Like a beggar handed alms. The joke becomes less funny as you begin to tell it more frequently. A punch card for an amusement park. Get paid double for overtime. Run out of things to say. Drop your camera only to find it harboring flies. Those digitized memories ring hollow. I was so close to molting but was failed by recollections of memories. A sunnier day in a different part of town. Quit the sad-sap routine and hop aboard the float. Wave hello as you ride through a parade of imagination without a spectator to be found. Only one waits for you and the two of you walk home together. This might be the turning point, only to find out, that the more you return to the living, the greater the hurricane. I want to do you justice. I survive. I create. I've climbed steep cliffs next to pancake rocks on the beach, only to emerge faraway from anything I'd ever known.
"The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam and I mean every word of it."
A manic gnawing principle. The fending off of adversity and trouble. The best ones keep their sense of humor. A person runs into a lot of trouble when their laughter and sense of irony abandons them. Maybe I've been a bad friend. Maybe I've been evasive. Maybe I've been living a dream. There was Davy Crockett. The Lone Ranger. A Western-themed room at Disneyland. A bad trip. An ever evasive tenderness. A discussion. A lie. A renaissance. A burden. A string. A mind. A refuge.
There is a breath. There is a moment. There is a heavy mind. There is a confusion. There is a desired outcome that thrives on resistance. Check the time on the clock. Read a children's story. Staple a bunch of papers together and make a book. Kids are haunted by so many different things and are never really cured of them. How do these impressive fears of youth manifest themselves into the minds and behaviors of who we now are?
Perhaps adults are ignorant of what haunts them.
Invented neuroses to occupy the dark rooms of our minds. Freudian issues like papier mache figures stuffed into suitcases. Las Vegas Casinos, loud, bright, filthy, violating like mirrors to an unfortunate collective soul. Filing cabinets filled to the brim with wasteful representations of imaginary lives. Tables set. Dishes done. Hands raw. The only sign of living.
