Dreams Walking In Broad Daylight
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
- William Butler Yeats
Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly
walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
I miss you like hell.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
- Charles Schultz
So. The termination of another lackluster, uneventful, ennui-soaked vacation. And what have I learned, this time?
- Time is perverse. On the one hand that is over here, it doesn't feel as if 8 days has passed at all. It feels like a looong day and a half, maybe. Even though I didn't really do anything except: sleep away a lot of sunlit hours in a fitful restless torpor; eat a bag of Pizzaria Pretzel-flavored Combos and wash it down with a few gallons of iced tea, or as I like to call it, nectar of the gods; watch a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; sit around in boxers and a t-shirt with the lights off and the blinds closed and listen to the Doors and write interminably long passages of voiceover narration about man's inhumanity to man, while getting piss-drunk and punching out a mirror; drive up and down Brick Boulevard and Hooper Avenue, and sometimes over to the shore and back, passing the places I had set out to drive to initially, getting angrier and angrier at the feckless, mealymouthed straight-up balderdash (yeah, that's right, I said it, so what? it needed to be said and I don't care how offensive my language is) effluviating from a rotating hydra of right-wing talking heads to which I for some unknown masochistic reason continue to subject myself; oh, and some laundry too. But on the other hand which is over here on the other side of me, it also felt as if I've been away from the world for over a month or four, a minor spell of incarceration for crimes unspecified and unproven and too embarrassingly meager to waste the court's precious time by ennumerating or proving them. I've always been an iconoclast and a misanthrope, and something of a recluse, and yet I'm not much better at being alone than I am at being among people. I think just the mere burden of existing has always been my problem. It's so tedious, such an effort. I sometimes wish that I was able to discorporate my component molecules for a few hours at a time. Just break myself down and not-exist, as a free-floating and formless cloud of disrupted matter. And then, when my internal alarm goes off, molecules knit themselves back together and shrug a structure out of the dust of nothingness and I exist again with a crackling echo of discharged eldritch energy or something equally apropos. And even if it doesn't relax me and harmonize my pagh, it would still make for a handy trick at parties. Hey there's that guy who can disintegrate himself, isn't he interesting, I wonder if he's single.
- I loathe children. Recently, because of a bet I lost with God, I've had to sleep with my bed in what used to be our dining room. I'm only grateful I didn't succumb to temptation and double down, or else I'd also currently be washing my laundry in the sink, brushing my teeth out of the toilet tank, and watching television while sitting inside our garbage can. Anywho. This morning, at circa-approximatish 8 o'clock ante meridiem give or take, a child who is generously still alive began shrieking just outside my apartment, or to be more precise, right outside my "bedroom" window. "Mommy!" No response. Some crying. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Silence from the madding crowd. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Right about now I started raking my fingers across my pillow, ripping huge jagged rents across it, imagining the spongy chunks of foam rubber caked under my fingernails were actually bloody shreds of this child's intestines. The performance art continued. Mommy, not surprisingly, had no interest in answering her child's sobbing cries; for all I know she'd had a profound realization about where her life was going and in a bold attempt to get on the right track had dropped this kid off curbside and peeled away, heading for the nearest Turnpike exit. The only thing that kept me from acknowledging that I was now awake was the thought that perhaps the child was screaming because her mother had actually been hurt, and needed help, and then I definitely would not be going back to sleep. Police and ambulances and all that shit. Fuck it, let her bleed to death while her child watches in horror for all I care, I am tired. Thankfully, the kid finally shut the fuck up and I dozed back into my increasingly weird and vivid dreamscape [more on that in a future entry, perhaps].
- Writing is hard. Let's see...that story about the haunted hotel room, dead in the water. Story about telepathic advertising, won't even turn over. Alternate historical story set in Libya, can't get past the fifth paragraph. The libretto for my self-composed opera about Jeffrey Dahmer, Nowheresville. [just checking if you're paying attention.] Even that short comic story Rob asked me to write isn't happening to my satisfaction. Why else would I be wasting time writing these nonsensical little soliloquies to you lot? ah, but I kid. I hope you enjoy every last stinking word of this wonderful fucking weblog, you heartless bastards.
Alright maybe that last part was a bit harsh. heh. Kidding. You know I kid. My heart oozes love for all of you, like pus from a suppurating wound. er. Wow. I am now the all-time worst bestower of compliments, Ever. It's official.
...see? I can post here and not have it go on for 15,000 words! I'm terse! Tacit, even! My prose is spare and economical, I'm not a motormouth, I'm not. Damn your eyes for saying otherwise. That's it, I'm leaving. Oh no no no - you stay, and enjoy yourselves, and maybe think about what you've done. I am going to bed.
....
It's not even 9 o'clock post-fucking-meridiem. Goddamnit. If you need me, I shall be in the kitchen pantry, reading by the light of a strike-anywhere match.
- William Butler Yeats
Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly
walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
I miss you like hell.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
- Charles Schultz
So. The termination of another lackluster, uneventful, ennui-soaked vacation. And what have I learned, this time?
- Time is perverse. On the one hand that is over here, it doesn't feel as if 8 days has passed at all. It feels like a looong day and a half, maybe. Even though I didn't really do anything except: sleep away a lot of sunlit hours in a fitful restless torpor; eat a bag of Pizzaria Pretzel-flavored Combos and wash it down with a few gallons of iced tea, or as I like to call it, nectar of the gods; watch a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; sit around in boxers and a t-shirt with the lights off and the blinds closed and listen to the Doors and write interminably long passages of voiceover narration about man's inhumanity to man, while getting piss-drunk and punching out a mirror; drive up and down Brick Boulevard and Hooper Avenue, and sometimes over to the shore and back, passing the places I had set out to drive to initially, getting angrier and angrier at the feckless, mealymouthed straight-up balderdash (yeah, that's right, I said it, so what? it needed to be said and I don't care how offensive my language is) effluviating from a rotating hydra of right-wing talking heads to which I for some unknown masochistic reason continue to subject myself; oh, and some laundry too. But on the other hand which is over here on the other side of me, it also felt as if I've been away from the world for over a month or four, a minor spell of incarceration for crimes unspecified and unproven and too embarrassingly meager to waste the court's precious time by ennumerating or proving them. I've always been an iconoclast and a misanthrope, and something of a recluse, and yet I'm not much better at being alone than I am at being among people. I think just the mere burden of existing has always been my problem. It's so tedious, such an effort. I sometimes wish that I was able to discorporate my component molecules for a few hours at a time. Just break myself down and not-exist, as a free-floating and formless cloud of disrupted matter. And then, when my internal alarm goes off, molecules knit themselves back together and shrug a structure out of the dust of nothingness and I exist again with a crackling echo of discharged eldritch energy or something equally apropos. And even if it doesn't relax me and harmonize my pagh, it would still make for a handy trick at parties. Hey there's that guy who can disintegrate himself, isn't he interesting, I wonder if he's single.
- I loathe children. Recently, because of a bet I lost with God, I've had to sleep with my bed in what used to be our dining room. I'm only grateful I didn't succumb to temptation and double down, or else I'd also currently be washing my laundry in the sink, brushing my teeth out of the toilet tank, and watching television while sitting inside our garbage can. Anywho. This morning, at circa-approximatish 8 o'clock ante meridiem give or take, a child who is generously still alive began shrieking just outside my apartment, or to be more precise, right outside my "bedroom" window. "Mommy!" No response. Some crying. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Silence from the madding crowd. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Right about now I started raking my fingers across my pillow, ripping huge jagged rents across it, imagining the spongy chunks of foam rubber caked under my fingernails were actually bloody shreds of this child's intestines. The performance art continued. Mommy, not surprisingly, had no interest in answering her child's sobbing cries; for all I know she'd had a profound realization about where her life was going and in a bold attempt to get on the right track had dropped this kid off curbside and peeled away, heading for the nearest Turnpike exit. The only thing that kept me from acknowledging that I was now awake was the thought that perhaps the child was screaming because her mother had actually been hurt, and needed help, and then I definitely would not be going back to sleep. Police and ambulances and all that shit. Fuck it, let her bleed to death while her child watches in horror for all I care, I am tired. Thankfully, the kid finally shut the fuck up and I dozed back into my increasingly weird and vivid dreamscape [more on that in a future entry, perhaps].
- Writing is hard. Let's see...that story about the haunted hotel room, dead in the water. Story about telepathic advertising, won't even turn over. Alternate historical story set in Libya, can't get past the fifth paragraph. The libretto for my self-composed opera about Jeffrey Dahmer, Nowheresville. [just checking if you're paying attention.] Even that short comic story Rob asked me to write isn't happening to my satisfaction. Why else would I be wasting time writing these nonsensical little soliloquies to you lot? ah, but I kid. I hope you enjoy every last stinking word of this wonderful fucking weblog, you heartless bastards.
Alright maybe that last part was a bit harsh. heh. Kidding. You know I kid. My heart oozes love for all of you, like pus from a suppurating wound. er. Wow. I am now the all-time worst bestower of compliments, Ever. It's official.
...see? I can post here and not have it go on for 15,000 words! I'm terse! Tacit, even! My prose is spare and economical, I'm not a motormouth, I'm not. Damn your eyes for saying otherwise. That's it, I'm leaving. Oh no no no - you stay, and enjoy yourselves, and maybe think about what you've done. I am going to bed.
....
It's not even 9 o'clock post-fucking-meridiem. Goddamnit. If you need me, I shall be in the kitchen pantry, reading by the light of a strike-anywhere match.
posted by Patrick at 11:56 PM
1 Comments:
Bravo! Had me laughing out loud. I do feel for you having to sleep in the dining room.
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