Chee Wiz
"What if it isn't happening to you. What if it's happening to someone else."
"But it's not, it's happening to me. I'm those someone else, too."
"Then deal with it, they certainly are," Len said, her voice deliberate and cold.
"..."
"..."
In their quiet hallway of conversation, an intimacy coiled around their heavy, drawn breaths. Keno had always known these answers, they were obvious, after all, yet his mind refused to acquiesce.
That great burdensome weight that never seems to lift when you willed it gone fell heavy upon his shoulders. Receding only into a distant memory when you have become light, effortlessly curious
("You could've just said 'You better.' I can hear it, after all. ")
"I've got a few pieces of internal dialogue I've been saving for some time."
"And you spent'em. Remember?"
Madness with a reason, though one that can never be true, only believed.
God, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Krishna, Zeus, Odin, Keno despised the self-assured grandeur gleaming from behind the eyes of the sportscaster. So pleased with himself. Confident as a quarterback staring at the jury in court.
And it all rang so clear, so beautifully in his own mind. But his inner-monologue had become so dirty, lately. The best cure is a preventative, but who could cheer the success they had never seen.
Since that day in the skemma some weeks past, the one with slow, growling reflections, where all-men were hurling frozen fowl. "I'LL KILL YOU!" he had screamed, terrified at his own shortcomings.
He remembered an incident from a few days before, walking across another, sad, broken story,
A homeless woman, squatting behind an electrical box on 5th st, 1 block North of City Hall. She's speaking in jilted Spanish, muttering and raving loudly in the day's light. Another equally worn man, his thumbs stiff in 2 Gulps of buzzing Cola, laughs with her, walking twixt yellow lines rolling meditatively center of teh road.
Her legs are puffy, bent, teal, grey pink days of youth and haunting beauty. Memories from her past spring out at her, she was once so naive and fair and now she is so threadbare and hungry is ass is shaking and she wants it, she wants it so bad when it seemed possible like before she had lost her sorrow, traded her grief for another immeasured afternoon.
She fought and remembered, crying out again. So ashamed of herself she became a haunted shell. Withered.
It might have been funny, if it hadn't been so achingly tender. Some kind of vapor in her lungs, a burning, sandpaper smoke. Maybe it was the drink...
"I think you remember, asking once, while you thought of... that you believed yourself without pity, without enough pain, and when you asked for it, you received it."
"I was so happy, and heavy..."
"Why does everyone else need to feel like you? As ugly and hurt and dying as you are."
Keno cycled his thoughts, rasping his tongue on a chipped piece of tooth. He exhaled deeply, and spoke, "I've always been like this.
"But there was a time when I asked for more. When I wanted to know pain ten-fold. I can remember asking for it, needing it...
"Escaping that was so intoxicating...so wild and careless. Actually choosing to hurt.
"Now, I am dumb and spiteful, just like everyone."
"So do you still hate yourself?"
"Less than always, but more than ever.
"Some memories still feel like they haven't happened, yet.
"And, it's like, I love secrets, but what about these ones I've never had the courage (or the reticence) to face?"
"You know,
"how easy it is to forget in the euphoria. Haunted for weeks, one night of exorcism becomes endless and they're still there, only now they're part of the scenery."
"How much of this is real, how much am I just perseverating over?
"When does the dialogue become bearable? Does the praise from people I don't really know mean so much? Where are the boundaries between my self and your self? And when does it matter, how many times in a day will we agree without being right?"
"Well, everything is inheritance, you know. We're all just reacting--"
"Untrue. Some things have no traceable original."
"Yes, and nothing new was said while you were talking into your sleeve."
Keno listened to her, turning his head aside, gazing blankly at the rustled greenery sprouting around them. He remembered when another friend, deep compassion rolling behind his eyes, had done the same. Politely ignoring everything he believed. A family member trying to escape...some sort of...tedium...
"But what about honor, Keno?"
The breeze was strong and her words pounded through the blustering winds.
"Do you think if these things could be quantized you could replicate them?"
"Am I an underdog? Why do I still feel like I don't deserve to win? Is it because I haven't learned how?
"I'm not always despicable, you know. Just more often than I'm comfortable with."
"Ahhh, see! You still have a few left."
To have loved and lost...imagine that time was a river-- dammed.
"Yes it's a simple metaphor, you can fuck right off, you know."
Time passed.
"Who would want to talk to the Beatles?
"**fuck'em!** **fuckem!**
"Old yellow yawning bastards, so old I can't even remember them!" Keno's voice was sore and angry as he railed a line of amber to his face. The beer left a pungent phlegm in his mouth, as he set his arm down, rest the head with the other. The memories from his past grew angry with him, having forgotten so much, in a time which seemed too soon.
Sometimes he would brag to himself about past lives, and what he remembered of being held below the decks of a splintered, sodden unknownable, un-contexted, cart like the 'Sharif's rode, the men here were foreign and--and, and strange. Why was I so far from home, I missed my Savannah and now we were drowning next to each other and Keno couldn't remember who he was, his lungs drew in water, heavy,
The memories existed, this much was true, although whether they were genuine or implanted--
and this was the fault of the white man
but Keno knew his self and wept the dry tears of a child who survived, knowing that, once, his forebear had been honorable. ("However threadbare," hissed a voice) More trance words, half-remembered from the past.
He wondered about "Indian" ancestors, wondering if he was more or less than the sum of his parts.
It felt like a monologue, but, more, it seemed like everything was out of sorts, like the world had chosen to become off-balance, as if it was a choice one was making everyday. Like, everything could be so violent and simple while still able to watch the trees on the frontyard yapping at each other in the setting sun, gossiping loudly. "Cool-guy" chatting up the best parts of the day in trailer-sunapse cinematic synaptic feeds, chuckling with you the whole time you chose to believe them.
Sometimes you could almost forget the chemical wash, the surging flow of tomorrow. The cramped strain of trying to make sense.
I feel like someone is striking a gardenhoe into my butt.
"There are no solutions. 'Every' thing is a test of self.
"Everything happens for a reason. Can you overcome your own shortcomings and bare it?
"Cycling through 'Fuck You' rippers. You gonna shoot? Cock it back, fire it off, increase your sense of self at the cost of someone else..."
"We're getting off-topic, Keno."
"Bingo."
"But it's not, it's happening to me. I'm those someone else, too."
"Then deal with it, they certainly are," Len said, her voice deliberate and cold.
"..."
"..."
In their quiet hallway of conversation, an intimacy coiled around their heavy, drawn breaths. Keno had always known these answers, they were obvious, after all, yet his mind refused to acquiesce.
That great burdensome weight that never seems to lift when you willed it gone fell heavy upon his shoulders. Receding only into a distant memory when you have become light, effortlessly curious
("You could've just said 'You better.' I can hear it, after all. ")
"I've got a few pieces of internal dialogue I've been saving for some time."
"And you spent'em. Remember?"
Madness with a reason, though one that can never be true, only believed.
God, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Krishna, Zeus, Odin, Keno despised the self-assured grandeur gleaming from behind the eyes of the sportscaster. So pleased with himself. Confident as a quarterback staring at the jury in court.
And it all rang so clear, so beautifully in his own mind. But his inner-monologue had become so dirty, lately. The best cure is a preventative, but who could cheer the success they had never seen.
Since that day in the skemma some weeks past, the one with slow, growling reflections, where all-men were hurling frozen fowl. "I'LL KILL YOU!" he had screamed, terrified at his own shortcomings.
He remembered an incident from a few days before, walking across another, sad, broken story,
A homeless woman, squatting behind an electrical box on 5th st, 1 block North of City Hall. She's speaking in jilted Spanish, muttering and raving loudly in the day's light. Another equally worn man, his thumbs stiff in 2 Gulps of buzzing Cola, laughs with her, walking twixt yellow lines rolling meditatively center of teh road.
Her legs are puffy, bent, teal, grey pink days of youth and haunting beauty. Memories from her past spring out at her, she was once so naive and fair and now she is so threadbare and hungry is ass is shaking and she wants it, she wants it so bad when it seemed possible like before she had lost her sorrow, traded her grief for another immeasured afternoon.
She fought and remembered, crying out again. So ashamed of herself she became a haunted shell. Withered.
It might have been funny, if it hadn't been so achingly tender. Some kind of vapor in her lungs, a burning, sandpaper smoke. Maybe it was the drink...
"I think you remember, asking once, while you thought of... that you believed yourself without pity, without enough pain, and when you asked for it, you received it."
"I was so happy, and heavy..."
"Why does everyone else need to feel like you? As ugly and hurt and dying as you are."
Keno cycled his thoughts, rasping his tongue on a chipped piece of tooth. He exhaled deeply, and spoke, "I've always been like this.
"But there was a time when I asked for more. When I wanted to know pain ten-fold. I can remember asking for it, needing it...
"Escaping that was so intoxicating...so wild and careless. Actually choosing to hurt.
"Now, I am dumb and spiteful, just like everyone."
"So do you still hate yourself?"
"Less than always, but more than ever.
"Some memories still feel like they haven't happened, yet.
"And, it's like, I love secrets, but what about these ones I've never had the courage (or the reticence) to face?"
"You know,
"how easy it is to forget in the euphoria. Haunted for weeks, one night of exorcism becomes endless and they're still there, only now they're part of the scenery."
"How much of this is real, how much am I just perseverating over?
"When does the dialogue become bearable? Does the praise from people I don't really know mean so much? Where are the boundaries between my self and your self? And when does it matter, how many times in a day will we agree without being right?"
"Well, everything is inheritance, you know. We're all just reacting--"
"Untrue. Some things have no traceable original."
"Yes, and nothing new was said while you were talking into your sleeve."
Keno listened to her, turning his head aside, gazing blankly at the rustled greenery sprouting around them. He remembered when another friend, deep compassion rolling behind his eyes, had done the same. Politely ignoring everything he believed. A family member trying to escape...some sort of...tedium...
"But what about honor, Keno?"
The breeze was strong and her words pounded through the blustering winds.
"Do you think if these things could be quantized you could replicate them?"
"Am I an underdog? Why do I still feel like I don't deserve to win? Is it because I haven't learned how?
"I'm not always despicable, you know. Just more often than I'm comfortable with."
"Ahhh, see! You still have a few left."
To have loved and lost...imagine that time was a river-- dammed.
"Yes it's a simple metaphor, you can fuck right off, you know."
Time passed.
"Who would want to talk to the Beatles?
"**fuck'em!** **fuckem!**
"Old yellow yawning bastards, so old I can't even remember them!" Keno's voice was sore and angry as he railed a line of amber to his face. The beer left a pungent phlegm in his mouth, as he set his arm down, rest the head with the other. The memories from his past grew angry with him, having forgotten so much, in a time which seemed too soon.
Sometimes he would brag to himself about past lives, and what he remembered of being held below the decks of a splintered, sodden unknownable, un-contexted, cart like the 'Sharif's rode, the men here were foreign and--and, and strange. Why was I so far from home, I missed my Savannah and now we were drowning next to each other and Keno couldn't remember who he was, his lungs drew in water, heavy,
The memories existed, this much was true, although whether they were genuine or implanted--
and this was the fault of the white man
but Keno knew his self and wept the dry tears of a child who survived, knowing that, once, his forebear had been honorable. ("However threadbare," hissed a voice) More trance words, half-remembered from the past.
He wondered about "Indian" ancestors, wondering if he was more or less than the sum of his parts.
It felt like a monologue, but, more, it seemed like everything was out of sorts, like the world had chosen to become off-balance, as if it was a choice one was making everyday. Like, everything could be so violent and simple while still able to watch the trees on the frontyard yapping at each other in the setting sun, gossiping loudly. "Cool-guy" chatting up the best parts of the day in trailer-sunapse cinematic synaptic feeds, chuckling with you the whole time you chose to believe them.
Sometimes you could almost forget the chemical wash, the surging flow of tomorrow. The cramped strain of trying to make sense.
I feel like someone is striking a gardenhoe into my butt.
"There are no solutions. 'Every' thing is a test of self.
"Everything happens for a reason. Can you overcome your own shortcomings and bare it?
"Cycling through 'Fuck You' rippers. You gonna shoot? Cock it back, fire it off, increase your sense of self at the cost of someone else..."
"We're getting off-topic, Keno."
"Bingo."