5.22.2010

Stuck On You

It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.

Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.

She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.

She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.

And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.

Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.

As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.

He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.

The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.

Hey Pretty

It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.

The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.

He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.

Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.

Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.

The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.

After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.

Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.

And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.

3.19.2010

Kyle & Jasmine

Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.

There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.

The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.

The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.

The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.

Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.

The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.

Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.

The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.

As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.

The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.

3.06.2010

Woodbridge's

It should have been a typical evening… after running a few errands, I expected to come home, heat up some leftover pizza and watch television until bed time. Nothing special, nothing exciting. Just a dull, flavorless evening. Destiny, though, can have different plans, and I suppose I found myself on the butt end of fate that night. From the moment I walked into that store, I should have known something was awry. It’s not often that one gets to wonder just how markedly different their life would have been if they hadn’t desperately needed to pick up detergent on their way home from work one Wednesday.

Our local department store chain is called Woodbridge’s. It’s small and its selection is paltry, but it’s directly between my job and my apartment. The Target is almost ten minutes out of my way, and the Wal-Mart is awfully run down these days. So unless I need something fairly obscure, I always stop at Woodbridge’s. I’m quite familiar with it, which is probably why I could tell something was off from the moment I walked in. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what the issue was, but it was definitely different. Maybe it was the lighting, or the smell of the place. I’m not sure. But it was off. I didn’t realize how far off until later.

The store was nearly abandoned that night. Now, this isn’t uncommon, especially on a weeknight (how, exactly, Woodbridge’s stays in business has always slightly confounded me), but it seemed exceptionally empty. Usually there’s a few stray shoppers, younger men, mostly, plodding over the dingy linoleum and looking pale under the buzzing fluorescent lights. But that night, I can’t remember seeing another soul between the front doors and the cleaning supplies. Every now and then, maybe, as I passed an aisle, a shadowy flash might skitter past, but I assumed it was just the tail end of a fellow shopper briskly moving in the opposite direction. I will admit that I didn’t really notice anything substantially odd at all until I picked my bottle of Gain off the shelf. There certainly had never been a stream running through the house wares department before.

I was dumbfounded, really. It was so nonsensical. But it was real. Only a few feet away from the fabric softeners and dryer sheets was a shallow brook dug into the white and blue Woodbridge’s tiles. The water was clear and running at a pretty fast clip, and there were little frogs and salamanders dotting the course of it. It looked freakishly natural, as if the store had just assembled itself around a creek... that is to say, there was no indication that the stream had been built into the store. Now, having stood in that exact spot countless times prior, I knew that that was not the case. The stream was obviously an addition. But the effort that had gone into making the storebound stream seem like a natural occurrence was staggering. It bothered me in a vague sort of way… I couldn’t fathom the purpose behind so much seemingly pointless work.

I set my detergent back on the shelf, bent down and cupped my hand into the water. It was cold. A tiny swarm of tadpoles darted away from my fingers as I broke the babbling surface. There was silt and a smattering of pebbles on the bed of the creek. I moved them around, kicking up a small storm of dirty plumes into the water. It felt so real. It was real, I suppose, but it didn’t seem any different than any brook you’d stumble across out in the woods. I stood up, flicked the excess water off my hand and dried it against my pants legs. Then I looked up and saw someone standing across the stream, just staring at me. He startled me so much that I nearly fell over.

There was a man across the stream. He was tall and lanky, dressed all in faded blue denim. I always hate how it looks when someone wears the same color pants and shirt. I’m not sure why, and given the fact that the man was tapping the blunt edge of a large butcher’s knife into his palm, I probably should have been thinking about something else. But I wasn’t. I was thinking about how stupid his faded blue shirt looked with his faded blue jeans. It didn’t take long, though, before I noticed the lunatic smile on the man’s narrow, craggy face. He had longish yellow-gray hair, the color of curdled cigarette smoke, and his lips were obnoxiously red. His teeth were certainly nicer than the teeth you’d expect a knife wielding lunatic to have, but his skin was almost stony in texture. All in all, he looked quite crazy and I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him. Helpfully, however, he had a nametag on his shirt. Unfortunately, his name was “T. Devil.”

We stood there, parted by the stream, and staring at each other for some time. Eventually, unsure of what to do, I sputtered, “What does the ‘T’ stand…”

He cut me off and said, “’The.’ It stands for ‘The.’”

“’The Devil,’” I replied. “I see.”

“It’s not my given name,” he clarified.

“Ah,” I said, wondering if should just run the hell away as fast as I could. But I didn’t. I stood where I was, conversing with a crazy man named The Devil while an inexplicable river ran between us. It was a bad decision, I will admit it, but it was the decision I made. I can’t adequately say why. I just stood there, almost transfixed by the man, or by the situation. After a brief silence, I decided to speak again. “Stream’s new,” I said.

“Nah,” The Devil said, never losing that horrifying smile. “It’s always been there.”

It hadn’t. I know it hadn’t. But I decided not to press the issue. “Oh,” I said.

“You just couldn’t see it before,” The Devil explained. “But it’s always been there.”

A brief silence passed again with The Devil and me just blinking at each other. Then, suddenly and chillingly, I realized that The Devil wanted to kill me. It just made sense given his demeanor and bladed accessory, but the reality of it sunk in at that very moment. My throat went dry with fear and I began to perspire from pretty much every pore. It struck me, then, that I should get a confirmation from the predator, and so I asked, “You’re here to murder me, aren’t you?”

The Devil nodded an affirmation.

The fear that overtook me was not the fear that I expected. It was not panic. It was anxiety, like the anxiety that comes along with being ill-prepared for a test, or the anxiety that accompanies a first date. I was nervous. I was nervous I would fail somehow and this crazed man would succeed in his endeavor to murder me. But despite the anxiety, I had no doubt I could keep him at bay if I just managed to focus. By no means was my situation hopeless. Something, already, was keeping him confined to his side of the creek. I began to formulate hypotheses. Perhaps it was the creek itself that was keeping The Devil from reaching me. I decided to ask him if that was the case. He had been unfailingly helpful so far, after all.

He nodded again and I breathed a sigh of relief. I would be fine. He was trapped in sporting goods and I was free to just leave the store with my life intact. A close call, certainly, but no harm done. I backed up, slowly distancing myself from The Devil and my protective creek. I kept my eyes on the lunatic the whole time, worried that, somehow, the status quo might up and change on me. He kept smiling. “I’m going to leave, now,” I told him. “I hope that’s ok?” I didn’t think I really needed his permission, but it seemed like the polite thing to do.

This time, The Devil shook his head. I didn’t like that. Not even a little. I decided to increase my back-up speed, hoping to make my way to the store's foyer a bit quicker. Instead, I tripped over myself and fell onto my rear end, landing with an echoing thump on the pockmarked tiling. All the while, The Devil continued staring at me, still grinning maniacally and still tapping his knife into his palm.

I was a bit shaken by my fall and growing more and more unnerved as moments passed that did not lead to my exit of the store. Sitting on the ground, amidst the surprising amount of dirt and detritus that had probably accumulated over the course of a single shopping day, I felt my limbs and my body become very heavy. Each finger felt like tiny weights had been tied to them. My bones felt leaden and dense. A soreness rippled across the muscles in my back and I felt ridiculously exhausted. I stifled a yawn, trying to keep a direct focus on my would-be killer, before noticeably wincing from my heaviness. I struggled to stand, but I overcame gravity and lifted myself from the ground. As I did, my armor creek shifted, changing course by making an L-like bend into the main aisle, veering sharply right through home goods and resuming course by cutting back through the row of plastic garbage cans and Rubbermaid totes. The creek was now running behind me. Without changing my position at all I was suddenly standing on the same side of the brook as The Devil. And, of course, that brook was the only thing keeping him from killing me.

My heart began to race. My nervousness escalated into a full blown panic. I no longer had any delusion that things were going to be just fine. Because a murderer was moving toward me. He was slow and deliberate, but he was moving toward me and he was going to plunge his butcher's knife directly into my heart. I knew it. I could feel it. I tried to back away, but now I felt trapped by the very same running water that had protected me mere moments before. I couldn't move. I was held fast by some sort of force, a compulsion I couldn't explain. I shut my eyes tightly and envisioned a place where I wasn't about to become the victim of a gory assault. But even with my eyes closed, all I could imagine was The Devil a few footsteps away readying a sharp object to pierce my skin over and over and over again. I wanted to scream out something, a demand for The Devil to stop, to leave me alone, to drop the knife, walk away and never return. But I couldn't make a sound. Nothing came from my throat but a sickly little gurgle. I was about to die and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Time seemed to freeze, and the agony of anticipation just hovered over me, heavy and thick like dripping molasses slowed by the cold. I was dying a hundred times between each heartbeat. I was ready, but I wasn't ready at all.

And then my brain created its own reality. Still in my mind's eye, still with my real eyes clamped tightly shut, I pictured the ground moving. I pictured space coming between The Devil and me, as if the store was growing from its middle, pushing us outwards and away from each other. New ground just rose up out of nothingness and took its place, seamless, in the new gap that separated us. I moved one direction without taking a step, and he was carried the opposite way. The world just filled in between us and I was safe and he was far away. It was a wonderful little fantasy, a glimmer of stupid hope to break up the tedium of my panic.

But when I opened my eyes, it had happened. Suddenly, I was standing at the edge of a huge gulf of new space. The world had moved us. I had moved us... with my mind. I don't know how, exactly, but my vision was absolutely accurate. The Devil had been pushed so far away that he was no longer visible. Instead, there was a wide expanse of empty store, just floor and walls and ceiling with exposed rafters and buzzing fluorescent lights high overhead. The aisle, the one where the creek had once flowed, the aisle that had separated The Devil and me had become miles wide. I couldn't see the other end of it. The horizon faded with emptiness. For all I knew, that space went on forever. Had it not just saved my life, I imagine I would have found the event wholly disconcerting. As it was, I found it to be an almost mystical experience.

Having successfully dispatched The Devil, I decided to return to my initial task of buying detergent. It seemed rather hollow, though, considering everything I had just experienced. Somehow, getting my whites their whitest paled in comparison to the power I had exerted with my mind. I wondered if my abilities extended beyond self-preservation. I decided to try a new trick.

I stood very still, shut my eyes tightly again, and envisioned grass growing beneath my feet. I imagined trees in time-lapse growth springing up from the ground, gaining heft and dominating the landscape. I imagined my creek changing directions again to flow through my new little patch of nature. Woodbridge's store would still contain it, but the new growth would be a tiny refuge of natural beauty in a sea of poorly lit artifice. I imagined dandelions growing between blades of grass, and mosses bedding down on the roots of the gnarled maples and oaks that stood in rapt attention on the banks of the babbling stream. I imagined birds nesting in the branches and singing out beautiful, spring-time hymns through green and red leaves that fluttered in an air conditioned, industrial fan generated breeze. I imagined grasshoppers leaping through the new lawn, munching on all this novel greenery, while worms and ants dug tunnels below the surface. Surrounded by aisles of cribs and baby clothes and displays of bargain priced DVD's, I tried to create life.

And I did. I opened my eyes and my park was there, just as I envisioned it. Just as I had done with The Devil, I had transmuted space, changed reality to my own accord. It was lovely. It was amazing. My attention to detail was incredible. I had made something beautiful spring from the recesses of my mind, and now it existed. I ran my hand over the soft grasses that had risen up from the shattered blue and white tile and I was amazed by how legitimate it felt brushing against my skin. The bark of the trees split and splintered in convincing jags and patterns. The leaves were variegated correctly. I caught a grasshopper and marveled at each little exoskeleton plate. It was all as real as anything made by God, but it was there because of my will. You can see how this could inflate an ego.

I worried very much for my sanity and doubted my ability to use these new powers in only a constructive manner. I worried that any stray thought, now, would suddenly be made real. As if on cue, horrible things started entering my mind without any provocation from my consciousness. I was hit with the notion of my family perishing. I fretted, now, that it had happened. It struck across my thoughts like lightning... my childhood home, up on an abandoned hill in the wilderness, still populated with my parents and siblings and pets, lit up with squares of yellow light as twilight spilled out around the countryside. It was so peaceful for one moment. But my brain conjured up a terrible event. An airplane overhead, a giant jet aircraft, stalling like an old car on a winter morning. The engines just sputter out dead and the tons of steel and plastic and glass fall like a stone from the sky. And the plummeting craft, of course, is headed directly for my house, for my family. I can't stop the train of images. My family is inside of their house. They hear the cacophony above, but they don't know what it is. It's getting louder. They don't have a clue. Before they can even guess that the thundering rumble is dangerous, the jet crushes their house in a fury of gravity and fire and apocalyptic destruction. And because this has come into my brain, I am terrified that it has happened.

More stray thoughts come and go. They vary in complexity and in malevolence. Some are almost benign, others are horrific. The United States capital building is now made of croutons. Every home in a nearby neighborhood is ransacked by ghostly marauders riding ebony, skeletal horses. Knives grow in the bellies of my former classmates, slicing them open from the inside out. Thriving metropolises are reduced to flaming planks and cinders. Trees morph into giant men who spend their time meditating by the shores of the oceans. Frogs rise up from the swamp on two legs and begin a conquest of all mammalian life. I am wreaking havoc with my mind. I can feel it. Every stupid thought breed something terrible, something nonsensical, something deadly. How many people are suffering for my ability? How many people are dying because of some new trick that I've discovered.

The exhilaration of what I can do has drained from me. It's too much to control.

I decide, perhaps, that I should bring The Devil back.

2.04.2010

Dreaming Athena

Athena blinks, half awake, and blurring dim, streaming moonlight with teary eyes. There is a dream, gauzy and wandering, left in the remnants of her memory. It spills around her like a shattered flute of wine, blood red and jagged with twinkling bits of glass. She breathes deep and her back arches. Blankets fall from her, unspooling from her body onto the floor. There is sweat on her forehead, dark blond hair matted to her face. She still hears the whispered words, ghostly and unwanted: "I love you, I love you, I love you." There is an illusory cooling kiss, fresh on her cheek, and she unconsciously bats at it, trying to shoo it away like it were a fly or a gnat. The world is swirling, lush and unwieldy above her. She struggles for her bearings, digs long fingers into the sheets and mattress and fights against another wave of slumber. She tries to open her eyes wider, to breathe and come to, but the force of her exhaustion is too much to overcome. The weight of it pulls down her eyelids, drags her back into the folds of her bed. She pushes back.

She fails.

The darkness drapes over her as mind slips the boundaries of rationality. The voice returns, calling out its affection as she spirals into another fit of sleep. Still slightly aware, she sings back at it, louder than it, hoping to drown it out. But it meets her, note for note, decibel for decibel, drilling inside her dreaming skull and filling it with a cacophony of affection. Even here, even in the wilds of her subconscious, she won't accept it. She can't accept it. There's a guilt that shrouds her, a painful unwillingness to allow any measure of abandon. Her will is stronger than her want, and so she pushes and pushes and pushes the voice aside. But she feels so strangled by it. She feels so unearthly and sad. Sleep finally settles back in, and she wades with trepidation into greater depths, afraid that she will be unable to maintain her defense. As sleep takes hold she takes form and a new pair of eyes takes over. She is seeing things that aren't really there.

She recognizes the room, but she can't say from where. It is an amalgam, a conglomerate of places... a window from an old apartment, her childhood bed, posters from her dormitory, a sleeping cat that's been dead for years. The walls shift in color and size. It's disorienting and a little scary. So she sits, and she floats... the floor is electric blue liquid. She is aloft, hovering above it, cross-legged and dressed in a gossamer nightgown. She knows she is dreaming. It's all too unreal, too fluid to exist anywhere else. She takes in a deep breath and it smells like wasp and butter. She holds the air in her lungs, closes her dream-eyes, and lets the world go black. But it never does. On the backs of her false eyelids are cinema screens, and film rolls through some projector in the back of her brain. Light flickers inside of her, and a scratchy soundtrack hiccups and spurts. Floating in this unreal room, her unreal eyes shut tight, she sees herself in luscious black and white, beautiful and calm and pale, standing in a field of colossal honeysuckle. The dreaming Athena is envious of her celluloid counterpart. She has never felt as serene as she looks in that field. And behind her, on film, a shadow gathers up and extends whispering tendrils around her middle. And the tendrils congeal into arms, and the smoke fills itself in, slowly, like a time lapsed paint by number kit, and there is a boy, then, vague and simple and reaching his lips to her ear. He gently bites, and she practically melts.

In the unreal room she throws open her eyes and disrupts the movie. She is flustered. She falls from her floating position onto the electric ground below. And when she does, there is a thunder clap and the ground is hardwood and the room is static and dull. She's lost it, that brief hint of dreaming magic. As she stands up, dusts herself off, and redresses herself in something heavier, something more substantial, she tries to shake the image of the boy. The lines of her world become thicker, heavier, greasepaint black and stark. She tries to drain herself of color, of worry, of thought. But the image remains. It sticks with her, and as she tries to avert her mind from thinking on it, it just grows inside of her. She can feel the thought of him glowing somewhere deep in her heart and she growls. She hates this. She hates it more than she could describe. With every slow motion blink of her eyes, the boy appears, animated like in an old kinetoscope.

And so she slumps herself down into the heavy drawn world, somehow, now, on an abandoned sidewalk in a crumbling gray block in an anonymous city. The lamp posts are sketched in, messy, curlicued and French. The sky is crackled paint. The buildings are cut from monochrome wallpaper samples. She lays on the concrete and looks up at a flock of wind-up crows skittering by, sending flakes of the heavens down on her like lead-based rain. Pieces of it get stuck on her eyelashes. She blinks them out and tries to clear her mind. From the ground, asphalt arms wrap around her again. They are warm, suddenly flesh, and she's embraced again. She wants to not want it. She wants it to not be so comforting. She wants it to not be so inviting. But it is. She tries to hold fast, to fight it. But she doesn't want to.

The voice is there again. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

And she almost says it back, but the alarm clock wakes her right up.

1.25.2010

20 Songs I Dig Right Now

1. Cinderella - Aqualung: If you're ever looking to start an awesome mix cd, you could do worse than this song. It has an explosively beautiful opening and it maintains a pretty otherworldly feel throughout. It's got that sort of U2-esque transcendentalism feeling without Bono yelling at you.

2. Stuck On You - Failure: This is, for all intents and purposes, a generic alternative rock song from the mid-nineties. Lately, though, it's gotten under my skin. It might nostalgia or the spacemen on the album's cover. Either way, it's a great time capsule song and deserves to be dredged up. If you listen to it, you'll probably be all like, "Oh yeah... I sort of remember this one."

3. Creeper - Islands: I found this song instantly catchy... like from the first few notes on. That always impresses me. Add in lyrics about being stabbed in the heart, and you can't lose.

4. You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb - Spoon: Spoon's Britt Daniel describes their music solely as "rock and roll," and that's very fitting, especially on the songs from "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga." "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb," is my current favorite track from that record, although I've vacillated between it, "The Underdog," "Rhthm & Soul," and "Don't You Evah."

5. Once A Glimpse - Maximo Park: A nice, strong propulsive song with a singalong chorus that never lets up for a second. It's all anxiety and nervous energy.

6. The Female Of The Species - Space: More 90's alterna-rock, this one from fairly obscure band Space. This one has xylophones, though. It's kind of like Edwyn Collins' "A Girl Like You," although I can't adequately explain why. It's more fun, though. On account of the xylophones.

7. She Got Dressed - Fleet Foxes: I could pretty much put an Fleet Foxes song on here and it'd be ok. This one has struck me lately. This one reminds me of the best possible outcome of a Brian Wilson/Stereolab collaboration.

8. The Good That Won't Come Out - Rilo Kiley: This one's a little bit older, but I sort of rediscovered it recently. It's one of those indie rock songs that starts out mopey and muted and eventually explodes with rage and anxiety. And it's got one of my favorite couplets: "I do this thing where I think I'm real sick, but I won't go to the doctor to find out about it."

9. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case: Neko Case's songs barely have song structures anymore... it's a pretty big departure from her alternative country stuff with Her Boyfriends. Somewhere along the way, she just shifted into a sultry, almost unnerving film noir songstress. There's a very haunting quality to her music, now, and it sort of sticks to you even after it's done playing.

10. Disintegration - Jimmy Eat World: This song is nearly eight minutes, but it doesn't get tiresome. It's a fairly miserable affair, one of the darkest songs from a unusually optimistic band. It's hard not to picture your worst relationship with this in the background... The slow build to its big crescendo almost catches you off guard the first time 'round.

11. Crown Of Thorns - Mother Love Bone: This is epic pre-grunge... I don't know if Mother Love Bone were ever embraced by the mainstream. I never heard them on the radio, but I graduated to modern rock after Andrew Wood was already dead. I absolutely love this song, though... it's the type of music that led me away from classic rock and forced me to stop dismissing 90's bands as retreads of great 70's artists. Not that they aren't, but when they made music this cool, what's the difference?

12. Plasticities - Andrew Bird: From Bird's "Armchair Apocrypha," "Plasticities" mixes tempos and moods in a lovely, pleasantly jarring way. I have no idea what the lyrics are about, but it seems very important and very stirring. It also makes a great streetlight song... the type of music you want on while driving down a lit, empty city street at, like, 3 am.

13. At The Wake - The Format: I think this song should be in every indie film ever, because it perfectly captures the feeling of suburban isolation, loneliness, powerlessness and restlessness. I might be reading too much into it.

14. Samson - Regina Spektor: This song just breaks my heart. I don't even understand how that works.

15. Move Away & Shine - The Polyphonic Spree: from the "Thumbsucker" soundtrack, this is just a typical freakishly inspirational, hook-laden Polyphonic Spree song. I don't know how they manage to actually capture so much uplift, but it's so bizarrely powerful. It's probably the happiest thing I like.

16. The Perptual Self Or What Would Saul Alinsky Do - Sufjan Stevens: There's not much that really gets me on board with the whole... uh... God thing, but Sufjan Stevens does. His faith is infectious, not obnoxious, and it makes me really want to believe in something that I do really want to believe in even if I can't really (usually) believe in.

17. Who Is It - Bjork: I prefer the Bell Choir mix from the single to the version on Medulla, but either way it's wonderful. There's something very affecting about this song, something ineffably gut wrenching. The bell choir version is especially urgent sounding... like one of the hymns in church I actually look forward to singing.

18. Take Care Of All Of My Children - Tom Waits: Speaking of hymns, this Tom Waits' song plays out like an antique spiritual, complete with warbling trumpet and old vinyl hiss. One of my favorite things about Tom Waits is his ability to make music that sounds like it could have originated at any point in time... there's no indication of its origin. It's like an artifact, something unearthed and discovered. This song is on his "Orphans" collection.

19. Dust Of Ages - Eels: Continuing a hymn-like theme, this little tune from "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" has a church song simplicity... it reminds me of something that would have been in an early 70's Christian Claymation show... except for the vulgarity.

20. Last Flowers - Radiohead: This is from the bonus disc of "In Rainbows" material. I think it's the best song from both discs, which is a pretty big feat. This song has been floating around since "OK Computer" days, when it was called "Last Flowers Till The Hospital" (I like that version of the title better). It's very pretty, very unsettling and it should have been on the main release.

Lester & Mister James

Lester, apparently, made his entire living by buying used media in the city and selling it for a slightly higher price in more remote areas, where people had less accessibility to second hand stores. His dingy white van was full of crates of CD's, cassettes, vinyl LP's and VHS tapes. This was at the dawn of DVD technology, so those were pretty rare, but he managed to snag a few every now and then. How he could sustain an entire life on such a meager margin was beyond me, but he seemed to do all right. He had a circuit, basically, that he made around the state, which meant we would we would see him at our used CD store in roughly three week intervals. He was always a welcome sight, not just because his voracious purchases ensured a decent day of profits, but also because a visit from Lester also meant a visit from Mister James.

The exact relationship between Lester and Mister James was never quite clear. They were roughly the same age, older than fifty, probably less than sixty, and the had similar haircuts and beards. They were both graying and a little paunchy, but Lester always seemed far more put together than Mister James. Where Lester always had his longish coif neatly combed, and always seemed to be dressed in relatively neat, clean clothes, Mister James couldn't have been more unkempt. In a strange way, he looked like a wild version of Lester, like Lester had been left to fend for himself a while in the woods and came out looking like Mister James. Mister James' hair was a tangled shock and he always seemed to be wearing the same, stained pink and white striped shirt every time I saw him. He looked, actually, to be a little bit crazy... and I think he legitimately was.

The prevailing theory was that Mister James was Lester's brother, although I found it odd that Lester would refer to his brother as "Mister James." It may have been a nickname from childhood, I suppose, or a more current term of affection, but I never got the feeling that the two of them were related at all. They definitely shared a bond, and Lester was certainly protective of Mister James, but I don't know that their relationship was familial. Mister James, I think, was Lester's friend, and I think there was a time when he wasn't crazy at all.

Now, that craziness wasn't wholly apparent from a brief conversation with the man. At first blush, he may have come across as slightly eccentric. My first encounter with him consisted of him traipsing toward the front counter, happily slamming his hand near the register and saying, loudly, "Shuggie! Shuggie Otis!" I didn't know what this meant, but he seemed genial and excited, so I pressed for more information. He explained, to me, that Shuggie Otis was an unfairly obscure soul-rock touchstone, a genius on par with Jimi Hendrix that had somehow become lost to time. Mister James demanded, there and then, that I promise that at first opportunity, I buy a Shuggie Otis album and give it a good listen. He guaranteed me that I wouldn't be disappointed. This was Mister James at his most benign. Subsequent conversations included grotesquely detailed accounts of his doctoral visits, dissertations on the cruelty of nuns, theories on the creatures living in his lungs and nearly incomprehensible screeds that were surely racist in origin, but so utterly nonsensical that it was hard to be offended. What became clear in a vast majority of his monologues, however, was a very real feeling of persecution, both from sources real and imagined. I am no psychologist, but I think the man may have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

Lester was an ace at calming Mister James down. He had it down to a science. When Mister James would begin to become agitated, often signaled by an increased frequency of vulgarity, Lester would stop his browsing, and quietly sidle up to Mister James, grab the man's arm, and somehow drain the anger, fear or excitement right out of him. It was practically magic. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than exerting a presence. It almost always worked straight away. I couldn't imagine what a boon this was for Mister James... without Lester, I think his delusions and his fears would have easily overtaken him. Nearly anything could set the man off, and once he began a rant, it seemed to spawn a new angry worry with every word. Without whatever medicine Lester practiced, it didn't seem unreasonable to think of Mister James spiraling wildly out of control. Somehow, something Lester offered allowed Mister James at least a semblance of a normal life. I wondered if Mister James even recognized that.

I wondered, too, what Lester got out of the deal, and how he had come to care for his slightly mad friend. Lester probably found the company comforting. He spent most of his life on the road, after all, and he probably got quite lonely. I think the pair lived out of that van most of the time... Lester never spoke of a home, although that doesn't preclude the existence of one, I suppose. Still, I knew their Wisconsin sales circuit pretty well, and I can't imagine Lester's income afforded them too many hotel stays along their trip. Under such cramped conditions, a companion might not seem ideal, but three weeks of isolation is an awful lot. Every road trip is better with a partner.

And Mister James, when not rambling incoherently, was a pretty interesting man. He was a virtual encyclopedia of psychedelic rock. He had elaborate explanations for the meanings behind the songs of Cream, the 13th Floor Elevators, ? And The Mysterians and Pink Floyd. He knew the biographies of hundreds of musicians, and how they interconnected to one another. He could expound eloquently on music theory, and who had innovated what and when. I learned a lot from him... I don't know how much of it was true.

Lester and Mister James stopped coming around in the winter... I'm sure that the cold was not conducive to their lifestyle. I don't know what they did from November until April, and I never found out. Our store shut down in February, and I never got to see either of them again.

1.23.2010

Remedy

Minutes tick by and Benjamin sits in the dark, listening to the motion on the clock and checking his wrist, every so often, for a pulse. This fear of dying, it's irrational, he knows it, but it's all he's dreamt of, all he's imagined, now (against his will) for so long. It's gutted him. Once that realization of mortality (an honest realization, not the sideways and muted understanding that most people give it, but the very visceral and powerful fact that his life is ebbing away, tick by tick, tock by tock) set in, it wriggled its way into his consciousness, laid parasite eggs and took over. And now he's literally listening to life end. In any moment of concentration, any moment where he is not distracted by hunger or lust or something interesting on the television, he imagines scenario after scenario after scenario and he wonders how his imagination will dovetail with his actual demise. He fears his fear most of all. Second to that, he fears that he will die before he accomplishes anything. Sometimes, that fear is mutated into a palpitation-worthy worry that he will die JUST as he accomplishes something, thusly being robbed of its reward. However, at three in the morning, with work mere hours away and no sleep in sight, it is unlikely that Benjamin will need to worry about the latter case.

His life, he sometimes realizes, is a monument of incompletion. He has three quarters of a necessary ambition, and it serves him well, up to a point. Beyond that, boredom sets in. Or, rather, what Benjamin calls boredom sets in. What it is, really, is worse. There is another horrible realization, similar to the gut wrenching knowledge of his own mortality, that plagues Benjamin. Unlike many successful people, Benjamin is all too aware of his own mediocrity. And so, as a project winds down, as a genuine accomplishment nears, Benjamin takes stock of his work and he dismisses it as too banal, too mundane, too pedestrian, too dull to be meaningful. Completion, he decides, is only a waste of his precious, dwindling time. And he surrenders progress for depression, vowing not to try again. His projects, like hunger, lust and good television, are a very viable distraction from worrying about death. The abandonment of his work, then, opens the door to these long, interminable nights of irrational terror. The whole of it is compounded, then, by the lack of accomplishment, the surrender which pushed him down in the first place, and an increasing amount of crazy brought on by the resulting insomnia. He finds himself in the middle of a vortex of self-created lunacy, and he struggles to free himself of its hold. He spends waning minutes of his life (waning, in the fact that he is on a slow march to the grave... there is no valid reason to believe his ending is coming soon, although he can cite, with chilling detail, how very thin the line between life and death is, and he will expound in unpleasant volume about how no one is guaranteed an average lifespan) fretting over his seeming inability to do anything of value, and as he wastes those waning minutes, he only has reason to chastise himself more.

He is at a loss. He wonders, then, if he would be better served by lowering his expectations of life, by embracing his mediocrity and enjoying the bland pleasures that seem to sustain most people. He has a hard time swallowing it. He wants to offer up something, to create something of substance, to be known, to be admired, to be respected. He does not want to just give in to a daily grind of punching a clock and being told what to do by an army of superiors all working to keep some indifferent and colossal cash machine running, oiled with his blood and sweat. But, given his lacking skill, given his inability to rise above the middling, he wonders if he really has any choice at all. Maybe he's only making himself ill by peppering everything with expectation and a desire to elevate. Maybe he's killing himself with delusion, losing time that he could appreciate the simple things of life. Without the constant want, perhaps he could settle into a pleasant rut and develop a comfort that would mitigate his menial and unimportant place in the world. That thought is both seductive and the most absolutely depressing thing he's ever considered. And so he continues on, stuck in a stasis of his own creation, unable to live up to his own expectations. His ambition is outsized. His capability is puny in comparison. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to remedy the situation.

As time slips by and daylight creeps up, he thinks there might not be a remedy at all.