It’s Time I Had Some Time Alone Thursday, Feb 12 2009

“I don’t think I believe in any of this anymore,” I say, looking out the window.

“Don’t believe in what?” she asks, effortlessly shifting into third. Back when I used to find things sexy, the ability to drive stick was right up there with protruding ears or knee-high socks.

“Any of it. I don’t want to be a part of our society anymore. I’d rather go insane living outside of it than go insane living in it…look at them…they all look so miserable.”

“Maybe you’re just miserable.”

“Maybe I just know what I’m worth.”

“You sure don’t act like it.”

“You could say that no matter what my status was…if I was living in Chicago and wearing a tie to the office it would still be biting.”

“You sound like a teenager.”

“Good…that’s about when it started going downhill, anyway. I didn’t want to be a so-called ‘responsible member of society’ then and I sure as hell don’t want to now.”

“So what do you want?”

This empire to meet it’s fate and collapse on itself, weighed down by it’s decadence and false idols, like the Egyptians and Romans before us. To go backwards, so far back that we’re operating under a barter system and waiting weeks and months to hear back from drifting lovers, so far devolved and detached that our society actually fosters the discovery of the self, if that’s possible. To run off into the woods before their jaws get any more of my soul’s marrow. Everyone to strip naked in the streets and fuck indiscriminately like the dogs that we are. To fall in love every single day with someone new who will eventually fade into oblivion, a myth passed down from lie to lie, selected pieces of their fabled soul swirling with my own for the rest of whatever existence I envision next. Something enduring.

“A slice and a beer sounds good right about now.”

“This place hasn’t changed since high school,” she says, shaking cheese onto her sweating and golden pizza. The slick tablecloths are checkered red-and-white. The same short-haired Italian woman wearing an apron looks on from behind the counter, smiling whenever our eyes meet. “So you never answered my question.”

“What’s that?”

“What do you want to do…in life?”

“I told you…living the dream as we speak.” I hoist up my limping slice and flash a smile.

“Be serious for just one second.”

“I don’t know…does it really matter?”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Seriously…what happens when your tits start to sag? What if the Fed went broke tomorrow and money became nothing but kindling and toilet paper? Who would you be and what would you want then?”

“That’s a cop out.”

“So is letting the world make a whore out of me,” I say, tipping back the last foamy remnants, twirling the empty and looking at her through it with one eye, her face warped and green through its lens.

I want to kick back my chair and run. Run from everything — her, the old Italian woman, the banks, the cops, the phone lines, the houses, the cars, the shopping plazas, the corporations, the mom-and pop shops, the debts, the credits, the network news, the clothes, the make-up, the perfume, the bad acting, the good acting, the notions of romance and lust, the cartoon hearts, the aspirations to be sitcom characters, the adjective ‘hot’, the office parks, the penthouses, the crack dens, the cannibalism, the greed, the envy, the hatred, the whole fucking charade. I’ll take my chances out in the wild, thank you very much. At least out there they flash their teeth and growl before they jump for the throat. Run, Dan, run.

Instead, I slide my only wrinkled dollar into the jukebox and play Katrina & The Waves, like I used to back in high school, and coax her into dancing about the empty place, gyrating and and leaping around as if we felt like Katrina sang, as if the Italian woman weren’t rolling her eyes, as if we were in love, as if nothing else mattered but right here, in this very moment. As if everything we knew about the world could end right now, and it would be alright.

As the manic song tails off, she draws herself so close that I can taste her breath, butting her forehead to mine.

“Don’t let them do this to you.”

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Somehow They Manage To Make It Last Monday, Feb 9 2009

Perhaps what truly separates the insane or the transcendent from the rest of the world is their ability to stand up to the present moment before them and say what they feel and believe, out loud instead of inside their own heads, regardless of the consequences. That or I’m trying to glorify my ever-increasing detachment from society.

My brother and I are in a notoriously seedy dive, the type with coke trays and faded rose tattoos, two-dollar domestics and a lax eye for the smoking ban. We are here to see our cousin’s band, a performance that is quickly disrupted a little after midnight by just shy of a dozen stocky officers, some of whom are undercover and wearing their badges like dog tags. The music is halted and replaced by bitter idle chatter while the muscle of the law is flexed.

The fruits of their Prohibition-like raid turn out an arrest for every five officers present — a twenty-three year old who was unable to handle his liquor and who had fallen docile, his head against a table, and a twenty-two year old who had left her I.D. at home, but was able to produce a wrinkled Social Security card that checked out over the radio. Ten officers on an underage bust with no underage arrests.

“What did I do wrong?” the groggy twenty-three year old asks, in the midst of the rudest awakening of his life.

“What did you do wrong?” a late-twenties undercover with a shaved head and a hairy claw hanging from his chin repeats in a mocking tone. He shakes him violently and pokes him in the chest with two fingers. “What gives you the right to come into a bar and drink so much that you pass out?”

“His status as an American,” I say from my stool, drawing laughs from the bar and the ire of the government employee with pointed facial hair. At this point, I feel like I’m retreating into the one-too-many sour grapes rebellion of a teenager, and perhaps what happens after this will read as such, but the next bit felt so much more serious and honest to me. Maybe I just never grew up. Maybe I don’t ever want to.

The majority of the bar has spilled outside to smoke and witness the rest of saga. The aforementioned girl’s given information had checked out, but one could tell by the boyish grins on the faces of this bunch that they weren’t satisfied to walk out of here just yet.

“We’re going to have to take you in anyway,” one of them says with the smirk of a bully, cuffing her against a brick wall and perp-walking her for everyone to see. Everyone’s eyes are burning with discontent, and the sounds they make are the barely perceptible grinding of their jaws. Or perhaps I was just projecting.

“Is that really necessary?” If I wasn’t so sad, if I had an ounce of hope left in my body, I probably would’ve just kept it down in my guts.

“Shut your mouth or you’re next.”

“Yeah, America’s much safer now, Soul Patch.”

“What did you just say to me?” he asks, turning with a puffed out chest.

“I said sarcastically that this arrest was making a difference, and then I said that I think your little soul patch looks stupid. That’s my opinion, and I’m completely within my right to express it.” I am not scared. I am nervous that I am not nervous. The symptoms of teenage rebellion and peacocking confrontation are missing — I do not tremble and the blanket of warmth that usually spreads beneath the skin of the face is not there. The officers circle me now, arms folded, heads tilted back, smirks growing wider. They are vultures, and I am an eviscerated roadside possum.

“Say that to me again.”

“I respect your profession, and I respect what you’re trying to do…but I think you’re being needlessly rude to these people and I happen to think that your facial hair looks ridiculous.”

“You better watch it there, kid…or you’re the next to walk,” calls out the other undercover leaning against a civilian car. He reminds me of a manager I once worked for in a wing joint.

“On what charge?”

“Inciting the public.”

“Inciting the public?” I repeat with a laugh, deciding to myself that I’ve had enough. I’m done with all of this. I don’t really care anymore if I end up in a jail cell. I have every right to do this. It’s soul-crushing to pick and choose one’s battles. Fight them head-on, even if you’re massacred. In this world, that’s a foolish ideal that’s liable to land you left for dead. But I already feel that way.

“Yeah,” he says with a cocked jaw, tugging at his belt.

“If you didn’t have that badge on, you’d be just another tough guy trying to prove himself at a bar.” His arms unfold, his shoulders droop and all of the action in his body is shot into his eyes. He’s trembling. He’s developing a thin film of heat under his skin. I’ve got this motherfucker, and he’s probably going to take me away in handcuffs, but it’s not going to stop those words from ringing in his head all night. My brother gently grabs my right arm and the officer behind me places his hands on the button that snaps his cuffs to his belt.

“I’ve said all I needed to say here…good luck with your citations, gentlemen. Have a nice evening.” I flick my cigarette into a sand-filled pot, flash the patronizing smirk that they’ve been emitting for the last twenty minutes, and walk back into the bar.

Friends and observers roll through to shake my hand or laugh or tell me how the officers are camped outside plotting their revenge. Alternate modes of transportation are arranged to thwart their plans, and as my cousin and I are playing songs on the jukebox the undercover who had been leaning against the car approaches me.

“You better get home safe tonight,” he says, his words dripping with the angst and hesitance of a fifteen year old. “We might run into you later.”

“I look forward to it,” I say, patting him on the shoulder. “Take it easy, man.”

We spend the rest of the evening in my cousin’s basement, drinking rum and laughing at recantations of the whole affair. It should’ve been one of my happiest moments. Instead I found myself bothered by the fact that this never would’ve happened if I was content. When we find ourselves happy or content with the world around us, we tend to turn our eyes from what is wrong about it. Getting involved or speaking up in those sorts of incidents are liable to threaten that joy and contentment. It’s best to just keep your eyes forward and do what they tell you.

The angry and the discontent are the ones most likely to change the world. It’s the happy and complacent ones that often and unwittingly perpetuate it’s ills. Either path you take, you find yourself losing something.

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Staring Right Through My Own Reflection Saturday, Feb 7 2009

The things that I used to live for now kind of make me want to throw in the towel. I find myself three days without a shave, on someone else’s tab in a red-lit bar that only plays techno covers of pop hits, sitting on leather couches next to a fireplace. The girl in front of me is around three years my junior, confused, attention-starved, sporting a hoodie and Kool-Aid red hair with a few streaks of golden blonde. Aside from the trend-punk costume and about a half dozen piercings, she looks like she could be a cheerleader. I ponder what went wrong along the way.

“I really love your writing,” she says with a shameless hair toss. We’ve spent the last hour acting as if our mutual dislike of the music represents a greater commonality. “What do I have to do to be a character it?”

“Disgust me or earn my affection.”

“And which am I doing right now?” I think she thinks she’s winning.

“There’s such a fine line…half the time I can’t really tell anymore.” I am every character in every scene of every film I’ve ever seen. So is she. We give each other stares we picked up from record covers. And that’s why I can’t take this. That’s why this bores me. I’d rather pay money for the end result if it burned through the peacocking and lies.

I lack the confidence to make this sort of thing happen anymore. Part of it is a lack in myself, and the other a lack in them. I’m merely visiting the moments of my youth here, the cast re-tooled to stay hip, to stay on par with the handicap of my romantic retardation. But unfortunately in these cases, apathy is often somehow found to be intriguing.

The more they’re intrigued, the more they flick they eyelashes or send cute texts or breathe acutely with fastened eyes as they listen to me talk. The more all of this happens, the more apt I am to find myself burning a not-alone-but-lonely 5 a.m. cigarette. So by not being interested, I draw interest, which interests me, which leads me back to a lonely square one every single time. The way our souls go about things, it doesn’t really have much of a chance to work, unless we fool ourselves.

Besides, I don’t trust the poor girl’s judgment. I’m a buzzing, sunken-eyed wreck — I look like hell, I’m half in the bag and wearing yesterday’s clothes. And you can save the possibility of ‘liking me for who I am’, as this bird hasn’t the slightest clue as to who I am right now. Neither do I.

“There’s a party above the bar if you want to check it out after this.” She gives me the tight-lipped, look upward, a few strands of hair in the way, the one that signifies an offer beyond a party.

“Nah, I don’t think so. I’m pretty tired, and I came here with some people.”

“They can come.”

“I think they have other plans…and they’re my ride.”

“You can stay at my place. I live around the corner.”

“Uh…really tired…thanks for the offer, though.”

“Well, it was really nice to see you.” The clock still shows about an hour of remaining bar time. And yet our rolling conversation has been halted by my clandestine admission that I’m not interested in sleeping with her. I was more than content to continue the movie/music/literature banter our types shield ourselves behind. But she needed a solution for the evening.

“Yeah, it was great to see you, too.” I give her a hug and rejoin my friends for that crawling and monotonous time of the evening where I’ve decided that I’m ready to leave but must wait on the group I came with. A lot of my life feels that way these days. I study my drink or stare out at the carnival or watch Dallas blow out Sacramento, thinking of where I’d like to be, and who I’d like to be talking with, but beaten down enough to merely anticipate a gas station six-pack and an empty bed.

As I sit around with them, immune to the conversation, I note her across the room, scrunching her nose at a shaggy-haired kid with a Castro hat and a peach face. They’re probably talking about the same things we were. Yes, he liked Juno as well, I imagine as I watch him nod in the way all men do when they’re contemplating whether or not they could sleep with her. I immediately question whether or not I made a mistake. It’s going to feel this way no matter what I do. Can the illusions of my own head be any better than the illusions of our pretty conversations?

I want to build myself a cabin in the woods and read novels by lantern, not to get away from society, but to escape the prospect of falling in love.

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Maybe I Have Been Exploring All The Same Places Friday, Feb 6 2009

We were in Mac’s — downstairs — when She broke the news. She had bought me a beer with an orange in it that I didn’t touch until after She’d left, and I just sat there, staring at Her tanned knee exposed through the eye-shaped hole in Her jeans as She stumbled through the whole it’s-not-you-it’s-me lecture, thinking to myself that it was way overdue. If I would have known then how much worse it would get in the next four years, I might have looked her in the eyes.

“Hi.” The greeting startled me. It had been about two or three hours since She’d had enough of my pained silence, and I’d moved upstairs, slumping at the end of the bar by myself, save for the occasional knowing friend offering a shoulder pat and a round. The voice was unfamiliar, and cheery rather than the softly patronizing tone I’d been approached with most of the evening.

I’d seen her around once or twice, a friend of a friend, but couldn’t quite place her. Diminutive and adorable, she was wearing a white blouse with crossing laces connecting the neckline, and a flowing, fuzzy dress swirling with patterns of maroon and lime green and harvest gold. Long brown hair twirled across her shoulders, her eyes were diamonds and her smile was infectious.

“Hi.”

“My name’s Kimmy…I’m Natalie’s friend.”

“I’m Dan.”

“Why so glum?” she asked, scooping herself onto the stool next to me.

“Take your pick of any tired cliché.”

“Nat says it was a girl.”

“One way or another, it always boils down to a girl, right?”

“I bet you I could cheer you up.”

“You’re on the clock.”

“Have you ever ridden a tandem bicycle?”

“Nope. Always wanted to, though…I always tell people that if I had the resources, my Christmas card would be me and a chimp on one, waving in unison with Santa hats on.” She laughed through her nose and smiled at me warmly. “Did Nat tell you to say that?”

“Nope,” she says with the grin of a kindergartner. “But I just got one, and none of my friends want to ride with me. You wanna ride it tomorrow?”

“Absolutely.”

“Would it cheer you up?”

“Absolutely,” I repeated, hesitating for a second before admitting that my most heartbreaking of troubles can be cured with the premise of a tandem bicycle and a pretty stranger.

We clinked our glasses and exchanged phone numbers and bantered for awhile, her attempting to brighten my spirits while I attempted to act like it was working (or fought the admission that it was). I expected nothing of it — in this town, each bar patron makes roughly five conflicting plans for the following day — but the detached companionship was a welcome break from slowly driving myself insane until the bar lights came alive.

My phone began to rumble and motor across the floor around eleven the next morning, the resulting jolt upward causing waves of rum to thrash around in my brain. It had taken me a moment to recall who ‘Kimmy’ was, and when I did it caused me to recall why I’d drank so much. She was gone.

“Hi.” I cleared my throat before answering but it still resulted in a sandpaper-coated grumble.

“Do you want to ride a tandem bike with me?” Her voice was as sweet and vibrant as the night before.

“Absolutely.”

The early afternoon air was limp and slightly chilled, the clouds threatening rain. The bike — red-and-white and most likely manufactured in the 1950’s — was better than anything that I could have conjured up in my wildest fantasies, chimp or otherwise. We hauled it out from their house and began to arduously pedal Uptown, wobbling and catching ourselves with heels to the concrete for the first couple minutes.

We started to get the hang of it once we’d cleared the hill, right around the Holiday Inn, and as we began to gain steam, her shoulder length hair whipping in front of my face and mine trailing behind me, the sun began to break from the clouds. The Uptown crowd nodded and pointed and laughed to themselves as we basked in the recently cracked yolk of the sun, practicing our synchronized waving a bit too early, the bike jostling from our control.

This was how I spent the first few hours of the day after what I sometimes convince myself was the beginning of the end. Breezing around the commerce district on a relic of a former era with I girl I’d just met the night before, the attention of the hungover town focused on us as we passed, beaming and waving.

I don’t think I’ve ridden a bike since then.

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I Thought Time Might Help Me Win This Game Thursday, Feb 5 2009

It’s been the same dream over and over again, every night, without fail, for about nine months now. No matter what fragments of memory and thought my mind pull together to weave a story, it always seem to take the shape of the same plot — I’m back in Oxford, standing on the outskirts of a party, and the attendants are everyone I know and love. They’re staring at me, pensively, apologetically, as if to say ‘I know, I know, it’s not fair, but she’ll throw a fit and hurl objects’. And then, of course, there she is, giving a mischievous, smug grin as if to say ‘I told you I could do it. I told you I could drive a wedge between them and you. And I did.’ From there I slink the midnight streets alone like a middle schooler without a dance partner until convulsed upwards from my slumber, coated in a drafty sweat and left realizing that it was not, in fact, just a dream.

Distance is no escape. The gentle souls I live with, who benevolently avert their eyes when I groggily crack the morning’s first to escape this nightmare and reality, stay at her place when we visit and attend the same parties that I dream about. I’m left to stumble from bar-to-bar alone, counting the minutes until the coast is clear, when they will call me to meet up for a token drink and mock her as if it somehow makes me feel better.

If I speak out about it, which I occasionally do in moments when my brain is sludge, they do just about everything but roll their eyes at me, asking with condescension if the Captain’s kids are really that important. I want to take it all away from them and ask the same sneering question. They often act as if my bitter indignation is somehow putting them in a tough spot. And it is. But their knowing guilt has something to do with it as well. I don’t believe that it’s anyone’s fault, but it seems that everyone, including myself, is laden with remorse, which causes us to lash out at any accusing party.

Before Captain’s, I had often found myself in an overly spacious downtown Cleveland studio that smelled of the hipster Brooklyn house parties I used to attend when I was still alive, the aroma of radiator heat and old building structure. It was inhabited by a paroled felon we called The Duke, and usually about a half-dozen of his closest drug buddies coupled with the passing customer or two. The Duke would take bumps of meth and coax junkies into letting him beat them at chess, while I’d sit on a piss-and-jizz stained couch in a vacant-eyed, frozen stupor, thinking about Her and watching a pale kid with an emo swoop smoke hash out of tin foil.

About four years later, the place still smells the same. The Duke is much paler and seems to have lost weight, hair and about a half-dozen of his back teeth, but the shit-eating grin he gives when he opens the door to find my arms outstretched in faux-triumph is timeless.

“Hollywood,” he says with astonishment. “A fucking ghost at my door!” He cackles manically, and hugs me, and I lament how tightly I hug him back.

“So where the fuck have you been?” he asks, scraping out a line and sliding the powder-frosted mirror towards me, which I slide right back. I will do just about anything to scramble the thoughts of my brain, but the goal at the end of the day is to put myself to sleep. In my dreams, at least there’s the possibility of a neuron misfiring, causing my consciousness to enter a different world where I can still be with the people that saved from this place.

“Heaven and back,” I say, nodding towards the small mason jar stained with the residue of hash. Duke begins to unscrew the cap while one of his caved-and-purple-armed minions provides me with a fresh beer. A Van-Damme movie that no one is watching plays from the television. The raccoon-eyed skeleton in the corner begins to make eyes at me, rubbing the pock marks that litter the inner joint of her elbow. At first glance, it appears that once upon a time she was beautiful.

Letting the first hit trickle and twist from my mouth like a bellydancer, I can see their faces — Valerie, Bryan, Marie, Kevin, Amber, Tim, Becky, David, Lana, etc. They’re all shaking their heads with a look of disdain. I brush it off, knowing that these thoughts are merely the machinations of my brain. In reality, they’re all out together somewhere, drinking and laughing in the electric night streets like we all used to.

This is all in my head. This is nobody’s fault but my own…right? Right.

“How about a dirty bump?” I ask with a wheeze, pointing towards the small pile of tan powder sitting on the edge of the table next to a bent and blackened spoon. “Just a bump, though,” I clarify, thinking of them. They are my reason to stop and my reason to keep going.

If an unaffiliated stranger were to wander into this drug-infested hell right now, I wonder if they’d see me as something that didn’t belong, as something that should transcend all of this, or if they would just lump me in with the rest of them? On the surface, there’s no discernible difference – I’m just as lost and desolate – but my eyes still contain a softened, burning soul that seems faded from the rest of them. They always have, even when I was here the first time around. I’m not sure if it’s subsided any since then, but I’ve been trying to burn out that fire for years, and the only way I know how is to jump in with the lifeless.

The Duke sculpts two miniature mountains, and we talk about the Cavaliers, because I don’t want to talk about anything else. I just want escape this recurring nightmare, and if that means propelling myself into a deeper, darker one, so be it. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, but in a way they all are.

I inhale it through my nose with an eye-opening jolt and hope that tonight my dreams are something different. They don’t necessarily need to be any less haunting — just different. I desperately and silently apologize to everyone I know and love while Duke takes my rook.

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Wear Your Skirt Like A Flag And Everything Surrounds You Wednesday, Feb 4 2009

In the end, or perhaps I should say up until the end, it seems that artifacts are all we have. We collect antiques and protect historical documents. We stare at photographs of the past and watch Nick-at-Nite. We listen to songs of our youth, and songs of our parents’ youth, and composers of the 18th century. We remember the words of our forefathers, and their forefathers, and they all still sound strangely relevant. Mix tapes made by old lovers, locker notes from the eighth grade, a dead relative’s watch, a ticket stub, a thrift store blouse, a Victorian-era novel. It’s as if we’re headed into the future walking backwards, looking to the past but headed in the same direction.

If nobody saw it but you, and there was no physical evidence to memorialize it, what then, is it but a bar story, a tall tale, something that exists only in your own head? Our materialistic nature compels us to reject this transience — the things that exist only in our own heads are not enough for us in this world. We need something to look at, to touch, something to symbolize the whole affair.

Our species needs artifacts, or perhaps more succinctly, symbols. Shapes that tell us which bathroom to use, a martyr hanging on the cross for the good of the people, X’s and O’s, headstones, teams that tell us our city is winning. Twain couldn’t just tell us that we were all living in our own dark age, he had to tell it through the symbolism of a fantasy. We must package love and affection into the grand symbolic nature of Love — physical beauty, flowers, kisses, fidelity, happiness. Even the conversation that lead to such feelings, the flirtation, is nothing more than symbolic gestures and words with very little substance or truth outside of indicators.

We choose symbols for our fears — horror movies or the Russians — because we cannot face our own. We choose symbols for hope and courage because we don’t have any. A new job, a new lover, a new president, a good horoscope, a Tony Robbins seminar — people will latch onto anything to find these traits in the world except through the mere fact that we’re here or that it happened, and it meant something. If they had never crucified Christ, if he had merely said ‘turn the other cheek’ and passed away from natural causes, would it matter to us? We don’t want real love or real fear or real courage — the reality of those things are far too bleak and unsatisfying to us.

The only time I’ve ever found real love is through a depression and apathy so fierce that I cared nothing for myself, so little that I was willing to sacrifice myself for her or him or the whole lot; no member of humanity was too small. And in this apathy, the lack of desire to further myself or any of my ambitions, I became wide-eyed and in love with the world. It was real — bitter, depressing, lovely, inspiring and real.

Real courage? Real courage is liable to get you shot, hung, crucified, broken up with, jailed, run out of town. We prescribe it as ’standing up for what you believe in’, but so rarely do any of us do so, and when we do, our actions are only given the ‘courageous’ label if they fit in with the mindset around us. The man who has the courage to realize that he’s wasted his life, and delves into divorce proceedings and custody battles while fleeing to somewhere warm is never called courageous. He’s more apt to be called a failure or a coward. Courageousness is more often than not an unwanted act. It rocks the boat, and plants itself on the grass after being warned not to. It doesn’t always stand for good.

We want what is fake. What we can’t have. We want what has passed or what will never be. The real is far to much for us to swallow. We avert our eyes from reality. We’d rather fake a smile than admit pain. We want a song to describe how we’re feeling instead of expressing it ourselves. We see more in the hour-and-a-half courtship of Matthew McConaghey and Kate Hudson that we do in our own romances. We want our romances to be like that. Our checking account stands as a symbol of our success. We only want symbolic love, symbolic courage, symbolic desires.

Not many ever found anything particularly compelling about Norma Jeane Baker. But we all loved Marilyn Monroe.

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Lost It All For Just Another Score Tuesday, Feb 3 2009

“Git back here! Im’a buss yer fuckin’ head open with a brick!” The commotion causes me perk up from my languid position on the couch. It’s Homeless Jeff, the only man that someone in my state still has the capability of lending a stronger hand to, stalking the side street with a broken slab of cinder block.

“Jeff, buddy, what’s the problem?” I ask, dashing out to the corner.

“He drank my beer!”

“Who did?”

“Rascal.”

“Is that the black guy?” I shake off the confusion, realizing that it doesn’t matter. None of this matters. “Look, forget about it. I’ll buy you a new one.”

“I’ma git him,” he mutters to himself as we walk towards the gas station, shaking his head.

“If I buy you a beer you have to promise me you’ll leave him alone.”

“He’s a damn thief!” he pleads, stopping in his tracks.

“And I’m being a good guy, right? Let it be a wash.” I almost begin to warn him that cracking someone’s skull with a blunt object won’t do anything but land him in jail, until I realize that retribution coupled with the added bonus of a warm bed may not sound like such a terrible option to him. “C’mon.”

The Eastern Europeans won’t let him on the premises of the gas station, so he lingers outside while I purchase a paper bag clad twenty-four ounce can and a bag of chips with roughly 1/25th of my checking account. I know I shouldn’t, but I see a pain in eyes that I see in the mirror, and there’s something inside of me that just wants to quell it. I know it will just flare back up later with more fury. But it’s nice to see them simmer down a little. Ignoring the Ruffles, he engulfs nearly half of the can in one fell swoop, his Adam’s apple thrusting like a piston.

“Thank you, Mr. McKay,” he pants, wiping the dribble from his chin and sucking on the end of his crusty University of Kentucky sweatshirt, eager to soak up every last bit of poison.

“Call me Dylan,” I say with dramatic flair and a squint. It never gets old.

The lunch rush is probably just dying down at Captain’s. I imagine the farmers are just having their double vodka-and-lemonades poured, and I can’t imagine that whoever is making them can do it as well as I did. I live my life out here not by the hour of the day or the tint of the sky, but by what is probably going on up there at that particular moment.

So many of us live out our days this way. Perhaps it’s not as bleak as my lot, having a raving schizophrenic as your only friend after callously being driven away from everything you love by a manipulative and heartless kid too young to know any better. But for most of us life is merely a daydream, a pursuit of what once was or never could be, except it’s a stagnant pursuit, running only in one’s mind as we continue on with the machinations we see before us.

When I worked at Captain’s, I daydreamed of the life I’d led before that one.

For people who are immune from the weight of the world or their conscience (or too green to recognize it) the world is their oyster, ready to be shucked and stripped in the name of any whim that makes them feel just a little better about their illness. For people like Jeff and myself, it’s a bear trap. We saw something shiny inside, but upon reaching out, it’s clamped into our flesh, cracked through our bone and left us to bleed to death, unable to move. We, too, will do whatever we can, no matter how detrimental, to escape the lament of our ills (and theirs).

I silently curse Devin, and myself, and everyone who watched it happen, and warn Jeff to behave one more time, shoving the chips into his hand before walking back home to kill the hours until…

Half of the time I think that these thoughts are stark truth, and the other half I can recognize that it’s complete nonsense, fueled by false idols and alcohol and bad blood. I don’t think there is a truth. I think we are all as innocent as we are evil. It’s all nonsense when you think about it, and chaos is just as apt to abruptly snap me back into sense at any moment. I may wear a tie tomorrow. I may marry to avoid loneliness. I may ignore the silence. Giving a bit of myself up and trying to fit in seems like a less terrifying option by the day.

Whether it finds itself in the present or the future, I just want my heart to get itself out of the past.

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