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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?