Scatter or Rally

We cannot be blamed for these things–we are all children.  You dig?  And I haven’t the foggiest about when we’ll all grow the fuck up.  We enjoy our shrunken forms and our backwards, adolescent politics too much.  We don’t want to grow up–age equals responsibility equals effort.  Can’t we just be lazy for a tiny bit longer?  What could it cost?

I take no responsibility not forcefully given.  I assume no culpability not handed down by a recognized court of law.  I bow to no judge who doesn’t bow to me.  With basket in hand and books in pockets, I walk across the windswept beach, patiently gathering the scattered bits of brain smashed out by a lifetime of ducking and weaving the obvious truth.

Do not presume me craven; this tanned belly has turned from yellow into a Sybaritic brown.  I have crawled from shell to shell sitting at the shoreline, consciously switching homes to avoid the encroaching tide of an insightful populace.  I make my nests higher and higher in the battered, seaside cliffs, desperate for a place inaccessible, invisible, and utterly acceptable.  Profoundly inoffensive.  Despicably easy and ineffably incomprehensible.  Someplace beyond the infantile jurisdiction of peekaboo games and egotistic deliberations, someplace where an innocent, mindless misstep might send me home.

I watch the widowed spider in malevolent glee vigilently watch me, aware of and indifferent to the fly struggling impotently just a few seconds and a tiny life away.  I measure the fall and compare it disfavorably to the thrill of the climb.  I stand stooped over and head down, staring into the expanse of a year spent wanting.  Will I scatter or rally?  Scatter or rally?  Scatter or rally?  Scatter from the danger or rally to the forlorn flag?  Scatter or rally?

I dig with my barehands until my fingernails bleed.  Medication, oh what Earthly medication, could ever fix this again?  Let’s avoid the truths about all that’s happened, I think, as I dull my chisel on the limestone summits.  What should I write?  What could ever matter at all?  A name, a place, a forgotten idea formulated in the darkest forests and driest deserts by the loneliest hermits?  Oh, the silly things we do in the name of loneliness.  So I write:

Life is hard.  Oh God, is it hard.  Some of us take anything we want, proud of our ability to succeed.  Some of us take nothing of what we want, reveling in our wasteful martyrdom.  Some of us take what life gives us, convinced that we’ve been wronged.  Some of us meet people exactly like us, and leave horrified, or leave confused, or leave infatuated.  Those who take all they want know who they are and it doesn’t bother them.  People who take nothing..well, it bothers them immensely.  When will we get ours?  When will we ever get ours?

Will I sit around and wait to harvest this tree of mistakes, feasting on fruit until it bears fruit again?  Will I become convinced of my own innate foolishness by others?  I unstopped the vial of Lethean waters, cringing at the odors the fluid emits.  I plugged my nose and crossed myself, fully aware the rote motion meant nothing to me, and I drank it all.  I promised to these people nothing but my best, and that they received.  I revel in my chance to forget it.

Life is as life always has been.  I spend most of my days with Penington, counting down the days until I graduation and leave.  Not that Whitewater isn’t a special place to me, but places are only places.  I finished exams on Tuesday, willfully aware I did nothing near my best.  I wish I could care, but I absolutely don’t.

I have two Christmas celebrations approaching, the 23rd and the 25th.  I wish I cared, but I really don’t.  For whatever reason, it doesn’t feel like Christmas here in my parents’ house.  Maybe it’s the lack of snow–we received about a solid foot on the 1st, but that’s all gone now.

I don’t think I’ll write again before Christmas, so for anyone readingthis:

Merry Christmas.  Happy Chaunakah.  Krazy Kwanzaa. 

Happy New Year.

O’Rourke’s, 1:20 AM, by The Good Life

It’s different when you’re lonely,
the whole world’s in love.
Holding hands between bar stools,
and you’re holding your tounge.
Hold on – you’re so fucked up…
so fickle.
Isn’t this what you want?
So simple, so single.
But it’s different when you’re helpless.
When the bars close their doors,
growing hostile towards your waitress…
those extra tips went ignored.

It’s different ’cause you’re desperate
Begging mercy on the sidewalk
to a sea of last callers
(keep the conversations quick
and keep them interested!)
You’re different…and they sense it
Your eyes can’t disguise it…
so glassy, half empty.
Ready to spill.

Hold on- please don’t leave yet.
I can’t go home alone,
it doesn’t go over so well.
So hold on just a little longer.
At least through the night,
at least ’til the morning.
Hold on. Hold on to me.
I can hardly stand – much less
the sight of myself.
So hold on, hold on tight dear.
Put your foot on the gas –
get me the fuck out of here.