Everything Just As Well.
The last thing I saw before drifting off was the faded green wall opposite the window side of my bedroom, right over the desk. My body remained alive for a few minutes more, but as for me I was out just as well as a dead light switch; repair could be on the way, but there’s only so much time you can let an accident sit before the injury becomes more enduring. In the case of whatever it was that happened, a decently courteous five minutes or so, if rounded off, would suffice as the vast window of opportunity. Like a thief, with both hands on the sill, one foot planted firmly where the starting point glowered and the other sent through into the future with a strong, healthy kick forward; only something came to its senses and it spent the whole chance it had in steady deliberation on how to go about handling what had already been started. Should you finish, I could have asked aloud. I think it spoke a lot about what my life had turned to, because I didn’t have anything hanging on the walls at all. There were not any maps hung against that plain pale green wall describing the course of trips planned but never taken, like a few people I knew had done. There weren’t even any photographs tacked up of those friends, or of interesting places I’ve been to. Probably in my time I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited a few monuments and historical estates memorializing long dead figures of the past who have made something special out of the seeds of nothing at all, and I should have had a camera on me during those moments. But truthfully, I probably would not have bothered to get the film developed even if I had. Either that or I wouldn’t have found anything else to photograph to take up the remainder of the blank exposures left, and so it would stay in that camera until the night I died.
Tonight, actually.
It would still be on the bedside table to this very night, residing with unthreatened stillness as a buried coffin does, next to the alarm clock that’s going to sound in the morning while there’s no one in the room who is fit to answer it.
And then there will be the empty beer bottles to collect and dispose of, the lp record collection for my neighbors to sift through and pawn, the quarters and dimes under the seat cushions out in the living room.
When I was sixteen I slept with a girl who was probably the hottest in all of the 10th grade. It was a sudden move, but it was great. That semester’s Advanced Printmaking class had burst a water main while setting up a newly purchased press, and as a result the whole room flooded. In fact, most of the hall flooded as well, so for that whole week it was, for the most part, empty. Its nickname was Ghost Town, but nobody ever called it that because I was the one who coined the phrase, but only to myself, and never aloud.
During the lunch period we’d snuck away, cracked open some warm beers I had stuffed in my locker under a dense pile-up of gym shirts I new nobody would touch even if they did happen to gain access to my locker for any reason, and before we’d gotten through half the six-pack her shirt was in a puddle on the floor, my shirt was hanging from the blackboard with chalk stains smeared across the front, and we were suddenly outlaws. It was also my first time doing it ever, so I was pretty nervous. Though not yet nervous enough, thanks to my low alcohol tolerance.
“I’ve never said it before and it’s the last time I ever will, but ignore me. I could reach into your pocket, unfurl the gloved fingers I’ve just shoved into the blackness of that secrecy, and while nobody is looking, I could easily-so easily it would hurt-drop a banded stack of one hundred dollar bills. When I pull my hand out you’d be thousands of dollars wiser. You would have quite enough to get along through the year. Moreover, you would be more than able to quit your job, pay the rent in advance and leave. But don’t do the most foolish thing you could, by supposing that the money wouldn’t run out; just like the sincerity in your heart, it would fastly become replaced by objects you figured you needed at the time just because you wanted them so badly. Back in those inferno moments of convenience, when a trade-off was simple simply because you could afford it, and above all, the availability seemed to have your name stamped across it with embossed lettering. You might as well have stained each of those bills by rubbing them against your stomach lining. When the money gets filtered through the system and some of those bills end up as far away as the other side of the continent, nobody’s going to know what is making them sick because there’s so much else in the world that can do it just as well.”
It’s a shame I couldn’t always feel as good while drinking as I did that day in the flooded classroom, but I suppose when your mind grows and learns to tolerate reality a little bit more, the alcohol adjusts to your lack of spirit and will try with adroit patience to obscure the sorrows it unmasks, by promptly drowning them in a small pool of wise failure. It’s a lot like a man confined to a wheelchair, who is largely paralyzed from the neck to the toes, canvassing the empty parking lot of an abandoned supermarket, wheeling himself nowhere all day long just because he’s bored, and how when it starts to rain and he wheels faster to try to get home, the wheelchair tumbles and he drowns because his face lands in a one-inch puddle and he can’t get himself out of it because what little movement he has in his arms isn’t enough to pull his body up after such a brutal fall.
Especially after it knocked the wind out of him, successfully weakening his already pitiful capacity for energy. If there's no effort to be put into it in the first place, it cannot be created on the spot based solely on neccessity. But yet he'll keep flailing his arms, even though it'll only be in his head because in reality he cannot even move his arms.
When a story like that hits the papers, people eating breakfast before work-ruffling through the local news sections-always laugh. It gives the average person in this type of solitary situation a good laugh before a hard day of feeling like they’re getting paid for nothing and are not appreciated, and the always accompanying fact that it won’t ever end. Most people toil over that prospect once or twice during the week as they’re brushing their teeth while looking at themselves in the mirror. In most cases, I bet, people deal with it at the back of their minds all day long, every day. And when they dream at night, it’s about being chased; about car accidents or a death in the family; about losing a wallet full of cash and about hitting a tree while driving.
A few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Thomas, dialing from a desk phone at the hospital. On an icy patch along the freeway, a tangle of cars started to slide, knocking each other about like bumper cars. Four people were crushed to death in a pile of automobiles at the bottom of the embankment, inclusive of his friend’s girlfriend, the third passenger in the car when it happened.
When I asked him how the other kid was, Thomas had started crying and it took him almost ten minutes to finally admit that the dead girl’s boyfriend, Carl, had no legs anymore. They had to amputate them? I asked. No, he said. They were severed in the accident and hadn’t been found yet. I wondered how a pair of legs could possibly be lost in the backseat of a car. It was a pretty big car, I guess, but still, I never found out about the status on the legs.
Thomas needed me to come and pick him up because he couldn’t drive home. I assumed he was talking about his emotional state, but in fact, it had everything to do with his car having been destroyed beyond recognition. So then I got curious as to Thomas’ own condition. He was bleeding from the head and his face was a bit torn up, but since he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, he was pitched from the side of the car when the door flew open, landing in a rough clump of weeds and filthy retention water. An umpire would have thrown his hands out and yelled, “Safe!”
You could tell where the holes in the wall were filled up with paper and pastes before I rolled over the whole clotted mess with that pale green paint. Tiny little particles that were only visible once you got a good close look at the paint job were just rolled over and forgotten about, with hopes that it would look fine once the whole wall matched in color. However, patches that at first looked pretty good unpainted were only forcibly made multiple times worse when it actually did have the same hue as the flat, unharmed wall encircling the numerous botched craters any real renovator would have split an ear over.
Every decision that got made had its consequences. When the last thing I saw was that imperfect wall, I thought to myself what a waste of time so much of the past few years had been. When asked of regret I could have told anyone that I had none (even though I had more than I should likely want to admit). It would have been simple, though, like how I wore different sets of sneakers from day to day to avoid feeling like I were only walking through my life predestined to cry long before I would ever actually be able to feel that beautiful tingle in my toes and fingertips when the sun came out from behind the clouds. My skin would feel warm but cool, temperately directing me into the open air. Seldom did I feel that kind of joy, and in a way it was how I shed the skin I didn’t need anymore, losing a hundred pounds of uselessness, finding out that mistakes just don’t last forever.
I couldn’t really say-as I blinked, staring without a need to try not doing it, at the pale green wall-if it was a mistake of if it wasn’t, but it was going to last forever.
“I’m speaking strictly on a need to know basis. But what really gets to me ten minutes after the conversation has ended is that nothing about what I say ever really has a need to be known. I could make up anything and it could fit as well, if not better. No matter what I try doing it’s bound to change even as the folds are being slipped into their allotted places. When spirals are coiling in, ready to spring back out again and lash into subsequent parts of the procedure, this next time it’s bound to get stuck there. Statistics aren’t necessary, because it hasn’t ever taken a record of like incidences to note that time is going to keep passing. Somebody’s apt to speak up on it, asking me-of all people-what went wrong. But when have I ever had an answer that mattered? I can tell you exactly what’s happening, and also, I can just as easily describe what could be done to make amends-to make it better. But it won’t happen. Even if you do exactly as I say and you yourself feel it’s the right thing to do. Even if beyond feeling that I may have been right; beyond any shadows of doubt you can do away with the honesty, shoving such impracticality aside for scientific formulas that actually prove what I’ve said are the simple facts. It’s still not going to work. So ignore me. Please. Listen to what I say.”
Tonight, actually.
It would still be on the bedside table to this very night, residing with unthreatened stillness as a buried coffin does, next to the alarm clock that’s going to sound in the morning while there’s no one in the room who is fit to answer it.
And then there will be the empty beer bottles to collect and dispose of, the lp record collection for my neighbors to sift through and pawn, the quarters and dimes under the seat cushions out in the living room.
When I was sixteen I slept with a girl who was probably the hottest in all of the 10th grade. It was a sudden move, but it was great. That semester’s Advanced Printmaking class had burst a water main while setting up a newly purchased press, and as a result the whole room flooded. In fact, most of the hall flooded as well, so for that whole week it was, for the most part, empty. Its nickname was Ghost Town, but nobody ever called it that because I was the one who coined the phrase, but only to myself, and never aloud.
During the lunch period we’d snuck away, cracked open some warm beers I had stuffed in my locker under a dense pile-up of gym shirts I new nobody would touch even if they did happen to gain access to my locker for any reason, and before we’d gotten through half the six-pack her shirt was in a puddle on the floor, my shirt was hanging from the blackboard with chalk stains smeared across the front, and we were suddenly outlaws. It was also my first time doing it ever, so I was pretty nervous. Though not yet nervous enough, thanks to my low alcohol tolerance.
“I’ve never said it before and it’s the last time I ever will, but ignore me. I could reach into your pocket, unfurl the gloved fingers I’ve just shoved into the blackness of that secrecy, and while nobody is looking, I could easily-so easily it would hurt-drop a banded stack of one hundred dollar bills. When I pull my hand out you’d be thousands of dollars wiser. You would have quite enough to get along through the year. Moreover, you would be more than able to quit your job, pay the rent in advance and leave. But don’t do the most foolish thing you could, by supposing that the money wouldn’t run out; just like the sincerity in your heart, it would fastly become replaced by objects you figured you needed at the time just because you wanted them so badly. Back in those inferno moments of convenience, when a trade-off was simple simply because you could afford it, and above all, the availability seemed to have your name stamped across it with embossed lettering. You might as well have stained each of those bills by rubbing them against your stomach lining. When the money gets filtered through the system and some of those bills end up as far away as the other side of the continent, nobody’s going to know what is making them sick because there’s so much else in the world that can do it just as well.”
It’s a shame I couldn’t always feel as good while drinking as I did that day in the flooded classroom, but I suppose when your mind grows and learns to tolerate reality a little bit more, the alcohol adjusts to your lack of spirit and will try with adroit patience to obscure the sorrows it unmasks, by promptly drowning them in a small pool of wise failure. It’s a lot like a man confined to a wheelchair, who is largely paralyzed from the neck to the toes, canvassing the empty parking lot of an abandoned supermarket, wheeling himself nowhere all day long just because he’s bored, and how when it starts to rain and he wheels faster to try to get home, the wheelchair tumbles and he drowns because his face lands in a one-inch puddle and he can’t get himself out of it because what little movement he has in his arms isn’t enough to pull his body up after such a brutal fall.
Especially after it knocked the wind out of him, successfully weakening his already pitiful capacity for energy. If there's no effort to be put into it in the first place, it cannot be created on the spot based solely on neccessity. But yet he'll keep flailing his arms, even though it'll only be in his head because in reality he cannot even move his arms.
When a story like that hits the papers, people eating breakfast before work-ruffling through the local news sections-always laugh. It gives the average person in this type of solitary situation a good laugh before a hard day of feeling like they’re getting paid for nothing and are not appreciated, and the always accompanying fact that it won’t ever end. Most people toil over that prospect once or twice during the week as they’re brushing their teeth while looking at themselves in the mirror. In most cases, I bet, people deal with it at the back of their minds all day long, every day. And when they dream at night, it’s about being chased; about car accidents or a death in the family; about losing a wallet full of cash and about hitting a tree while driving.
A few weeks ago I got a call from my friend Thomas, dialing from a desk phone at the hospital. On an icy patch along the freeway, a tangle of cars started to slide, knocking each other about like bumper cars. Four people were crushed to death in a pile of automobiles at the bottom of the embankment, inclusive of his friend’s girlfriend, the third passenger in the car when it happened.
When I asked him how the other kid was, Thomas had started crying and it took him almost ten minutes to finally admit that the dead girl’s boyfriend, Carl, had no legs anymore. They had to amputate them? I asked. No, he said. They were severed in the accident and hadn’t been found yet. I wondered how a pair of legs could possibly be lost in the backseat of a car. It was a pretty big car, I guess, but still, I never found out about the status on the legs.
Thomas needed me to come and pick him up because he couldn’t drive home. I assumed he was talking about his emotional state, but in fact, it had everything to do with his car having been destroyed beyond recognition. So then I got curious as to Thomas’ own condition. He was bleeding from the head and his face was a bit torn up, but since he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, he was pitched from the side of the car when the door flew open, landing in a rough clump of weeds and filthy retention water. An umpire would have thrown his hands out and yelled, “Safe!”
You could tell where the holes in the wall were filled up with paper and pastes before I rolled over the whole clotted mess with that pale green paint. Tiny little particles that were only visible once you got a good close look at the paint job were just rolled over and forgotten about, with hopes that it would look fine once the whole wall matched in color. However, patches that at first looked pretty good unpainted were only forcibly made multiple times worse when it actually did have the same hue as the flat, unharmed wall encircling the numerous botched craters any real renovator would have split an ear over.
Every decision that got made had its consequences. When the last thing I saw was that imperfect wall, I thought to myself what a waste of time so much of the past few years had been. When asked of regret I could have told anyone that I had none (even though I had more than I should likely want to admit). It would have been simple, though, like how I wore different sets of sneakers from day to day to avoid feeling like I were only walking through my life predestined to cry long before I would ever actually be able to feel that beautiful tingle in my toes and fingertips when the sun came out from behind the clouds. My skin would feel warm but cool, temperately directing me into the open air. Seldom did I feel that kind of joy, and in a way it was how I shed the skin I didn’t need anymore, losing a hundred pounds of uselessness, finding out that mistakes just don’t last forever.
I couldn’t really say-as I blinked, staring without a need to try not doing it, at the pale green wall-if it was a mistake of if it wasn’t, but it was going to last forever.
“I’m speaking strictly on a need to know basis. But what really gets to me ten minutes after the conversation has ended is that nothing about what I say ever really has a need to be known. I could make up anything and it could fit as well, if not better. No matter what I try doing it’s bound to change even as the folds are being slipped into their allotted places. When spirals are coiling in, ready to spring back out again and lash into subsequent parts of the procedure, this next time it’s bound to get stuck there. Statistics aren’t necessary, because it hasn’t ever taken a record of like incidences to note that time is going to keep passing. Somebody’s apt to speak up on it, asking me-of all people-what went wrong. But when have I ever had an answer that mattered? I can tell you exactly what’s happening, and also, I can just as easily describe what could be done to make amends-to make it better. But it won’t happen. Even if you do exactly as I say and you yourself feel it’s the right thing to do. Even if beyond feeling that I may have been right; beyond any shadows of doubt you can do away with the honesty, shoving such impracticality aside for scientific formulas that actually prove what I’ve said are the simple facts. It’s still not going to work. So ignore me. Please. Listen to what I say.”