11th post

It is cold up here on this ledge, and I haven’t brought my coat. I don’t think I’ll be needing it. This shouldn’t take long. The thing is, I don’t know what to think, really. Sometimes…Sometimes I think this is probably too dramatic. It doesn’t matter that much. But it does. That’s why I’m here.

The ground is there, beneath me. And my breath ghosts in and out. I thought it would be windier, but the little puffs just float and kind of…dissipate. The snot running from my nose is really cold. Colder than the stray snail tracks these infrequent, shattered tears leave as wakes.

There is a note. There is always a note. It is on my iPhone. In the coat in the locker in the hall that is behind me and to the left. It was too long to text, so I saved it as a memo. They’ll find it. I look at myself wondering, ‘when will they find it?’ and kind of laugh. In that totally detached way you laugh at absurd things. Like when you have too much to drink and are maybe a little high and find yourself kissing people and feeling them up and then it’s like you know that they’re boys too and it doesn’t matter because you feel good and don’t care that people see it because they all had drinks and they must feel good too, so you laugh.

And I want to laugh. But it comes out like a choked laugh, a strangled, drowned laugh that is clinging to a sob to make it out of the water and then it swirlpools down into the sky and the street and the kids down there playing. Remember when it was you down there playing and everything was so simple? You just want it to be like that again, just once more. You didn’t look up and see the big, wide, grey sky ready to swallow it all up. It was just you and your friends and then it’s weird that you’re this detached from it all and you’re talking to yourself like this in the third person remembering like with yourself likeyouweresomeoneelse.

So it’s simple to be back down there with the little kids again. And they are so much smaller now than they used to be. It’s funny. I didn’t think it would be like this; that I just wanted to be a kid again. But there it is, and it’s the truth. I can’t really hear them, and they’re so tiny and innocent.

Then it gets real windy. And those little kids get so much bigger so fast. And it isn’t true; I do not want to be a kid again. I want to be an old man, but now I know that’s not gonna happen. And they aren’t innocent either. They were talking about sucking dicks when I showed up.

Catch Up

I was at a coffee shop. Clouds lined the horizon, grey and dark like boxcars. The sun was obscured and I had recovered some of my sense from a lost year and a half wandering the wastelands of south Texas. I returned to the good graces of my former home town. Houston is a dark and savage place. One should never retreat there, even in pursuit of everlasting peace and redemption, or ones alleged soul mate.

This time it was different. She was wearing a blue jumper dress and a smile like a scimitar. Edgy. The Smiths were playing and I had a million ideas of recuperation dilating through my head. I must speak with her. It was the same story as ever, tics, hiccups and belches. She was charmed, I'm sure. A connection was forged; a psycho-spiritualknowing that transcended physicality and unified three different cosmologies in one lambent and underworlded package of glory and Coltrane type LOVE. Somehow she understood it all, the Tourettes-like bursts of nonsense and vulgarity, the coded ephemera of snorts and giggles that passed for speech in the heightened state of being I had attained.

She was Canadian, obviously, and completely entranced with the idea of trans-species communication. I explored with her the memories I had of teaching sea squirrels how to hunt. She shared that her dissertation (pending approval) synthesized research linking solar flares and the appearance of haiku form poetry in the western Marianas Islands in the twelfth century. Our future plans included a phase shifting domestic pet with which we could create chimera babies in the underground labs that would prove our love.

I immediately set out for the Arabian Peninsula. I had gained expertise in oil research in Texas. I was going to make a fortune, and return to our bunker of love. Three weeks spent wandering the desert vastness left me disoriented and hallucinatory. I awoke on a Yemeni trawler covered in fish scales and apparently betrothed to a reformed animist militant. It was immutable. We married on the dry sandstone cliffs of the Yemeni shores, backed against the timeless cliff dwellings that evade temporality. A lifetime of goat-herding and happiness erased any recollection of my lost Canadian fiancee.

Our honeymoon was perfect, a small cottage high in the Scottish fens. We ate broiled monkey and haggis. Feeding each other like confused frat-boys on a spring break bacchanal. It started to rain. Great sheeting drifts of wet slanting through our intimacies. A stike of lightning scared me straight. I was unable to hold onto my frisky North African soul mate, the deception it required was too much. I tore myself from his impassioned embrace. I ran out the door into the wide open moors, sheep pleading with me to reconsider. The night was endless and spinning as I escaped once again.

586

ZOMBIE BLOG!

Well, a friend reminded me that this existed. I checked around and, it's true. The blog was dead when I arrived. Fortunately, in my peregrinations since last I trod this particular valley of the digital desert, I picked up some knowledge of the voudou. I applied certain of these arcane techniques to the dessicated remnants of the blog and it worked. I owe a certain lady in New Orleans far more gratitude than was initially proffered.

I shall redeem this space.