Sunday, August 23, 2009

Creatures of Note.

Slept in late today, but not as late as I have been. Yesterday, I didn't emerge from the blankets until well after four in the afternoon. This is not conducive to productivity, as if such a thing concerned me.

And yet it should concern me. I've been a Tennessee resident for nearly half a month, with no real progress or gain to show. As it should be, I tell myself. What did I expect? This is a land of milk and honey. The sun is warm on my shoulders. I feel content in my monetary poverty, and proud of my inner riches. I am in the constant company of friends. I am well-fed and well-read. We are the Lost Boys. I catch toads and throw up behind bushes.

There are always fires going, like a refugee camp. Sometimes we eat the smoke, and sometimes the smoke eats us. It peels our flesh from our bones, and we dance in the Expanse, mad skeletons. We laugh, and the world shrieks with us.

I live in a little monklike den, very simple. A mattress on the ground, a metal shelf with some folded pairs of blue jeans and a few shirts. A nighstand made from an overturned milkcrate, upon it resting some weak sleep-aid pills for the anxious insomnia I've recently fallen victim to, wrapped in cellophane. A green ashtray. Next to the mattress, stacks of books. At the foot of my bed, a turntable. A small stack of records. A lifelike human skull. A portrait of Johnny Cash. This is my room, a tiny wooden box at the top of the stairs, swelteringly hot if one does not rise before noon, when the Tennessee sun turns it into an incubator. Kevin compared it to Henry Haller's little room, at the top of a different flight. But I have no room to pace, no tome in which to inscribe anything remotely profound.

Tonight, I will pace across town, across property lines. I feel like wandering, as I always have. And now I have no obligations to stop me. Not yet, anyhow. Responsibility is a gorgon over the horizon, but I have no fear. I will find a job soon enough. I have been putting forth the necessary effort. No need to help the gorgon along her dismal, pragmatic path. She'll be upon me soon enough, and I refuse to have any regrets about the vacation I spent in her absence. Keep your bitch talons out of me, at least for the time being, and I will pretend not to feel contempt when you crunch my bones and suck my marrow. But I will not pretend forever.