Took a late-night walk into the darkness and found the space egg. The birth of the universe left exposed right up there in the sky. I heard animal movement in the woods whilst my soles scraped against the gravel pathway. I was thinking about life and all the creeps out there. That true crime documentary. That voice demanding: “Down the hill.” Then those girls got kidnapped and met their end. How awful. It’s a chiller killer moment. It scares me for some reason.
I reached the top of the hill, and the moon spread its legs like a dime store hooker eating French fries with ketchup and drinking Coke in a Walgreens downtown (when Walgreens used to have a restaurant inside). The moon was big and bright and with the rings around it looked like a vibrant fried egg dangling in the night sky.
I also took a few pictures of the star blanket unfurled up there in the witch black sky. So many points of light pinpricking the charcoal firmament that separates us from Heaven.
The house was quiet when I got there. The cat appeared at the door and I let him in. He ate in the quiet. I turned on some lights and went back outside. I thought I saw someone standing there in the yard. Some sort of mystical being. I fumbled for my cell phone and switched on the flashlight. It was nothing but a trailer. I felt foolish and walked back home.
A Mach One goblin of green by the name of Edward Groovy sits in a city diner and looks out at the rain as he thinks about loneliness and all the fragments of his life. There were the days when he installed carpet, drank on the job, daydreamed of far away places that can only be reached by flying in the sky. The hot tea at his current happening smells like leaves. He sips, swallows. Someone jumps off a high balcony across the thoroughfare, and he watches the body hit the roof of a car, bounce, and land on its feet. The woman twitches for a moment or two before walking off as nothing happened. He wonders to himself. How is that possible?
A waiter who looks like Lurch comes to the table and in a very deep and monotone voice asks, “More tea? … Wait, are you the infamous Green Goblin?”
He turns to look up at him. The waiter’s head is like a stone mountain with a flat top. A mesa then. “Of course not. That’s a fictional character you speak of. I’m real.”
The waiter walks away and the man focuses his attention on the rainy street once more. Traffic and people. Umbrellas, wet shoes, raincoats, newspapers shielding hair. He wonders why he’s alive like everyone else. But then someone gets hit by a bus. Close to the curb. There’s a body on the ground, twitching. The red, red kroovy begins to flow. A police siren emits intermittent wails. An ambulance arrives. The engine patiently chugs and the lights twirl as they load the body in the back.
“For some odd reason I’d like a dinner roll with two chilled pads of butter on the side,” Edward Groovy tells the waiter who looks like Lurch who has just returned to the table to look out the window at the accident scene. “And more tea.”
The waiter bows. “Right away, sir,” he says in his dragged-out doom voice that reminds him of a gray, gloomy day … Just like it really is.
Why am I suddenly so cold and fizzy? What is happening to my body? Am I dissolving? Am I evolving? There’s a reflection of blue light in his reading glasses. Popping like cops. Why are my bones so nervous and my guts rolling like a tsunami? Someone gave me a Bible once and I ended up being so pissed off that I threw it across the room and it broke.I cracked the spine, disemboweled some Gospels, and tore the fine paper made of angel wings.
Now Edward Groovy is in a dimly lit bar looking out the same window at the same rainy day. Besides the bartender and a man in a cape sitting at a table in the corner, he is the only one there. “Give me a good pour,” he says to the bartender. “I’ve got two 50s and two 20s burning a hole in my pocket. Let’s go. I’m deep and dark. Or I’m about to be. Can I smoke in here?”
Hours pass. The overhead lights swing on their cords like pendulums. His vision is blurry. There are two moons outside. Edward Groovy is in a stupor and thinks about his daily struggles that keep him caged and poor and without much hope for a brighter future. I’ll always be a green goblin with no real defined goals, and I will work and work and work until I’m dead and I’ll still be in debt, he thinks. Oh, the mistakes I have made. All the mistakes. I should have done this. I should have done that. Now here I am, fucked. Because of me, me, me, and my poor choices and decisions. There they all are out there traveling and doing things … Living, living, living! And here I sit, a barfly on Bourbon Street. And I’m just buzzing to live like something. I’m going to need to live forever if I am ever going to have a chance. But even so … Will I forever, be enough?
He goes into his bedroom, crawls into the bed, and takes a nap.
There is a dream of a rigid street, a neon and black hotel bar with a large window gazing out onto the world, the lighted stage, all the unreal.
He’s the only one there for now.
The pumped-in music is instrumental and weepy.
His head is bowed as he prays to the bourbon.
How much more of this life can I take, he thinks.
Rabid Bible men skewing the focus of what life really should be.
Preaching patriotic hate and rage.
Guzzles the last of the liquid.
He taps at his glass with a clean and trimmed fingernail.
“Another,” he says to the bartender. “This makes me feel good.”
Bartender looks at him, pours. “You’re famous aren’t you,” he says.
“Famous for what?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You have a famous-looking face.”
“It’s just a face… And if I’m so famous, why am I all alone here tonight?”
The bartender grins. “Maybe you’re just anti-social.”
“You got that right. I’m tired of all these dipshits making noise. Tired of all this talking and nobody says anything remotely interesting.” He nods toward the window. “I guess I’m here because I don’t want to be out there. Out there where all the terrible things happen.”
“You sure are full of the blues,” the bartender says to the man. “It’s not all bad. Just think of all that tight ass out there.”
The man chuckles. “I once new a guy who used to stroll around the mall… You do know what a mall is, right?”
“Yeah. I know the concept of one. Ancient history, man.”
“Anyways, this guy would stroll around the mall, following women around, and he’d try rubbing against them or touching them, you know, like on accident, but it was no accident.”
“Sounds like he was a troubled pervert.”
“He sure was. His name was Cliff. Go figure. And he’d tell me this stuff at work while we were in the breakroom and all I wanted to do was eat my sandwich in peace and this guy is yapping about his ass escapades. I don’t know what happened to him, but I bet he’s in jail…”
“Or maybe he jumped off a cliff.” The bartender laughs.
The man laughs along with him. “You got to wonder how many Cliffs have jumped off a cliff.”
The air grows silent around them and the man taps his glass once more to get another drink. The bartender pours and then walks away to attend to a couple who have come into the bar. They take a seat at a round table in a corner, and the man studies them as they talk. He wonders what they are talking about and then suddenly doesn’t care. He just watches their mouths move incessantly. It makes him uncomfortable. Talking is painful to him. It takes too much effort, and the thoughts never form correctly in his own head. Finding someone to be comfortable with is the ultimate dream.
I’d rather write stories and make the characters talk, he thinks. I can make them say whatever I want and I don’t have to actually talk. People bring me discomfort. People rattle my nerves. It’s hard to swallow. It’s hard to see. My throat dries up and I spit out word salad. My psychiatrist thinks I may be schizophrenic. No. That can’t be right. Schizoid, maybe.
He catches the woman at the table in the corner glance over at him and then whisper to the man she’s with.
It’s hard for me to function in society, he thinks to himself. But then again there is nothing real about society. No one is true blue; they’re all dead red. Red Dead Redemption. He’ll go home to his high rise and play video games by himself. It’s an escape. He needs an escape.
He finishes the last drop of his bourbon and gets up and leaves. Once outside he hails a taxi. He lives in Las Vegas. Nevada, not New Mexico. He wonders how many people even know there is a Las Vegas, New Mexico. Not many, he concludes. People are stupid.
He enters his empty apartment and turns on a light. A cat comes out to greet him. He goes to a window and looks out at all the lights. He’s surrounded by life. He’s surrounded by cliff divers.
Flittering filth and glass lenses. The dais waits under fuzzy white light. The podium is propped. The whole of the stage is green. The audience whispers of ghost sightings and Christmas cookies on a white plate with a red and green design. A glass of milk gently shakes; a ripple forms across the top of the liquid. A black morning raid has come to ruin the day.
The city of Epsilon lies in ruins. The man at the podium in the small theater clears his throat and speaks: “Is everyone okay?… I’m afraid there has been a terrible tragedy. We’ve been bombed.”
Whispers flutter among the crowd.
A man stands and exclaims, “Well, isn’t that the thing to do these days!” And he walks out of the theater and into the smoke and debris. People are running and crying, some are screaming. It’s all mad hysteria, man. The man makes it to the local record store and ducks inside. The clerkies are pressed to the window, looking out at the new war in wild wonder. The man’s name is Ethan Duck and he goes to the section of Rush albums and starts flipping through them. He pulls out A Farewell to Kings and studies the cover. The scene looks just like it does outside in the real world.
“They never stop, do they!?” he spits out in anger and frustration.
One of the clerkies turns away from the window. “Sir? Did you need help with something?”
“Yes! I need you to drive me to another planet so I can get away from all these idiots who do nothing but murder and destroy!”
The clerkie whispers to the other, “Should I call the police? He seems absolutely mad.”
The other clerkie scoffs. “He’s not mad, he’s just telling it like it is.” He raises his head and calls out, “I agree with you, sir. Bunch a bloody lunatics.”
Ethan Duck smiles at the fact he has a supporter. He files the Rush album back into its place. He pumps his fists in the air and exclaims, “I am right and ruthless.” He dances around a bit and then walks out the door
The setting sun is mingling with the afterglow of the bombing—a blood red orange color with streaks of black in it. Ethan Duck can see his apartment building in the distance and is glad it still stands. He can see his particular windows and the veranda with the green plants growing tall. Ash floats down from the sky. The dead burn his eyes.
Once inside his apartment, he presses a button on his flashing answering machine. It’s a message from his boss, Glennentine Ross. “Why didn’t you come to work today? Call me back with an explanation. Bye.”
“Fuck him,” Ethan says aloud. “Does he not see the world is in crisis because of dipshit morons? What am I to do? Carry on with life as if nothing is terribly wrong like all these other idiots do?”
The eyes on a painted portrait hanging on a wall come to life. The mouth opens and speaks. “How else are people supposed to act?”
“Get off their timid butts and protest. Stand up for something!” Ethan answers. “Fight these war mongering assholes.”
The woman in the painting sighs. “I’m afraid there is no victory in a world such as this. It’s all fighting. I really believe we were all set aside here on this very planet because we are so ill behaved toward each other. The things these humans do to each other. Heinous.”
Ethan Duck sighs. “It’s exhausting just trying to live.”
“Would you like to come into my world?”
“You could do that?”
“Yes… Close your eyes and focus on somewhere else, somewhere better and brighter.”
Ethan’s soul steps out of his body and into the painting. He is suddenly beside the woman in the portrait, and they are surrounded by nature—rolling green hills, beautiful trees, a pale blue sky with a peaceful sun hanging from it. Ethan breathes it all in. “Where are we?” he asks her.
“The Italian countryside, on another astral plane. Care to smoke some weed?”
And there she is, with a joint (marijuana cigarette) held between her lips. “Here,” she says, and she removes it from her mouth and hands it to him. “It’s good stuff.”
Ethan takes it and smokes. “Damn, I’m already high… And this place is amazing. And you’re quite pretty for a painting.”
“Let’s take a walk,” the painted lady says.
Along a wonderous lane of green brick, they walk. The trees all have faces. Some smile; some frown.
“Where are we going?” Ethan asks. “Is this all real? It seems I can’t differentiate fact from fiction… Or am I just so high that I’m in another world of another world?”
“Don’t try to figure it out. Just go with it, man,” the painted lady says. “Relax. Everything is okay… Look there, a pink waterfall.”
“It must be made out of bubble gum, man.”
“Let’s top off our high tank,” she enthuses.
And then they smoke more. This time from a psychedelic caterpillar-shaped bong she plucks from a tree.
Ethan Duck wakes up in his bed. He sits up and shakes his head.
“Man, that was one hell of a dream,” he says aloud.
He goes to a window and looks out. Everything is as it usually is. There was no bombing, after all. The world is the same. Stained and mundane. The sky is blue and the sun is shining but people are still struggling. He sees it in the aching faces walking along the walkways. Ethan Duck sighs and goes out to look at the painting of the woman in the Italian countryside. He studies the painting closely. The eyes and mouth do not move. Nothing swirls. The backdrop is idyllically serene. It’s just a painting. He pulls it off the wall and studies the backside. Nothing. No doorway. No portal. No escape hatch from this world to another. He hangs the painting back up and is disappointed. He was hoping he could go back to that place someday. But it doesn’t seem so.
“It was all so vivid,” he murmurs.
The next morning, he churns in his bed when the alarm goes off. He must go to work. Why? “Why do I have to sell my life away for so little?” he complains to the mirror as he shaves. “And we all do it. Wasting our entire lives doing something we hate. Oh, there are the lucky few who get to do what they love. Because they have money. But the rest of us, we’re paid just enough to barely get by, just enough to keep us buried in debt, just enough to keep us coming back for more bullshit. I get my paycheck, and then a medical bill takes half of it, so now I’m behind on everything else.” He splashes water on his face to wash away the remaining shaving cream. “What a scam living is… And we’re not even living. We’re being worn down by the system that laughs in the face of human comfort and joy. Everything is a fucking battle. Everything is a fight. And then you just die. Like you never even mattered. You come into this world kicking and screaming and ready to experience it all… And then you go out, battered down, beaten and bent over, used up. What’s the point of all this lifelong struggle.”
Then a figure appears in the mirror behind him. “Hi, hi, hi there,” the painted lady says.
Ethan whips around. “You’ve come back.”
“Yes. I have. You seem so messed up.”
“No. Just trapped.”
“Care to take another walk on the green brick road? … A forever walk?”
“You mean, I’ll never be able to come back?”
“I’ve been listening to you. Why would you want to? You hate your life.”
“You’re right. I do hate my life. I think it every day.”
“Then come with me and leave it behind.”
The green brick road wound up and down, in and out, through and around, all the way to the horizon and beyond to where it ended at the spot of a bright glow.
“That’s the City of Mystic Rhythms,” she said. “That’s where you’ll find work and a place to live.”
Ethan was confused “But… Wait. That’s not what I want.”
She looked at him and smiled. “But that’s all there really is.”
If only I could grab myself and hold the wounds together. The wolves watch with piercing eyes. I smell blood and pine trees. Crimson stains the snow. Where am I? What am I doing here? Cold coffee in my cup. I build a shelter and make fire. The computer keyboard keys click and tick. The smell of wood smoke surrounds me. The internet is fast in this place. It’s going to be a long, cold night. I wonder if I’ll sleep. There is silence save for the crackling of campfire wood. The city and the people are beyond that mountain. My cell phone has no service here. But what if Bigfoot comes out of the trees? I wonder if he would rip my head off or sit down by my fire and talk. I’d ask him what planet he was from. The light is fading quickly. I look up at the night sky. I pull out my digital telescope and study the splatter of space. How can I be lonely in a universe of trillions and trillions? How can I be on the planet of hell? I long for a starship and safe passage to another system. One without hate and greed and war and all the hurt humans suffer. Humans hurting other humans. How can you take pride in that? The government is attacking the weakest and most vulnerable. That’s great! I shake my head and chew on twine. Endor calls for a refreshing bath.
cereal after sex 