I’ll go. Yes, I’ve admitted to myself. How the hell am I going to survive in Chicago, yet another big city with concrete?

I walk on the beach. It takes so damn long to actually focus on what’s around me. I’m too busy burrowing into my past, my friend’s heads I never see, my anger, my loneliness, my sadness, my conversations with self. I come up with some good lines:

N, I thought of you when the bus rolled past the town with all the rows and rows of boats stacked up upon the sand that churns with camarones y ceviches y pulpo y cangrejo. I wanted you here with me, sitting right next to me. I could point out to you. We could laugh and find a place to get a margarita and we would climb everything around us, because climbing is what we do together. We scale. We are the scale, really. We reach right up and thought talking cha and it works and life works and I find such a relief, and when I’m thinking about it in a panic, I calm down when I remember we can talk cha yeah with no drunken problems.

ER, will you forgive me for making you my salvatory thought when I write the novel that was saved from my innards by the shear overwhelming force of the fact that you love me?

AL, I dreamt of you last night and you were Vietnamese. When did you become Vietnamese?

A-W, I sent you dreams. Yes. Images. I walk on the beach, the sand under toes. I have been tipping the bottle again, and my feet seem so lovely and the sand has little ripples and I think of how sad you’ve been and how I loved and love watching you dance. The clearest vision: you dancing with a chair. You stand on it, your jeans rolled up to your knees, and you have this bounce. The Bounce of Confidence. And I think of how badly I want to pound anyone who put The Bounce at risk. I think of riding the buses with you, the rhododendron garden, of how much I need you. I think of the stories you tell, over again, I like hearing them over again. I remember when you were obsessed with an old friend of your family who had aerial shots of England taken in WW2 and how you wanted to take them and store them, and he had stories that you were, and are going, to make real, and how you are of my soul, and how there are those out there who are of my soul and how you are a writer, and that spirit of yours so sensitive and tuned and now injured hurt and I want to reach out and tell you that you are so wonderful with Bounce and I need you to be well. Yes, we should be well. So, I send you images, I particularly place them in your dreams and I hear me saying in the future: “Do you remember the image from you dreams of the ripples in the sand as the Ecuadorian waves washed over everything?” I hear your response of “yes,” (which pleases me), and “no,” to which I chastise you and tell you to practice remembering each and every part of all your thousands of nightly dreams, so that you remember I sent you an image.

S, I ache. I ache. I try to put the thumb down, but can’t figure out why or where? I heard your name again today and it ached me all over again.

There are too many conversations. I figure the line: “I come away from almost every interaction with you feeling like I’ve been varnished in cow dung. Anybody have sandpaper?”

Sometimes when things are broken, they need fixing. But who are the fixers of the bridges burned down? Yes. I whine to myself. Maybe the states of existence are as follows: pretense, poor pretense, filling up someone else’s hold, ache, self-pretense, out-of-body, and connection. I wonder how it is possible to move from a weekend like the one in the jungle to the week like the one I just went through, where most of my thoughts are pure misery and I have to remind myself that the week is nearly over. Life should really involve more balance. I think about the factors:

Balance. Clear Vision. Sense of Direction. No Fear…. Odd. I used to have all but the last, now I have none but the last.

Of the four, I really must start at home. Life should not be an act of teetering. I think about it, and as I do, I walk past a child’s playground. There are three teeter-totters, and I want to play. But all I can do, since I’m pacing the Manglaralto late-night, is notice how, of everything on the playground, the teeter-totter is the only thing you absolutely can’t do by yourself. Odd, that. All you can do is basically sit on the goddamn ground.

I think about the sense of direction. Should I decide today how many words I’m going to write? Make it happen? How many short stories? How many lovers I should take? People to kiss? Friends to make? All that jazz. I decide instead that my s / d is: surprise myself as much as is feasible for one lifetime.

Clear vision: this depends on how the rain murks the water. But what is as consistent as mud is the mirror. I once heard that wisdom is understanding others, but enlightenment is understanding the self. I feel wise these days. Old and wise. Practically creaking. But I’m about as enlightened as a baby ripping its way from the womb. How is this even feasible? Is it a fool who thinks they can see one way with seeing the other?

What I decide: I am walking, thinking. I write bitter bitter dialogue. I edit my bitter bitter dialogue because truth is not truth unless it brings something bigger. Otherwise it is destruction and half-story. Nothing is more destructive than half the vision, half the sight. The imagination only thinks it can fill in the rest, but it really needs to stop and think.

I decide that bitter bitter dialogue is shredding me up. Batman has it right: my fear, the fear that is left, is of my own anger. Will it tear me into pieces? When will it ever give me back my head? When will it move past itself?

All I know is: Puedo hablar. Si, yo estaba escuchando a una mujer hoy, y a veces tuve que preguntarla repetir una oracion, pero despues entendi. Y si no puedo hablar tanto, no importa, porque puedo escuchar y entender mucho mas cada dia. No me parecen ya que el espanol tiene tantas palabras que no conocen. Es la verdad que estoy una ignoramus, pero puedo appreder todo un dia. Porque no? Why not? I now have conversations with myself in Spanish… why not? I say them outloud, to myself, my mouth moving at the sheer lovemaking that thinking another language entails.

All I know is: I am walking at night in a town in the dusty dusty campo of a place I never grew up in, never expected, never asked for, and I am going back to my hostel, grabbing my camera and walking drunk all over this town at 2am taking the pictures that will make this head realize what it needs to realize.

All that is not: Rules. Fines. Laziness. BS. Inert dialogue. People fucking with each other. Lies and manipulations. Sadness. Silence.

All that is: Lines. Jumble. Limping one-eared donkeys. Dogs barking. Teenage boys sprawled on the concrete of the town square playing cards for shots. Dogs pretending I don’t see them. Plastic bottles in puddles. Concrete piles. Words. Che. Men tossing empty propane tanks with a clang into an empty lot. The Waves. Me by myself, here, sharing my head. My friends everywhere else, sharing their head. Images. Light slicing blending humping hiding the dark. Pine needle webs. Cats sitting on slats. Woven hammocks. Coconut bundles. Infinite inwards.

Posted by: bezdomnik / 5:08 PM