Endless.
Endless
PART ONE
There is an aberration of mind, which, if allowed to’ fester’ for those who think it an illness or perhaps, a ‘blossoming’ for those of us who think it a blessing, will, in either case, redouble your senses need for fortitude.
Constancy seems reckless to a mind whose natural ways are that of disorder and leisurely chaos, and a necessary element for living a reality based day-to-day existence requires a mustering of enthusiasm for constancy that is not quite within ones nature.
It is 2013. I write as I read, and today's readings have been translated from the Japanese. But that is a lie for today I did not read. Nor did I bathe, nor brush nor shoulder, or hoist or overmuch think long thoughts.
I have made a name for myself within these boundless walls of the rec room, where some are wild, some are misty-eyed and abandon themselves to sentimentality. Others are prone to quick harsh action, physical reactions for the slightest of wounds.
Every one of them here have a capacity for what I excel at, but are otherwise committed to their own addictions, their own storylines in which I cannot prevail my own inclination towards Nothingness. They are savages. Horrors.
The stench of the place changes and shifts with the moons and the tides. Much could be learned by creating charts and taking notation in written form but it is never done. For to crack the code of the variety of stinks and their arrivals and departures would be something akin to an abomination. An ambition to be
scoffed at, a truth to be ignored, for to claim facts is the saddest device of all, the worst way to spends ones, anyone’s, individual moments.
Last evening, as I paraded through the halls with my devil mask askew and riding high upon my forehead, I managed to spook the residents each in their turn with my red cheeks aglow by the nightlamp in the bathroom as they stepped up to take their place with toothbrushes and cleansing wipes. There is a respect here for the others, we live eyes averted, we close doors to avoid forcing another to hear the waste leaving our bowels, or the sound of spitting red-flecked phlegm into the cracked porcelain bowl.
One of them slithers up to me and asks with feigned interest if I can imagine who has been ####ed here right up against the sink, or if that doesn't suit', the voice whines, 'perhaps to think who has died here, anyone? Staring at themselves in the glass as the tiles reach up for their hearts?'
I refuse to give any satisfaction to this sort of resident, who is bored and boring and has been thoroughly and desperately cooked like a forgotten roasting hen. A dried out account of someone I used to know, but surely no embodiment of a soul resides within that flabby form with its obnoxious thoughts and nonsense utterances. It is twelve and sixty-two all at once; it is alcohol and paper-hoarding, disdainful and full of pride. Once I held the hand of a child, once I wiped the buttocks of the elderly whose hips broken, were never to be mended, thin thin thighs, enormous distended belly, sparse white and red pubic hair flashing. I awake alone in the stall, with no one to hinder, no one to help and nothing to do but gather my britches about me and smile, smile, smile.
TWO
Who is here? Who is here that has something to say? The assemblage is crowded, to my right stands a wiry child with a dozen or more crows tattooed upon her face and covering her pale long arms. She looks to be no older than ten and she is glaring directly at me even as I casually survey the room. Feeling we must have met before, and not under the most pleasant of circumstances, I nod almost imperceptibly. This seems to appease her, my slight acknowledgment. What must I look like to her?
Who is here, and what am I in this place? Check legs, check face with fingertips, feel for the crepe paper skin at throat, or the sprouted beard or the pearls, or the hickies, or the thick fat flesh of age itself, who is here?
I elect not to awaken, not to find out, to allow myself the closed eye plumage of red seen through the lids, pierced microscopic dust beams fall slowly like feathers, follow them, one at a time until they dissolve into the bottom reaches of your ocular abilities.
Riding on such a beam I come across a small suburban house, and floating against the parapets move until I find a window that allows me passage inside. I was produced, nurtured and cultivated here.
Who is here and who are you now?
Does this voice sound hostile in your mind? Is this questioning a frightened teen coming home into an empty darkened house or a threatening and menacing challenge, neither or both? I, myself do not know for the queries are not aloud but simply coming from a residents head.
Why doesn’t she listen when one begins to relay the past night’s dream fragments? How is she so disinterested, even if she loves, even if that dreamer is an ideal protagonist in a favorite book? Even then her eyes will try to skim quickly past the related dreamscape. Every one is the same. We simply do not
want to know. The others dreams are dull; they reek of self-indulgence and individuality. But I propose that we feel a slight abhorrence in hearing another’s dreams for we do not allow ourselves to remember our own, and those of us who do, seem overly elated and obnoxiously enlightened in some way that betrays our pleasant state of mind disturbs us to no end.
So the dreamer and the audience both are thereby damned, for it is not without conviction that the hanged man sways in the breeze.
THREE
The resident, hot wet breath in my ear whispers the codex. “It is not without conviction that the hanged man sways in the breeze.” he wheezes snottily into my aural cavity. Tray in hand, I stand. In line. For swine, non-kosher limp sticks on bread. His voice in my head. Repeats its idiocy. My heart misses a beat, sharp intake of breath, it’s always a surprise. And even though he gleans nothing I have a brief moment of alarm as I always do and remind myself;
This is mimicry only, one cannot be impressed. He is simply close enough to hear some thought. It is nothing. A trifle. A truffle. I will think of truffles now, I will mask my thoughts with considerations of truffles, of pigs on leashes seeking the fungus of the tree in which to make the millions moan. Two deep breathes, the quick ping of adrenaline pulses down my wrists and through my fingertips and I am out on the other side of this momentary panic. How many times a day? I wonder, but keep my wonder close to myself, my inner casing. No sense in giving the lunatics cutlery.
The residents sloshing gut preceding him now wants to whisper the new line into my ear but I will not grant him the joy. As I move away too fast for his numbness to follow he shouts it out aloud, triumphant. “No sense in giving the lunatics cutlery!” he screams out across the hall. “No sense, indeed!”
FOUR
If it is the endless, exhausting ‘we’ who carry the fleshy cumbrous burden from point A to point B, then who is the head? It cannot be the strongest voice, the one you’ve heard from; for to mince about in this time speaking in archaic tongue would not do, and surely draw attention, the sort of which we do not desire.
It is not the one who speaks now, for the language, stilted and formal remains the same and this is not an authentic voice, so perhaps, mayhaps, it is a trick upon us all, and it is the head of this cumbersome beast of We’s. I plainly do not know. I do not diddle with your mind, I AM your mind, and there is no differentiating most days the I from the We, and it is never ‘them’ for it is always ‘us’.
Conceivably we can be satisfied that this is an integration of sorts, a lifetime in the making, for how else to explain the insane numerous lifetime ‘accomplishments’ experienced? The runaway, the hustler, the dominatrix, the religious deviant, the devout, the doubting, the drinker, the abstainer, the lesbian, the aproned mother, the gay man, the bearded, the hairless? As a young person, I think I was more able, if it were conscious, which I doubt fully, but in any case, certainly more adept at being one at a time.
I would throw ‘myself’ fully into the character whose will was strongest and live, for a time, fully and jubilantly, even in my throes and miseries.
All this without the aids medicinal or liquid intoxicants! A team spirit prevails or there would be nothing of cohesion left within the halls and the residents would have long ago forged alliances, cliques and bonds, separations from the shared reality and individually could have existed no more. One of us might have summoned the largess of spirit to end the bodies usefulness, but we can be proud that this is not part of our collective and the body still is ours, it’s youth
gone,( we can no longer say ‘slipping’ and long for the days when we could, alas!)its synapses less supple, less pliant and nothing growing now but the tumors and chin hairs, yet still we can delight for 50 years is an accomplishment on the order of loaves and fishes, and certainly one that many within and almost all without thought ‘we’ would never attain.
FIVE
“The residents covered the security camera with feces.” With feces! What did they use to cover the security cameras with? Their shirts? Shaving foam? Frothy saliva? No, the residents covered the security cameras with their own, (one presumes hopefully) feces! Ha! Say the residents as one. Ha! Say I in return. I am not on the other end of those ocular spies, nor am I a participant in the crime and never, no matter what the cause, never would I smear feces upon any particular object, no matter how much the success of such weird endeavor counted upon it. First of all, is it my feces to smear? This is something only a judge and jury can determine. In the meantime, I take safe passage by claiming I wouldn’t take that action no matter what the cause, and thereby do I ‘stick’ to my moralities.
One shouts out to me directly, their voice aimed like a gun towards the midpoint that is me, that it is not a question of ethics but more in the philosophical vein of ‘If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it….’and so forth. Irritating, but I cannot definitively disagree, for it depends upon the individual and in this area I am at a loss, for there is no individual ‘I’ but only the fatuous and uncompromisingly confused ‘We’.
My hands held out to you, big chapped palms up. Empty. Also I have nothing in my pockets, nothing to hide, nothing to use against you, or to silence anyone else’s views, I am the unfortunate container of all opinions, no matter how
ridiculous.
Time marching on endows dusty tread marks upon the path to liberation. I am outside the walls, the enclosure now replaced with a boundless open-ended sky but black as a moonless night.
Everyone is with me, some begrudgingly and others wild with enthusiasm for the voyage. Mounds of luggage, backpacks and satchels I had them pack, and mounds of luggage, backpacks and satchels I had them leave behind.
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