be self-identical. She saw one part of her as a thread and another part of her as this scrap heap of fabrics. The thread, probably with a needle at the helm, but that didn't matter, kept looping in more and different pieces of fabric. Sometimes a nice neat row of stitches. Sometimes less so. Sometimes just a single time through, or just the thread tied into knots around itself. It was a fucking mess. A serious and intractable fucking mess. And so the question was always put, are you the fabric or the thread? Are you the active and conscious act of stitching or what is stitched? And what a bullshit question that is. You're both right? I mean, I guess, the metaphor might even be too lame to really work. It still makes you think you've got an outside you picking where to stitch, a piece of thread that even if tangled up still has some linear continuity that is always and forever trackable in some real and true way.
Just now on the bench, hadn't she totally fugued? Aren't their cases all of the fucking time where people stop being themselves? And doesn't that mean that some piece of continuous thread isn't essential? Not even just in outliers but in all of us? Aren't there times with the social fabric is the thing itself that allows you to patch in and make connections.
Here, how the fuck about this for a metaphor: We're still made up of all this fabric, but instead of a nice piece of thread holding it in line, its held together through whatever available adhesive materials. Most of the time you've got these staples maybe. And maybe other times its duct tape and it gets all gooey with that backing glue. Some lucky and deluded fuck might see it as a nice long piece of thread. But at some point you have to admit that you were lent a stitch here and there. So yeah, I think the idea of a stitching action holds up. I remember plenty of things. I see myself in the light of past things I've been. It isn't just like I woke up today in a vacuum. But it also isn't that I have to be anything like I was yesterday. How could it be? I don't even care about yesterday.
But I guess the question remains, if posed at all directly, who am I? I don't have a good and clean answer. And maybe that's cause the concept itself is wrong. I. It implies too many things I'm not sure I agree with. And called to answer in the terms of I, I have to swallow too many of those things even before I can formulate an answer. And I don't think its either me or society. I don't think anything is so simple that I can erect a fence and talk about the things on either side of it. Or maybe I can for a second, but that's just in my head and I can't pretend the divide exists even a moment later.
There is a me sometimes that lives in this body. And there is a big old society sometimes too. And then there are little mobilized societies as well. And even mobilized fragments of me that drive the "whole." Fuck if it isn't a complicated mess through and through.
__________
After all the record breaking she felt like things were all set to collapse around her. It was a feeling that permeated her. She set up a world of stories around her, set it delicately and expertly. At one point it'd appeared as this perfectly structured edifice which she could traverse with ease. In high school it'd been easy to read people enough by their social position, usually grafted onto the physical environs of the schoolspace. She'd know in advance who knew would know what about her and how they'd likely heard it. And she could shift herself a little left or right to fill just such a role to its best advantage—usually the advantage was a form of disappearing, but every once in awhile it had more active benefits. Her troubled girlhood—fictional—had allowed her to do a lot of subtle bullying—actual—that allowed her to get things she wanted. The bullying was so subtle tho that her lived experience of it wasn't much different than asking for things she wanted and receiving them. In the background, the stories that floated around determined people's reactions to her desires. Like a hulking shadow the stories animated all of her scenes without any new input from her.
That was awhile ago at this point tho. And she felt the topple coming. The social scene of the high school years guaranteed that there would be a certain large percentage of people who didn't care at all about you. They provided a buffer for her stories, an insulation that ensured certain elements would pass through and others stop all without adding any additional charge. Now tho, the social world was smaller. It'd hit a critical mass of knowledge eventually—now—where there would no longer be enough space to perpetuate absolute variants of truth. Some actual was bound to sneak it if only in the cross waves of two falsities colliding. She'd appear at some point when she'd intend to disappear.
But she was a master. And she had felt the collapse before it came. So she had a chance to plan. And tho the opportunity presented a very limited set of options. She could nonetheless choose. Perhaps it was even reduced to a binary. She could stand still in the middle and watch the collapse around her. Flash into existence in the middle of things and watch as people reacted to the newly formed girl in their midst. Or catch the crashing wave of her own life and ride it out for as long it would go, clinging always to the very edge of the collapse and its little tailings all the while invisibly and elegantly sliding past. Certainly there had to be gradients between the poles, so not a binary at all. But she wasn't one for the half assed. Both had a certain charm about them, but of course she'd choose the latter and end up alone down the road somewhere chewing a stick of gum and thumbing a ride to somewhere else. And maybe there'd even be some faint little drift that would pass her on into the next world without there ever really having been a collapse at all.
_________
At a party that night that she went to because a friend of hers had insisted that the only thing a person can do post break-up is attend some sort of soirée and do one's damnedest to get fawned over and then either laid or to get to enjoyably send someone packing. Violet hadn't a notion for any of that in the slightest and felt instead like she was walking into some crucial scene in her young adult life in which she'd lay the ground work for what it would mean for her to be an adult. Ideally it meant the same life and the same thoughts, but she felt it a trial at which any outcome could avail itself. Her friend, this is the stranger bit, she didn't know what to do with friends anymore. There was this nosy insistence in friends that dug into you as if you weren't the image you projected. It was this natural assumption that you're a liar and that a friend's place is to get inside of the lies. As Violet was a liar par excellence, the friend position became mostly untenable. This isn't to say that Violet was needfully defensive of her close kept lies, that a driving friend could so easily puncture them and cause her system to collapse. No. Violet was no charade in the usual sense. What bothered her about friends was the assumption of lying as friendships default state. This assumption made Violet's extravagant story-life seem like the paltry stuff of everyday life. In a sense sure, people lie all the time. And Violet lied all the time. But the lies were constructive, intentional, planned and processed. It wasn't an issue of quantity. Not ever shifts in order of magnitude. It was about kind. She made up her life. She didn't fiddle around with social masks in some vain effort to gain attention or avoid people. Her life was the nexus point of telling and told. She lived on that cusp.
So this party. Bullshit right? Absolutely. But it was also like a land mine long buried in a forgotten plain rusting away unnoticed until one day the trigger fails even without a passing pressure and the place goes up. While statistics say that's the best option, nobody'll get hurt. We all know better. That really the damned thing couldn't snap until there was some appropriate density of awful it could do cause for awful it was made. And like a rifle in the first act, you can't avoid setting off a round. But now, we're deep in and need to telescope out. Like a rifle it's got to go off, that's its purpose. Like an old land mine, it'd been waiting a long time and was bound for badness. So Violet walks in the door, separate from this friend who'd meet her because Violet was already at the edge of certainty when it came to friends in this world. And first thing she sees is the ex. Talking with, of course, the first ex at the start of the whole game, who, crept up out of some corner just for such an occasion when shit had to go down. This is what parties are for tho in small home towns that you never leave; they stir the primordial ooze to test our new combinations, rile up old enmities.
"It's a fucking travesty" she says out loud. The whole place is a stage set to test or break her. Seems everyone she'd ever known was there. The normal stratification and calcification of eras and old friendship was all broke up and muddled in this final scene. And who'd stirred all the shit up? Marren, a vain louse with what passed for a hip pad because it had enough space out of doors to always have a fire going, which still somehow at this late day still meant hip. For Marren, it must have been an issue of pride codifying so many social layers. Or if not codifying precisely, temporarily suspending in the same place the diversity and array of the entire town and its history as far as it can be said to have either. Which it can't. Instead it was like a high school party from any film, but achingly and longingly so. Everyone was there to be filmed. Everyone was appreciating the moments that whirled past them as still images that could be reproduced when direct access was so clearly cut off. Marren glowered always in the center. Propriety gets you that. Landed gentry.
Violet, a nomad, set to snaking through the place and getting plowed. She was at once essence and antithesis of the scene. A towering force that went unseen. And truth told she did. She hadn't been recognized by a soul yet through her particular powers of knowing just when to weave and fade into various groups. Even in a town where everyone knew everyone you could still count on people's quick forgetting, at least when it came to faces. She'd dodge someone she'd really known by temporarily hovering at the border of a group in the midst of some conversation about shark activity off the cliff scarring or not scaring local surfers. They'd all know her by her stories, but not a one by her face since none of them had shared a room since elementary.
"The chop is rough right now anyways. We've got a temporary rip off North Heights. There's not a shark in the waters. It's all machismo talk. The surf is shit and no one gets a wave; sharks are in these waters. Bullshit is all."
And off she went unrecognized to grab another drink and pound it back. She was gaining bravado for a virtuoso performance she was planning in her head. Her goal tonight was to touch off a final scene that would produce her as completely insane on one hand and a local hero on the other. She sought to divide herself and the room into those who thought her an agent of chaos and those who thought her contrarily as a degraded object of chaos. The difference was fine. She was happy to have the entire world thinking she was part of the insane, decaying and entropic universe. What mattered to her now—and this only as a sort of send off to be done with this town—was to separate those who could embrace the chaotic and rebellious from those who must tyrannically hold the world together and condemn the chaotic.
There was a certain joy in imagining friends divided over the issue of herself. Not that she expected anyone to really care in the long run. She simply liked the idea of the rift, even a minute temporary fissure in the fabric of these lives.
The how made use of the real explosion earlier in the day. She usually like to work with total lies; the whole cloth kept real details for getting mixed up in the crafted elements. Her identity was never defined by the mundane in her life; she expelled it for the narrative. She was working with something brand new now. She would set the real story out there with just the right person and in pressure waves around the room enact new moments of the story in progress as the story is told again. She would distort in real time with real acts. She imagined this would mean perhaps first a screaming fit in the face of the ex. Then maybe she would have to through a drink. After that real things would have to break, bottle, glasses, she'd probably have to shove someone over. Then it would really be loosed into chaos and she would have to react in true real time. Would it be best to through someone into the pool? To shatter a window? Maybe she could slash someone's tires? In the end she knew simply she had to let go and swing as the moment swayed her. And she was ready.
Pounding another drink, she made her way ex-ward.
___________
[climactic bits]
This crucial effect of her presence—or her personality and personal history in that they tended to stand in precisely for presence—wasn’t so much calculated, but certainly wasn’t accidental. Violet was a secretive person and liked to stay off of people’s radar. At some point in her youth used had the profound recognition that people just don’t give a damn about each other in any way that might actually matter. And so maybe it was two revelations in one. First that people couldn’t be counted on for a god damned thing. And second that this lack of caring occasioned an almost total freeness within the world. It was probably on that day—if it was a day and not just the effect of the years of disillusionment of her youth—that she became a con artist of her own soul.
It wasn’t calculated per se. She just started letter people feel more comfortable with their own stories about her. She did some of this intentionally and consciously, but she never had any sort of end game in mind. At a party in her middle teens when she has been awkwardly dating a guy—in fits and starts—who for whatever reason got too much social attention, she’d performed her life’s only badass move. She’d caught him cheating at the party that they’d come to together. Telling the girl some infectious lies and snapping a few awkward photos of the poor boy, she sat down calmly next to him. Inside of the uneven and unenjoyable on and off dating she might have been trying to piece together a social life, but in a moment that was nail in the coffined. Maybe she’d be trying to repair her sense that people aren’t all good for nothing viewed at close enough range. She leveled with the guy. It was over, yes. There wasn’t any need for embarrassment, personal or social. She had these photos, which might be enough to destabilize his social career and all she wanted in exchange was for him to help implode her own.
“The fact that I’m asking you at all implies that I still have some faith in you, that I imagine you’re vaguely more interesting than the rest of our combined age group. What you’re going to do for me is deploy three different stories into the social scene” this was all on the spot, game strategy that would establish her for the rest of her life so acutely managed in this moment of its inception, preternaturally—maybe divinely inspired—this dense little cluster of tales like the big bang. “You tell the story of tonight as I tell it to you—don’t worry, you’re a slut banging hero. You tell the story of when we first met, which I’ll get down exactly for you since it is going to be a bit more complicated than you’re likely to remember. And finally, should occasion arise—and please, only if, like if you’re specifically asked for some extra special piece of information on that psycho you used to date, only, only, only—you’ll tell a little story, you probably heard from someone down the grapevine and the details are as musty as they come, of my precocious youth.”
She made him stay something like an hour verifying that he could be a trusted carrier of all this precious cargo. True to his word he was. Probably not from fear or coercion or any meanness of the knowledge of the effect either. Probably it was a noble and good hearted moment in the face of the pure oddity of the situation. Like she’d asked, looking him straight in the eye, to stab her right in the gullet. That true friendship at that moment would and could only mean that. And, she liked to believe, tho confused, he acted on some pure faith. She also liked to believe that she’d clearly occasioned that faith with some perfect look that she hadn’t spent any time in the mirror planning or adjusting, but arrived on her face as a piece of pure inspiration. Like of pure instances roaming around in this scene. But it really was the kernel of her life as a self-made women. True to his word those stories got on in a believable fashion and they spun out and continue to until the final heat death of the universe which hadn’t hit yet. Through college and on into early adulthood. Now at quarter life or beyond she reckoned they hadn’t yet seen their first half life.
________________
Now it was a man with a record collection and too skinny jeans and a fairly morbid self-loathing that, while hidden by the aforementioned effects, offered her no true solace. And this wasn't going to be about finding a way to get through the mire of her own stories and form a true connection with someone's inner soul. She was damned fucking sure of that. People were still unreliable schmucks. Probably more so now than when she'd first more or less consciously cocooned herself in talk all those years ago.
They guy had all the charm of his variant forms of superiority. That, more than any other single element of his discernible personality, was certainly my Violet had gotten attached to him. He willfully projected these terrible self-centered parts of himself, his collections of records or whatever else. A certain set of knowledge he'd accrued that could battle off anyone who'd try to talk to him. It was the most blatant kind of armour, but it was a devotion to the ability of knowledge to shield self that Violet assumed had to be consciously put on.
What had happened tho was that she realized that he was just a hurt kid. Probably she should have known that having consorted with these types before. But I guess she let the romance of her own system cloud her vision and imagine she saw sometime more in him than there was.
And that was the worst thing now because it implied that she was imagining some beautiful soul for him that she'd spent years believing she didn't care about or have herself. True, her version of a beautiful soul was an intelligent and calculating consciousness that understood the limits of representation in the world and desired simply to navigate social space all the while maintaining a comfortable anonymity. But now she was forced to admit, seeing this rank amateur version of herself, that the truth of it was that she was all along imagining some inner self of her own that was too good for the world of tales and tellers that had to recluse up inside of herself to stay pure. It was silly, but she was insistent even with this new knowledge that she'd glimpsed a serious truth in making herself up out of stories and she was damned fucking insistent that she'd carry it through and figure out what it meant.
The first step was to excise the guy. Which meant smashing a good deal of his record collection. She grabbed a handful, compressed to lift them out from the milk crate storage like a gripper claw in those arcade games. Her over extended grip let two or three slip. They fell nicely to the floor and flopped around. It was a good start. With space in the crate, she next grabbed a particularly hip looking record and holding either side of it broke it over her knee. She stopped momentarily to think if she had ever broken anything over her knee. She hadn't. It was a satisfying feeling. It was a feeling of full success as the record crisped in half and the cardboard broke and bent. But also satisfying because it validated the tale telling of culture itself. Without ever having crazily shattered records, she already knew the best way to do it. Culture worked. It had taught her through unknown routes how to destroy effectively and efficiently. Next she tried to crack one using just her hands. No luck. So the knee again. So smart that culture of hers.
He'd come home in the midst of it and write it into his own legend of the psycho ex girlfriend. It'd look just like every movie where clothes go flying out of the window to the plaintive guy on the street. But they lived in a terrible little duplex with paper thin walls. On the ground floor nothing could be so grandiose. And this is why Violet knew she had to get out. Her own version of things coped perfectly well with reality. But reality included a lot of stories, even his grandiose ones. It was just the way he got caught up in them that upset her. So she had to get out. Even if the reason bespoke a flaw in her own system. She needed the space to rework the system. Oh well. She went on breaking records. Until it got monotonous and then she picked a last couple good ones and headed out.
_____________
He hadn't come storming in before she left. So that fucked that up. She hit the streets on foot. She'd left everything but a quick packed backpack over her shoulder. She walked downtown, which in this shabby burg was something like a quaint little main street. There were only the first terrible signs of self-consciously gilt charm. A shop here or there realized that soon this little strip would be pulsing with a inward turning nostalgia for a by gone era. What there era was nobody could be sure. Anything but strip malls seemed like the obvious answer. But more than that it was anything but the planned shopping complex that wasn't even an obviously odious as the strip mall. Violet sensed a time not far away when the strip mall itself would have a special charm as it became outmoded.
But no, the downtown wasn't quite self-aware yet. It was still peopled by busted down trophy shops and cold meat stores. A leather work shop and a cobbler/dry cleaner tandem. They were shops that had some realer seeming charm for not having anything to do with a visual aesthetic. They were all shops that were manned by someone of a specific knowledge, nearly a trade. Most of the time people wouldn't be in the shops at all. There wasn't a thing in them that let onto browsing. You'd only ever come by with a specific needs. And they'd fill that service for you. But now she was nostalgic for the present that was right in front of her, sad to know that it must be collapsing, that it was already an anomaly and not one that other people saw as fittingly charming to maintain. She made herself pukey. She was just as god damned caught up in these stories as anybody and not quite on the leading edge she kept telling herself she was. She'd have to sort it all out somewhere. Somewhere where she could think. But where could she get that was to the side of the problem instead of in the heart of it?
She was aimless. In a sort of fugue space. Absent of motivation she let herself be guided by her feet in big blocky motions. Her pacing becomes a blur and then a quick invisibility. If she was only ever the stories that could be told about her and now she was alone in a street without a motive, she must of necessity disappear. No reason to think that she hadn't. When someone else walked on the street tho, she had to reappear someone. Still she's not much more than a blocky set of colors, black hair, leather bag, whatever color clothing she happens to be wearing. This was always the sort of encounter that had troubled her because she had no idea what image she would strike. Not that she'd ever been able—or ever desired—to completely control the impressions she made on people. But she liked having been the root cause of it. And sure she could pick her clothes and her hair color or whatever, but that wasn't the same as having planted some wisp of history to articulate her every motion. Thus far in life, she'd been able to thread a connection through her social field that still maintain those faint lines of flight from her earliest decision. It was a virtuoso effort even. Finding little links to make the connections. Fanning flames of the littlest knowledge.
[Some quick discussion of this story's plot: Violet breaks with her own life in an attempt to understand a narrative/composite identity. The story becomes a story of stories. She tells made up tales of her own past in an attempt to implode her own identity. Scenes of her at parties, in the library, sitting out at parks. A tour of a small town as seen by a women evading/creating her own life. The end game has to be that she ride some edge of narrative, self-propelled. Which, you know, none of this makes any sense. The things I'm looking to get at are: non-identical self-identity and maybe thats it.]
Sitting long enough, Violet started to come into herself again. Only because she had started telling herself stories again. I'm sitting here on a park bench. My ass on the top of the back rest. I'm surveying the community fountain that something between bad public art and nice real public space. I'm looking like a badass, a badegg. I'm scowling at old ladies and middle aged ladies with their young pups as they walk by. They see me as the quiet loner type. Someone daddy never loved enough. They even see a black eye that isn't there from a guy that couldn't beat me up if he tried. They think I'm a sweet little poison keeps putting herself in harms way when really its harm that keeps putting itself in my way and getting the raw end of the deal, ending up with its own black eyes and broken records.
The park was cast out before her, not much more than a few lolling grass hills and a soccer field giving away to an unincorporated brown hillside that rose steeply for what had to be two hundred feet. The sky was high gray clouds that wouldn't do a thing. They weren't even distinct clouds that you could imagine floating past, just a big mass coating the upper atmosphere. Not threatening rain. Maybe they'd break, allow a little fissure of blue. Or maybe they wouldn't.
I'm a stealth object. Light comes off of me in big glancing blocks, like a rough cut diamond. People seeing some single feature of me can only manage a quick reference to something they already know. And in that second I can slide through them. I'll transmute to whatever is required of me to slip past.
_________
Where'd you ever get pretending you were who you woke up being? Being embodied doesn't mean you have to be self-identical. She saw one part of her as a thread and another part of her as this scrap heap of fabrics. The thread, probably with a needle at the helm, but that didn't matter, kept looping in more and different pieces of fabric. Sometimes a nice neat row of stitches. Sometimes less so. Sometimes just a single time through, or just the thread tied into knots around itself. It was a fucking mess. A serious and intractable fucking mess. And so the question was always put, are you the fabric or the thread? Are you the active and conscious act of stitching or what is stitched? And what a bullshit question that is. You're both right? I mean, I guess, the metaphor might even be too lame to really work. It still makes you think you've got an outside you picking where to stitch, a piece of thread that even if tangled up still has some linear continuity that is always and forever trackable in some real and true way.
Just now on the bench, hadn't she totally fugued? Aren't their cases all of the fucking time where people stop being themselves? And doesn't that mean that some piece of continuous thread isn't essential? Not even just in outliers but in all of us? Aren't there times with the social fabric is the thing itself that allows you to patch in and make connections.
Here, how the fuck about this for a metaphor: We're still made up of all this fabric, but instead of a nice piece of thread holding it in line, its held together through whatever available adhesive materials. Most of the time you've got these staples maybe. And maybe other times its duct tape and it gets all gooey with that backing glue. Some lucky and deluded fuck might see it as a nice long piece of thread. But at some point you have to admit that you were lent a stitch here and there. So yeah, I think the idea of a stitching action holds up. I remember plenty of things. I see myself in the light of past things I've been. It isn't just like I woke up today in a vacuum. But it also isn't that I have to be anything like I was yesterday. How could it be? I don't even care about yesterday.
But I guess the question remains, if posed at all directly, who am I? I don't have a good and clean answer. And maybe that's cause the concept itself is wrong. I. It implies too many things I'm not sure I agree with. And called to answer in the terms of I, I have to swallow too many of those things even before I can formulate an answer. And I don't think its either me or society. I don't think anything is so simple that I can erect a fence and talk about the things on either side of it. Or maybe I can for a second, but that's just in my head and I can't pretend the divide exists even a moment later.
There is a me sometimes that lives in this body. And there is a big old society sometimes too. And then there are little mobilized societies as well. And even mobilized fragments of me that drive the "whole." Fuck if it isn't a complicated mess through and through.
__________
After all the record breaking she felt like things were all set to collapse around her. It was a feeling that permeated her. She set up a world of stories around her, set it delicately and expertly. At one point it'd appeared as this perfectly structured edifice which she could traverse with ease. In high school it'd been easy to read people enough by their social position, usually grafted onto the physical environs of the schoolspace. She'd know in advance who knew would know what about her and how they'd likely heard it. And she could shift herself a little left or right to fill just such a role to its best advantage—usually the advantage was a form of disappearing, but every once in awhile it had more active benefits. Her troubled girlhood—fictional—had allowed her to do a lot of subtle bullying—actual—that allowed her to get things she wanted. The bullying was so subtle tho that her lived experience of it wasn't much different than asking for things she wanted and receiving them. In the background, the stories that floated around determined people's reactions to her desires. Like a hulking shadow the stories animated all of her scenes without any new input from her.
That was awhile ago at this point tho. And she felt the topple coming. The social scene of the high school years guaranteed that there would be a certain large percentage of people who didn't care at all about you. They provided a buffer for her stories, an insulation that ensured certain elements would pass through and others stop all without adding any additional charge. Now tho, the social world was smaller. It'd hit a critical mass of knowledge eventually—now—where there would no longer be enough space to perpetuate absolute variants of truth. Some actual was bound to sneak it if only in the cross waves of two falsities colliding. She'd appear at some point when she'd intend to disappear.
But she was a master. And she had felt the collapse before it came. So she had a chance to plan. And tho the opportunity presented a very limited set of options. She could nonetheless choose. Perhaps it was even reduced to a binary. She could stand still in the middle and watch the collapse around her. Flash into existence in the middle of things and watch as people reacted to the newly formed girl in their midst. Or catch the crashing wave of her own life and ride it out for as long it would go, clinging always to the very edge of the collapse and its little tailings all the while invisibly and elegantly sliding past. Certainly there had to be gradients between the poles, so not a binary at all. But she wasn't one for the half assed. Both had a certain charm about them, but of course she'd choose the latter and end up alone down the road somewhere chewing a stick of gum and thumbing a ride to somewhere else. And maybe there'd even be some faint little drift that would pass her on into the next world without there ever really having been a collapse at all.
_________
At a party that night that she went to because a friend of hers had insisted that the only thing a person can do post break-up is attend some sort of soirée and do one's damnedest to get fawned over and then either laid or to get to enjoyably send someone packing. Violet hadn't a notion for any of that in the slightest and felt instead like she was walking into some crucial scene in her young adult life in which she'd lay the ground work for what it would mean for her to be an adult. Ideally it meant the same life and the same thoughts, but she felt it a trial at which any outcome could avail itself. Her friend, this is the stranger bit, she didn't know what to do with friends anymore. There was this nosy insistence in friends that dug into you as if you weren't the image you projected. It was this natural assumption that you're a liar and that a friend's place is to get inside of the lies. As Violet was a liar par excellence, the friend position became mostly untenable. This isn't to say that Violet was needfully defensive of her close kept lies, that a driving friend could so easily puncture them and cause her system to collapse. No. Violet was no charade in the usual sense. What bothered her about friends was the assumption of lying as friendships default state. This assumption made Violet's extravagant story-life seem like the paltry stuff of everyday life. In a sense sure, people lie all the time. And Violet lied all the time. But the lies were constructive, intentional, planned and processed. It wasn't an issue of quantity. Not ever shifts in order of magnitude. It was about kind. She made up her life. She didn't fiddle around with social masks in some vain effort to gain attention or avoid people. Her life was the nexus point of telling and told. She lived on that cusp.
So this party. Bullshit right? Absolutely. But it was also like a land mine long buried in a forgotten plain rusting away unnoticed until one day the trigger fails even without a passing pressure and the place goes up. While statistics say that's the best option, nobody'll get hurt. We all know better. That really the damned thing couldn't snap until there was some appropriate density of awful it could do cause for awful it was made. And like a rifle in the first act, you can't avoid setting off a round. But now, we're deep in and need to telescope out. Like a rifle it's got to go off, that's its purpose. Like an old land mine, it'd been waiting a long time and was bound for badness. So Violet walks in the door, separate from this friend who'd meet her because Violet was already at the edge of certainty when it came to friends in this world. And first thing she sees is the ex. Talking with, of course, the first ex at the start of the whole game, who, crept up out of some corner just for such an occasion when shit had to go down. This is what parties are for tho in small home towns that you never leave; they stir the primordial ooze to test our new combinations, rile up old enmities.
"It's a fucking travesty" she says out loud. The whole place is a stage set to test or break her. Seems everyone she'd ever known was there. The normal stratification and calcification of eras and old friendship was all broke up and muddled in this final scene. And who'd stirred all the shit up? Marren, a vain louse with what passed for a hip pad because it had enough space out of doors to always have a fire going, which still somehow at this late day still meant hip. For Marren, it must have been an issue of pride codifying so many social layers. Or if not codifying precisely, temporarily suspending in the same place the diversity and array of the entire town and its history as far as it can be said to have either. Which it can't. Instead it was like a high school party from any film, but achingly and longingly so. Everyone was there to be filmed. Everyone was appreciating the moments that whirled past them as still images that could be reproduced when direct access was so clearly cut off. Marren glowered always in the center. Propriety gets you that. Landed gentry.
Violet, a nomad, set to snaking through the place and getting plowed. She was at once essence and antithesis of the scene. A towering force that went unseen. And truth told she did. She hadn't been recognized by a soul yet through her particular powers of knowing just when to weave and fade into various groups. Even in a town where everyone knew everyone you could still count on people's quick forgetting, at least when it came to faces. She'd dodge someone she'd really known by temporarily hovering at the border of a group in the midst of some conversation about shark activity off the cliff scarring or not scaring local surfers. They'd all know her by her stories, but not a one by her face since none of them had shared a room since elementary.
"The chop is rough right now anyways. We've got a temporary rip off North Heights. There's not a shark in the waters. It's all machismo talk. The surf is shit and no one gets a wave; sharks are in these waters. Bullshit is all."
And off she went unrecognized to grab another drink and pound it back. She was gaining bravado for a virtuoso performance she was planning in her head. Her goal tonight was to touch off a final scene that would produce her as completely insane on one hand and a local hero on the other. She sought to divide herself and the room into those who thought her an agent of chaos and those who thought her contrarily as a degraded object of chaos. The difference was fine. She was happy to have the entire world thinking she was part of the insane, decaying and entropic universe. What mattered to her now—and this only as a sort of send off to be done with this town—was to separate those who could embrace the chaotic and rebellious from those who must tyrannically hold the world together and condemn the chaotic.
There was a certain joy in imagining friends divided over the issue of herself. Not that she expected anyone to really care in the long run. She simply liked the idea of the rift, even a minute temporary fissure in the fabric of these lives.
The how made use of the real explosion earlier in the day. She usually like to work with total lies; the whole cloth kept real details for getting mixed up in the crafted elements. Her identity was never defined by the mundane in her life; she expelled it for the narrative. She was working with something brand new now. She would set the real story out there with just the right person and in pressure waves around the room enact new moments of the story in progress as the story is told again. She would distort in real time with real acts. She imagined this would mean perhaps first a screaming fit in the face of the ex. Then maybe she would have to through a drink. After that real things would have to break, bottle, glasses, she'd probably have to shove someone over. Then it would really be loosed into chaos and she would have to react in true real time. Would it be best to through someone into the pool? To shatter a window? Maybe she could slash someone's tires? In the end she knew simply she had to let go and swing as the moment swayed her. And she was ready.
Pounding another drink, she made her way ex-ward.
___________
[climactic bits]
It progresses outside of her in such an interesting way. She's an embodied, fully embodied, being swinging with the movement all around her, part hers, part everyone else's. She acknowledge the mutual creation, the collective enactment. She's ad-libbing the whole thing. She's punched her ex in the fact, which was the starter. The tide was much higher than she'd imagined when it was all only thought.
Her embodiment was all that occupied her as she swung and after he fell—he fell hard and knocked his head. No blood from the head hit, but from his cheek. Her fist throbbed and for a second that was the center of her. But then her center was elsewhere, more expansive. She was only her, but that didn't seem to be the crucial thing. That was the room and the people in it. Her fist had been a proximal center for the entire room—perhaps the ex's face. But she was aware of these things both as herself and as herself within this context of people.
She might have found it odd that only sheer violence had allowed her to feel at one with the people surrounding her at the party. But it was a curious oneness anyways, so why not a curious entrance into it? She saw with profound clarity the way it all worked. She was alive in all that was around her, in this moment and in all the rest. She had activated a network that was a brand new configuration and articulation. She and all of them. She wasn't the only initiator, such a thing would be patently and definitionally impossible. She wasn't the creator or the master. But she was an adept orchestor. She could weave and spin the room. She could float and curl amongst all the very real talk and tale. And now, crucially, she had entwined the bodily and the story. She'd tied a knot in the midst of her own narrative. No one could even conceive of her from now on without this dense moment and from it she would craft the tailing wisps she'd ride out of here forever.
He was cursing on the floor sort of curled up against the couch more like a drunk in an alleyway than a boxer on the ropes. Violet was being held bodily by one of two guys that were trying to balance restraining her and gauging her level of danger. For a second she was in the pocket of her own consciousness again, enjoying the fact that she had this extra bit of hiddenness amidst the spectacle. For everyone else in the room she could only be made sense of in terms of her most recent action—a seemingly unprovoked assault. Some of them would begin to use various bits of knowledge to set and place her. But for now it was a shattered instant in the social world and only she could be tucked away in her own head with any reasonable sense of what would happen next.
And what would? She hadn't decided because she was unsure what we left open to her. She wanted to escalate the myth of herself into a more interesting perspective. The shattering violence had been essential for establishing the stage, but it wasn't articulate enough to develop into a narrative without something more spectacular. She thought about plotting a love child or an abortion, or just plain old cheating hearts. But she wasn't interested in soap opera shit. She was looking for myth, for the pure figure that eclipses paltry sub-plots and becomes the generator of narrative itself.
At some point she decided regardless of what else she had to through a bottle through a window. If for no other reason than the pure experience of joy. And finally it was decided that it would have to be a speech punctuated by whatever breaking of physical objects struck her fancy. She'd decided to forego any further harm to people, sensing that she could maintain the room and her own free space only if she didn't seem to pose any more of a bodily threat.
"Fuck you. Oh good people. Fuck you. Fuck Michael. Fuck your gracious hostess. Fuck this goddamned town and its fucking squared off corners.
I came here tonight to beat some sense into the lot of you. You're all boring as shit. You're all pieces of absolute death and boredom. You're alone. You're aliens. You're the worthless and dregs.
Only you're not going to stay that way. Because I've delivered you from your mired shit. I've broken your sad little collage or drinking and gossiping." Grabbing a bottle she hurled it through the kitchen window adjacent. A worried guy half-heartedly grabbed her upper arm and she shook him off. A little din rose in response. "Shut the fuck up. I'm versifying at you all."
"I'm leaving town. Tonight. Drunk as I am. I'm going to catch a freighter and tour the fucking world. I'm going to catch a way and die on the rocks like all good sinners. I'm tired of your faces, but I'll leave you the spark of life. I know the secrets of the whole fucking world and I'll happily share them with you just to have you shut the fuck up." Silence again reigned and she shoved the entire contents of the counter onto the floor. Glass bottles of booze shattered on the sad linoleum floor.
{&c &c &c}
"I'll tell you story before I go. And you'll listen or else." The crowd's mood was unclear at this threat. The room seemed to perceive both her fury and her weakness. She might have looking a shaking little girl. Or a trapped, wet and rabid rat. It wasn't pretty in any case. The romantic swing it had in her head didn't translate from other available perspectives. Not that any of that undercut her sense of it. And tho she wasn't hiding anything or deceiving them in any strict sense—she was generally in sync with all the attitudes she was conveying, and breaking bottles was killer fun—there was a part of her that none of them were seeing, the part that calculated and perceived. And parts of her perceived this perception and its hiddenness. And she could have looped there forever if there was an reason to. But by her figuring she was at such a point in wreaking havoc on these poor souls that they'd now hear the truth of even that differently. And maybe that was the point of all this: some fucked up vision of utopian community.
"I'm a put on and show. In some strictly real sense there isn't a one of you that has ever met me. And in that same strictly real sense, I might only have a leg up on you all about even myself, not ever having met a self myself. Thing is you every one have your own me that you and me and the rest of us all built up. I'd like to think I had some hand in it. Not that it matters."
"What matters is that I am the force that has spun this town up into anything. I've had my hands in every honey pot. I've pissed on every party. I'm intractable. I'm in your blood and bones. I'm a cancer that will eat away at your lonely little selves until you're huddled together somewhere very much like nice. A naked mass of sad bodies sobbing into each other. I've shat you out and up come daisies."
"I'll dance." She does and awkward and jerky dance, her arms held out with a weak limpness, fragile shakes etching contours in her side to side sway. "And I'll crash my way out of your fucking nobody lives until you're all stripped bare and it's just me dancing that you can even form into a solid picture any more. I'll be the image and the ecstasy of your every thought, the apotheosis of your ability to form coherent thoughts. Remember me just like this, shouting and fucking and breaking shit and dancing an awkward jig."
"They say the devil dances while he eats up souls. And shits the soil healthy again. So up yon bitches and cry."
[Worst thing I've ever written or marginally inspired? Likely the former.]
Friday, November 5, 2010
Young Love [tentative]
I wanted for once to tell a story that doesn't have any problems in it. We aren't built to think about stories outside of the idea of problems. I mean, maybe not "problems", but something along the lines of change and development, often overcoming. That's just how narrative tends to work for us. But doesn't that seem like a pale idea about life? Always a battle against something or someone, only the rest you've earned by working for it—against something. And when you're thinking about love and joy and the beauty that emerges from out it? How terrible to be always putting it in terms of adversity and challenge. How vexed are we that we can only enjoy such a thing if we've earned it?
So I've tried to tell this story without all that. And I'm sure I've failed, or will fail, cause I'm not sure it's even possible to pull yourself out of that mindset. But I'm trying. I just want you to see the world as I've seen it, to experience the things that love makes possible without undercutting it as a drug or a dream, but as the everyday. Gods I wish there were another word than love that hadn't been so mulched. Maybe I'll say communion or friendly relations. I guess it really is that vexed. But like I say, I'll just keep trying.
A & I were together before I even remember meeting her. And why the hell not? I was me before I remember becoming me. Certainly I can point to some big historical moments when I changed or had things that effected my personality, like when I was four maybe and a rooster squabbled after me at my grandparents' farm and ever since I've felt like they were my spirit animal in a perverse way, not of course knowing at the time anything about perversity and only knowing that the motherfucker was scary as all hell. But there are plenty more things about myself that seem pretty set in stone that come well before I remember a damned thing. And just so with A right? I remember some big moments—first kiss and those sundries, big fights that we got past, calm nights when things clarified—and those make up the bulk of the stories we ever tell people or tell each other. But that isn't it and it would be silly of us to really pretend it. She and I were she and I at some point regardless and it backfilled the rest. Life acts to look like fate, modeling our memories of the past on our known future. And bully for that. Because our thing, A & I is a real thing that really came into being as real as any other thing that's stitched together in the unknown of a million experiences.
And that's why I can't tell you where it came from and whatever turmoils got us here. And why I won't be telling you anything about tugging at the seams. Cause the seams are stitched and disappeared at this point. Just like me is me, we're us. So we won't be fucking with that. Sure we could existentialize til the cows came home. I'm sure I could stop feeling like me, but what the hell good will that do? It isn't any more true when you really think about it. Real effects people. Maybe worth questioning and working over at some point, but real effects.
Anyway, A and I had this one turmoil that doesn't matter now, but sort of establishes things the way they are now. We had to run away together. But maybe we didn't really have to, we just thought to.
[day's worth of writing disappears. things about their leaving town and going out with their friends. just the need to be somewhere new.]
A & I had both grown up in the city, were truly city kids for what all that's worth. And at some point it just died for us. We were unintelligible to ourselves and the world around us. We had all these gutter punk kids we were friends with, kids with shaved and dyed bits of hair, kids with studded leather and ripped lace, kids who had nice suburban home not more than thirty miles away, but couldn't stand the thought of them. We were sort of idolized by then since we came from the city. We seemed truer and harder to them, not tainted by having had some sort of make shift opulence to trap us. Of course if you ever went into either of our parents' houses you'd just see all the same crap modulated to the appropriate city style. The fantasy of urban living dies at the street and stoop.
But anyway, when A & I realized when needed to go we knew we couldn't go to another city. They just couldn't hold the appeal for us that they did for these kids. Everything seemed so overwrought with other people's intentions. And so I guess we might have flipped too far the other way and ended up in somebody else's fantasy. We thought to go to some small town where we could hole up in some sort of home like thing. Where the main street might be just all square brick buildings and maybe the occasional open construction two story grange hall or mayors office. So sure, yeah, fantasy. But the funny thing was that we both just sort of knew it was time. We looked at each other and nodded our heads and that was that. We were packing to go that very night. So, yeah, I guess it wasn't really a turmoil at all, just sort of a big thing that needed to happen, but that we were both prepared for. Maybe I can rethink that turmoil thing more later and try to dig something more dramatic up. But for now I'm telling about how we moved out and resettled ourselves.
So that night anyway we had all of our things packed and stacked in the side yard. Mostly boxes and that sort of what not, all set up to go in a big pile. But we wanted to really see the town on the last night, so we gathered up all of our street punky friends and had them pile into our boat of a car. The thing had bench seats, which the conversation to bucket seats really seems to mark some serious loss for mankind. Not only does the bench seat allow you to get up close with your love, but it let's you determine how many people you wanna cram in next you, instead of being told how much room there is in your car. That night there were four of us across the front. In the back seat there were five, but really a couple of those were tiny type punk girls and really the two at the far sides were propped halfway up the door so they hardly give a fair picture. In the back—it was a big old station wagon—a couple had been given reign to roll around making out and took full advantage.
We bumped through the streets and poured out into various parks, split into various cliques, drank, smoked, tripped or fucked as was appropriate. A & I just sort of sat on park benches and occasionally stomped around through the grasses. It was a big gloomy night of low cloud all lit up by the city lights and the occasional mist shower. The night ended up somewhere in the crazy empty morning hours. Maybe it was four, but there wasn't even the hint of morning yet. Just that quiet lost middle time when nobody but you and the cops and the taxis are out anymore.
When we got home we just sat in the car. A says to me, there's no way I can sleep right now or enough. We should just pack up and hit the road. And so we did. We just grabbed everything from the big stack and bit by bit the car climbed with it all. By the time we were done the neighbor was shambling all zombie into his car and heading out to his too damn early work. It must have been five, but the streets were still dead. And we took off right after him.
The quiet predawn morning was wet, but done with raining. The few cars and us went by with the hizzing of tires on wet streets, letting out the little persistent wakes of water behind. The city was sort of sad as we went. A big lonely beast of so many people, but them all tucked away. Anyway we were done with it for a time and we weren't too worried. Weren't angry or nothing. Just needed our own space and time. And so we were on our away.
_________________
We're smart young kids yeah? I think at that moment we were on the border crossing, she 19, me 20. But most of the rest of the year we were the same. We had, despite all else, that city savvy about us. So what we really wanted was to actually arrive in some town and start living there. We didn't want anybody thinking we were coming in to study them or play at small town life or anything like that. But there really is this first moment in small towns when you come from a big city where you wonder why don't at least some of the people get up and out and into a city where there is something going on. Just on some pure statistical level there were bound to be some dissatisfied people who felt trapped and stilted there. And didn't they know it wasn't that long a drive to a nice big city and that there really was some work to be had there of pretty much any and every stripe. Not that this was our primary thought or anything. Just that first moment where the space of the open country gives onto a town, but the town doesn't seem much different from that open space around it, just like a delicate toe hold on civilization, like not wanting to disturb too much or anger something in that open country. Just that that first moment seems like, how are you certain that you're even here when the anchor seems so light? I suppose you could look at it like a blessing too and that is eventually why we were here and what we wanted. But that first moment is a bit of a shock, like being lifted off the ground just a tic by a hand full of balloon, like a little spacewalk. Anyway we didn't want to be tourists, but somehow we'd always have at least a piece of that by being outsiders.
In town, I think we got there around midday, there was an information office always staffed by this one woman. All the buildings by the way were two stories and the streets weren't all straight lines like they had been in my head, but were twisted around a couple of hills and rock gullies and cut through by a curving train track. This women was a peach. She was older and dressed up like a relator, which I guess she was along with being the tourist guide and the social center of the town. She was older looking and professional, name of Janice. She sort of thought of us as kids I could tell, but treated us like young marrieds anyway and was gentle about us. Like she was playing along with our dreams, but respected that we thought them serious. She knew places for rent and could run our credit for us and was actually a notary too. Got a guy on the phone and we had a place out of town in the unincorporated county land within two hours. Just like that. We'd figure out work when we could, but had saved enough to sit and adjust a bit. All in a day. All in a day.
________________
So here we are in this brand new town right? A brand new state even. And we don't think often enough about state I don't think. And how great it is that I can just run on over and land in this new place with a whole new set of rules and ideas about what you can and can't do, with a whole new culture. And I can just live there, just like that. I don't even have to tell anybody. Or, I guess, if I have to tell somebody like the post office or the tax man or what not, nobody can tell me no. It's just a new fact of the world. I live in Wyoming. And there you have it.
A & I drive up to the place in the late afternoon. Its north of town at the edge of this broad shallow valley with little swales that can't seem to decide whether they're rolling hills or rocky gullies. They're part and part. And our house is up the hill part way with little rivulets and ravines cutting back into the hills, a little exposed rock decorating the hillside.
We have the keys and its just this old odd shaped ranch house sort of thing, but pretty. Someone took the time to get the architecture a little dolled up. We're parked up the top of this rambling drive and we just sit and look at each other a minute. Like, we woke up yesterday morning in a big city and had a big city night with our big city pals and now we're in a new town, in a new state, in a new home and we're alone here. And we're tired from not having slept, but we don't have much stuff, so we haul it all in. Of course we don't have any furniture so we sort of lay out a nest for ourselves in the center of the big wood floored living room, boxes all around us and a twilight sun slashing red-orange through the windows. And we just pass right out.
______________
But I haven't told you a thing about A, which has just got to seem silly. But she's just part of my life in a way that I forget needs describing. And its not like I forget or neglect her. Just her actions seem like mine and I haven't taken the time to describe myself either. Seems worth not much to look in a mirror all day telling yourself what you look like. What A is is a firebrand. A gods damned devil. A killer even. I mellowed her some I imagine, not cause of anything particular, just that I'm always sort of cow-eyed moving along and the pace can either be frustrating or infectious. Luckily I think she's fine with it. Doesn't slow her down none. Suppose that is how we got out here, at least in one night. Her passion is thought if you can call it that. She's always trying to fight and debate everyone about thinking. I guess she's a philosophy you might say. But like a people's philosopher? I think she imagine herself in the ancient Greek world like Diogenes and his barrel maybe it is? It has something to do with a town square, or a town forum. She reads a lot of Mark Twain and listens to comedy records. Claims that is where this particular activity has drifted off to. In this town too, she has some big plans about how to go about being a public philosopher. She's one to hold court.
With me tho, she's sweet as daisies. She's not a critic either, just a thinker. We're a real pair is all. We're just quietly eye to eye and I can't really say more than that.
Me, I'm a tinkerer or an inventor or something of the sort. The only way to have it make money is to call it art, or something of the kind. But I think up things to make and I make them. Or we could just take care of our house and put food on the table, really it doesn't matter what we are or think we are. We do happen to be these things, but now we've got this new place and a new life here and we're set on living it.
_________
So I've tried to tell this story without all that. And I'm sure I've failed, or will fail, cause I'm not sure it's even possible to pull yourself out of that mindset. But I'm trying. I just want you to see the world as I've seen it, to experience the things that love makes possible without undercutting it as a drug or a dream, but as the everyday. Gods I wish there were another word than love that hadn't been so mulched. Maybe I'll say communion or friendly relations. I guess it really is that vexed. But like I say, I'll just keep trying.
A & I were together before I even remember meeting her. And why the hell not? I was me before I remember becoming me. Certainly I can point to some big historical moments when I changed or had things that effected my personality, like when I was four maybe and a rooster squabbled after me at my grandparents' farm and ever since I've felt like they were my spirit animal in a perverse way, not of course knowing at the time anything about perversity and only knowing that the motherfucker was scary as all hell. But there are plenty more things about myself that seem pretty set in stone that come well before I remember a damned thing. And just so with A right? I remember some big moments—first kiss and those sundries, big fights that we got past, calm nights when things clarified—and those make up the bulk of the stories we ever tell people or tell each other. But that isn't it and it would be silly of us to really pretend it. She and I were she and I at some point regardless and it backfilled the rest. Life acts to look like fate, modeling our memories of the past on our known future. And bully for that. Because our thing, A & I is a real thing that really came into being as real as any other thing that's stitched together in the unknown of a million experiences.
And that's why I can't tell you where it came from and whatever turmoils got us here. And why I won't be telling you anything about tugging at the seams. Cause the seams are stitched and disappeared at this point. Just like me is me, we're us. So we won't be fucking with that. Sure we could existentialize til the cows came home. I'm sure I could stop feeling like me, but what the hell good will that do? It isn't any more true when you really think about it. Real effects people. Maybe worth questioning and working over at some point, but real effects.
Anyway, A and I had this one turmoil that doesn't matter now, but sort of establishes things the way they are now. We had to run away together. But maybe we didn't really have to, we just thought to.
[day's worth of writing disappears. things about their leaving town and going out with their friends. just the need to be somewhere new.]
A & I had both grown up in the city, were truly city kids for what all that's worth. And at some point it just died for us. We were unintelligible to ourselves and the world around us. We had all these gutter punk kids we were friends with, kids with shaved and dyed bits of hair, kids with studded leather and ripped lace, kids who had nice suburban home not more than thirty miles away, but couldn't stand the thought of them. We were sort of idolized by then since we came from the city. We seemed truer and harder to them, not tainted by having had some sort of make shift opulence to trap us. Of course if you ever went into either of our parents' houses you'd just see all the same crap modulated to the appropriate city style. The fantasy of urban living dies at the street and stoop.
But anyway, when A & I realized when needed to go we knew we couldn't go to another city. They just couldn't hold the appeal for us that they did for these kids. Everything seemed so overwrought with other people's intentions. And so I guess we might have flipped too far the other way and ended up in somebody else's fantasy. We thought to go to some small town where we could hole up in some sort of home like thing. Where the main street might be just all square brick buildings and maybe the occasional open construction two story grange hall or mayors office. So sure, yeah, fantasy. But the funny thing was that we both just sort of knew it was time. We looked at each other and nodded our heads and that was that. We were packing to go that very night. So, yeah, I guess it wasn't really a turmoil at all, just sort of a big thing that needed to happen, but that we were both prepared for. Maybe I can rethink that turmoil thing more later and try to dig something more dramatic up. But for now I'm telling about how we moved out and resettled ourselves.
So that night anyway we had all of our things packed and stacked in the side yard. Mostly boxes and that sort of what not, all set up to go in a big pile. But we wanted to really see the town on the last night, so we gathered up all of our street punky friends and had them pile into our boat of a car. The thing had bench seats, which the conversation to bucket seats really seems to mark some serious loss for mankind. Not only does the bench seat allow you to get up close with your love, but it let's you determine how many people you wanna cram in next you, instead of being told how much room there is in your car. That night there were four of us across the front. In the back seat there were five, but really a couple of those were tiny type punk girls and really the two at the far sides were propped halfway up the door so they hardly give a fair picture. In the back—it was a big old station wagon—a couple had been given reign to roll around making out and took full advantage.
We bumped through the streets and poured out into various parks, split into various cliques, drank, smoked, tripped or fucked as was appropriate. A & I just sort of sat on park benches and occasionally stomped around through the grasses. It was a big gloomy night of low cloud all lit up by the city lights and the occasional mist shower. The night ended up somewhere in the crazy empty morning hours. Maybe it was four, but there wasn't even the hint of morning yet. Just that quiet lost middle time when nobody but you and the cops and the taxis are out anymore.
When we got home we just sat in the car. A says to me, there's no way I can sleep right now or enough. We should just pack up and hit the road. And so we did. We just grabbed everything from the big stack and bit by bit the car climbed with it all. By the time we were done the neighbor was shambling all zombie into his car and heading out to his too damn early work. It must have been five, but the streets were still dead. And we took off right after him.
The quiet predawn morning was wet, but done with raining. The few cars and us went by with the hizzing of tires on wet streets, letting out the little persistent wakes of water behind. The city was sort of sad as we went. A big lonely beast of so many people, but them all tucked away. Anyway we were done with it for a time and we weren't too worried. Weren't angry or nothing. Just needed our own space and time. And so we were on our away.
_________________
We're smart young kids yeah? I think at that moment we were on the border crossing, she 19, me 20. But most of the rest of the year we were the same. We had, despite all else, that city savvy about us. So what we really wanted was to actually arrive in some town and start living there. We didn't want anybody thinking we were coming in to study them or play at small town life or anything like that. But there really is this first moment in small towns when you come from a big city where you wonder why don't at least some of the people get up and out and into a city where there is something going on. Just on some pure statistical level there were bound to be some dissatisfied people who felt trapped and stilted there. And didn't they know it wasn't that long a drive to a nice big city and that there really was some work to be had there of pretty much any and every stripe. Not that this was our primary thought or anything. Just that first moment where the space of the open country gives onto a town, but the town doesn't seem much different from that open space around it, just like a delicate toe hold on civilization, like not wanting to disturb too much or anger something in that open country. Just that that first moment seems like, how are you certain that you're even here when the anchor seems so light? I suppose you could look at it like a blessing too and that is eventually why we were here and what we wanted. But that first moment is a bit of a shock, like being lifted off the ground just a tic by a hand full of balloon, like a little spacewalk. Anyway we didn't want to be tourists, but somehow we'd always have at least a piece of that by being outsiders.
In town, I think we got there around midday, there was an information office always staffed by this one woman. All the buildings by the way were two stories and the streets weren't all straight lines like they had been in my head, but were twisted around a couple of hills and rock gullies and cut through by a curving train track. This women was a peach. She was older and dressed up like a relator, which I guess she was along with being the tourist guide and the social center of the town. She was older looking and professional, name of Janice. She sort of thought of us as kids I could tell, but treated us like young marrieds anyway and was gentle about us. Like she was playing along with our dreams, but respected that we thought them serious. She knew places for rent and could run our credit for us and was actually a notary too. Got a guy on the phone and we had a place out of town in the unincorporated county land within two hours. Just like that. We'd figure out work when we could, but had saved enough to sit and adjust a bit. All in a day. All in a day.
________________
So here we are in this brand new town right? A brand new state even. And we don't think often enough about state I don't think. And how great it is that I can just run on over and land in this new place with a whole new set of rules and ideas about what you can and can't do, with a whole new culture. And I can just live there, just like that. I don't even have to tell anybody. Or, I guess, if I have to tell somebody like the post office or the tax man or what not, nobody can tell me no. It's just a new fact of the world. I live in Wyoming. And there you have it.
A & I drive up to the place in the late afternoon. Its north of town at the edge of this broad shallow valley with little swales that can't seem to decide whether they're rolling hills or rocky gullies. They're part and part. And our house is up the hill part way with little rivulets and ravines cutting back into the hills, a little exposed rock decorating the hillside.
We have the keys and its just this old odd shaped ranch house sort of thing, but pretty. Someone took the time to get the architecture a little dolled up. We're parked up the top of this rambling drive and we just sit and look at each other a minute. Like, we woke up yesterday morning in a big city and had a big city night with our big city pals and now we're in a new town, in a new state, in a new home and we're alone here. And we're tired from not having slept, but we don't have much stuff, so we haul it all in. Of course we don't have any furniture so we sort of lay out a nest for ourselves in the center of the big wood floored living room, boxes all around us and a twilight sun slashing red-orange through the windows. And we just pass right out.
______________
But I haven't told you a thing about A, which has just got to seem silly. But she's just part of my life in a way that I forget needs describing. And its not like I forget or neglect her. Just her actions seem like mine and I haven't taken the time to describe myself either. Seems worth not much to look in a mirror all day telling yourself what you look like. What A is is a firebrand. A gods damned devil. A killer even. I mellowed her some I imagine, not cause of anything particular, just that I'm always sort of cow-eyed moving along and the pace can either be frustrating or infectious. Luckily I think she's fine with it. Doesn't slow her down none. Suppose that is how we got out here, at least in one night. Her passion is thought if you can call it that. She's always trying to fight and debate everyone about thinking. I guess she's a philosophy you might say. But like a people's philosopher? I think she imagine herself in the ancient Greek world like Diogenes and his barrel maybe it is? It has something to do with a town square, or a town forum. She reads a lot of Mark Twain and listens to comedy records. Claims that is where this particular activity has drifted off to. In this town too, she has some big plans about how to go about being a public philosopher. She's one to hold court.
With me tho, she's sweet as daisies. She's not a critic either, just a thinker. We're a real pair is all. We're just quietly eye to eye and I can't really say more than that.
Me, I'm a tinkerer or an inventor or something of the sort. The only way to have it make money is to call it art, or something of the kind. But I think up things to make and I make them. Or we could just take care of our house and put food on the table, really it doesn't matter what we are or think we are. We do happen to be these things, but now we've got this new place and a new life here and we're set on living it.
_________
Friday, October 29, 2010
Sometimes Lonely Hearts
Characters
A Peter Blue
B Y
C Z
D The Heart
Center stage is an old green felt pool table, ragged and worn, with a large dim lamp hanging high above it. It is covered in tiffany style glass and possibly a short fringe. The surrounding room shows evidence of wild parties, expired. The trappings of a recent event are strewn about—cups, bottles, garlands—as well as embedded remnants of earlier soirées—signs of decorations from several identifiable holidays. The time of the space is indeterminate: fall and winter holidays clash with spring, but it is midsummer. It is the longest day of the year. It is well past midnight right now, the furtherest moment from the light of day on either side. Say about 2am.
Around the pool table are a variety of chairs of differing heights, a love seat, probably a recliner and certainly an overtall director's chair.
Lights up on an empty stage. Lights down.
The noise of a bustling party is heard in the dark. A glass or two break. A few people shout and/or laugh. Nothing terrifying. An odd hush move out from the center of the stage around the table. The last loud voices at the far ends of the stage maintain over the silence of the center for an awkward extra moment. Exit everyone but the central cast.
Lights up on the entire cast occupying the seats around the table, all are filled. At the center of the table, a heart beats continually in a slow normal rhythm. Around its edge there is a small pool of blood.
PETER: Well I don't see how that's possible.
Y: Strictly speaking, it really isn't. But I suppose empirical evidence is worth lending some credence to.
Z: Unless we're all under some sort of mass delusion. Which, given the unlikelihood of a heart spontaneously abandoning its former abode, unaided, landing in the center of a table and continuing to beat for [checking his watch] a full three minutes and thirty seconds after having...
Y: Now wait. Nobody saw the heart leap... [looking around, somewhat uncertainly] So I don't see how you can measure so precisely...
B: [With panic in her voice] None of this is right. It's...He's...dying...dead...he just isn't alive anymore. But, I mean, that thing, that thing is just spasmming still. [Evidently more confident now that she's found medical terminology] It's just a reflex of the muscles and its bound to stop any time now.
PETER: But so, all those other things aside, ain't we got a murder on our hands? And then a murderer? Cause alive or not, hearts don't just leap. They have to be removed and placed. Just you know, were it to have leapt, wouldn't there be a trail? Like a skipping stone?
Y: Astute. Well then. As I see it we have two possibilities. First, murder and reckless insanity run amuck within the gathering itself. Or, second, the supernatural—or just the same as Z has it a mass delusion. Which, while granted might have a specific cause, seems worth addressing along the lines of the supernatural sense our experience of it is as such.
Z: I call foul. Keep your supernatural thesis to yourself. Barring that momentarily, we either have a mass delusion triggered by accident or on purpose. If an accident, we can find a cause. If on purpose, we can find the person who's done it. The other option, murder, accords to the same. So, I say we gather up around the table like the end of a who-dun-it and suss out the situation and each other's roles in it. Our possible motivations.
C: [With child-like glee] Like a party game?!? But we won't have to pull roles out of a hat because whoever's done it has already done it. And whose dead is dead. And whose the examiner is...well...I suppose we can do it like a Greek Chorus...
B: I don't see how you can all be so fun and games about this. W is dead! Stone cold. And poor A [who has here head tucked in her arms in a corner, facing away from the rest] is suffering. Lost her man. And who all are playing detective stories like a bunch of kids. Meanwhile, that thing is beating on the table, just about to stop...[waits for a delayed beat], going to cease any moment, the last grotesque evidence of human life. And you're all so glib.
C: It's not an it. It's W, alive and well, not dead. And we just respect his last lingering bits of life and do him some justice by figuring out what has happened. It'll be like saying farewell to W. They say the minute after your head is off from a guillotine, you can still see. Well maybe, his heart can still feel?
Y: I've heard a few seconds maybe. Enough to get a glimpse, but a minute? You must have religion on you.
C: What if I do?
Z: Five minutes.
Y: Five minutes? That's a laugh. The brain can't last a minute without blood or oxygen. The heart must stop in less time than that. Ghosts!
Z: The beating. It's been beating for five minutes. I agree with you, except for that ghosts part.
A Peter Blue
B Y
C Z
D The Heart
Center stage is an old green felt pool table, ragged and worn, with a large dim lamp hanging high above it. It is covered in tiffany style glass and possibly a short fringe. The surrounding room shows evidence of wild parties, expired. The trappings of a recent event are strewn about—cups, bottles, garlands—as well as embedded remnants of earlier soirées—signs of decorations from several identifiable holidays. The time of the space is indeterminate: fall and winter holidays clash with spring, but it is midsummer. It is the longest day of the year. It is well past midnight right now, the furtherest moment from the light of day on either side. Say about 2am.
Around the pool table are a variety of chairs of differing heights, a love seat, probably a recliner and certainly an overtall director's chair.
Lights up on an empty stage. Lights down.
The noise of a bustling party is heard in the dark. A glass or two break. A few people shout and/or laugh. Nothing terrifying. An odd hush move out from the center of the stage around the table. The last loud voices at the far ends of the stage maintain over the silence of the center for an awkward extra moment. Exit everyone but the central cast.
Lights up on the entire cast occupying the seats around the table, all are filled. At the center of the table, a heart beats continually in a slow normal rhythm. Around its edge there is a small pool of blood.
PETER: Well I don't see how that's possible.
Y: Strictly speaking, it really isn't. But I suppose empirical evidence is worth lending some credence to.
Z: Unless we're all under some sort of mass delusion. Which, given the unlikelihood of a heart spontaneously abandoning its former abode, unaided, landing in the center of a table and continuing to beat for [checking his watch] a full three minutes and thirty seconds after having...
Y: Now wait. Nobody saw the heart leap... [looking around, somewhat uncertainly] So I don't see how you can measure so precisely...
B: [With panic in her voice] None of this is right. It's...He's...dying...dead...he just isn't alive anymore. But, I mean, that thing, that thing is just spasmming still. [Evidently more confident now that she's found medical terminology] It's just a reflex of the muscles and its bound to stop any time now.
PETER: But so, all those other things aside, ain't we got a murder on our hands? And then a murderer? Cause alive or not, hearts don't just leap. They have to be removed and placed. Just you know, were it to have leapt, wouldn't there be a trail? Like a skipping stone?
Y: Astute. Well then. As I see it we have two possibilities. First, murder and reckless insanity run amuck within the gathering itself. Or, second, the supernatural—or just the same as Z has it a mass delusion. Which, while granted might have a specific cause, seems worth addressing along the lines of the supernatural sense our experience of it is as such.
Z: I call foul. Keep your supernatural thesis to yourself. Barring that momentarily, we either have a mass delusion triggered by accident or on purpose. If an accident, we can find a cause. If on purpose, we can find the person who's done it. The other option, murder, accords to the same. So, I say we gather up around the table like the end of a who-dun-it and suss out the situation and each other's roles in it. Our possible motivations.
C: [With child-like glee] Like a party game?!? But we won't have to pull roles out of a hat because whoever's done it has already done it. And whose dead is dead. And whose the examiner is...well...I suppose we can do it like a Greek Chorus...
B: I don't see how you can all be so fun and games about this. W is dead! Stone cold. And poor A [who has here head tucked in her arms in a corner, facing away from the rest] is suffering. Lost her man. And who all are playing detective stories like a bunch of kids. Meanwhile, that thing is beating on the table, just about to stop...[waits for a delayed beat], going to cease any moment, the last grotesque evidence of human life. And you're all so glib.
C: It's not an it. It's W, alive and well, not dead. And we just respect his last lingering bits of life and do him some justice by figuring out what has happened. It'll be like saying farewell to W. They say the minute after your head is off from a guillotine, you can still see. Well maybe, his heart can still feel?
Y: I've heard a few seconds maybe. Enough to get a glimpse, but a minute? You must have religion on you.
C: What if I do?
Z: Five minutes.
Y: Five minutes? That's a laugh. The brain can't last a minute without blood or oxygen. The heart must stop in less time than that. Ghosts!
Z: The beating. It's been beating for five minutes. I agree with you, except for that ghosts part.
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