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John rubbed his sore lower back and thought about how everything
was decaying at an enormous rate. The Ozone, the polar ice caps, old-growth
redwoods, humanity. He sat up straight in his chair as though this might help.
It felt unnatural. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season. John wanted to collapse in a heap on his desk. The thought of the inevitable keyboard imprints on his forehead pleased him. But collapse he did not. His posture slumped again, slumped back to its usual half-mast position, but here at least, he kept it. Someone, somewhere, was interested in what he had to say. Somebody liked the way he put two otherwise incongruous or disparate words or thoughts together to make up.. whatever. Salvation flambé. Hopscotch sycophant. Whatever. He banged the keys and prayed for levity, angelic visions, pussy, morphine, answers, a plot, anything. John thought about calling somebody. A glance at his address book would make some people think John knew more people than God. Amidst a hundred-some friends nationwide were sprinkled the names and numbers of celebrities: a famous actor, a rock star, an award-winning filmmaker, a multi-millionaire, a popular novelist. Oh, and let's not forget Whats-His-Name, that old guy who started his own record label in the Sixties and signed the Doors. But the thought of making interesting conversation with anyone right now depressed him. He took another swig of a beer and kept his fingers moving on the keys. Thanksgiving had been the usual gone-native, American pilgrim potshot dysfunctional funeral replete with slaughtered animals and nose-bent outa-shape relatives. It had been painful almost from start to finish. But there had been that one good moment, that shining pacific shimmering sunset on the pier and a good buzz and laughter and real dialogue with mom moment. Seemed to John the only way he could ever communicate with any of his immediate family anymore was with beer-in-hand. Sober was just too painful. Sober with the family was like having one's hands cutoff at the wrists and all the synapses between thoughts and actions snuffed out like fireflies in a downpour.
Then of course there was always the question of what next, what to do next in his quest for a tolerable existence. "What do you wanna do with your life?" John mimicked any number of querying voices over the years. Then he added, "What's left of it." John squinted at the computer monitor, squinted past nicotine stains accumulated on the screen during the monitor's tenure with its previous owner. As with everything else in John's life, the monitor was secondhand. Or thirdhand. Or fourth. Everything he owned was a handmedown. A neighbor's wife had described his various cars over the years as "disposable cars." John had to admit it was true. But as true as it was, John felt sure that his life wasn't nearly so pathetic and horrid as the fictional realm of that fat faggoty shit in New Orleans, the one who's litany of pompous bullshit and misery John had felt compelled to read over Thanksgiving out of respect for the undoubtedly sad fucker who wrote the book. The 32-year old author had killed himself long before the book was ever published. And the latter only occurred because the guy's mother tirelessly promoted her dead boy's tome. John thought it was the worst piece of shit he'd ever read. Which depressed John all the more. Because he seriously wanted to like it. Not because it had won a Pulitzer or because Walker Percy thought it wonderful, but because (and this was probably why it had won the Pulitzer) the sad young author had killed himself, a course of action that often enough entertained John's sick psyche. John figured everybody was at least to some degree as sappy as he was, and that the book's celebrants couldn't separate the book and the book's "circumstances." So it was a hit. Everybody loves a dead poet. John had been writing since college, since a few years before the Berlin Wall had come down. He still he hadn't published diddly squat. John knocked a zit-sized helping of sniffing tobacco from its tin out onto the back of his hand, raised it to his head and horked it up. The blast of tobacco and menthol threw him back in his chair and he let go a howl. After the dead bird & the family, the dead-tasting beer and all the dead and depressing thoughts, the menthol nose blast was the best thing he'd felt in hours, days maybe. "How depressing." Melancholy roared into the room and choked him like water busting a levy and drowning a below-sea level city. John could barely stand it all, the anchor of inertia, the downward spiral of gravity, reality's rusted hull ready to sink it all. Just when he didn't think he could type another word, let alone go searching for the light at the end of the dark tunnel of his life, he half-straightened his back, took the last swig of his beer, and finished the story. There was a knock at the door then, and in walked Lena. Lena the love of his life living with another man. Lena the heartthrob, dickthrob, mindthrob all in one. Lena forever tormenting his soul by mere dint of her presence on the Planet amongst a zillion available mortal women, available and banal as a bucket of mud everyone one of them. Lena! Lena strolled over to John, straddled his chair and with bold & Icelandic, IKEA-furniture-conviction moved it back and away from his desk, creating a space before him into which she deftly dropped. John's jeans crotch buttons popped and time slowed as Lena unveiled a part of John he'd all but forgotten in the suffocating mildew of his despair. "Lena!" he moaned. The music shifted then from a frantic and unnerving Phillip Glass to a dreamy cocktail hour Amon Tobin. John let go his posture completely, closed his eyes and swam in a soup of synthesized and sampled space music. With Lena's mouth on him, nothing mattered for shit anymore. Not the pilgrims or the Pulitzer. Not the Ozone or the ice caps. There was no shame in failure anymore, nothing abnormal about the pain of family, and humanity's doom couldn't touch him here. As these murky half-thoughts washed across his mind like mop water on a cafeteria floor, he felt his whole being leave him like water down a drain. Gravity, John decided in a flash, was quite probably his friend. And as though out of some sense of cyber solidarity, the nicotine-confused monitor, bored from lack of key strokes, dimmed and went dark, taking with it the burden of words.
{For Justin, whose superior imagination, if united with my sherpa-like pace
and refusal to die on the trail, would make one helluva literary peak-bagging
beast.} Kick down now before you wish you had. Even just $20 will tickle the Muses pink. Click da Button now! Until I pump out another Burning chapter, enjoy the photo gallery from Burning Man `02!
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