Ch. 8
He was in mortal combat my dear friend Barstool was. Who had started this vicious display of animal like dominance. Who's to know honestly, but on the word of one IRON MIKE MAN BEAST it was the MOTHER FUCKING DOG. Now do not let my crass language muddle the relationship these two had one to the other. There was hate, but it was accompanied by the oddest and utmost respect. Was it the commonly shared respect between fellow combatants? Possibly. Or was it something more? Something more precious. Was it perhaps the kind of respect that one might call love. Was there a love between dog and man that could only find expression in petty squabbles. With battling stares. Territory disputes mark with arrays of dog shit and human piss. The temptations. The call to action. The dedication. One starkingly ginger bearded man. One grand husky with the Devil’s own blue eyes. Was this love for these two or was it merely the titter tatter of conflicting minds. I guess we’ll have to leave it as one of the great mysteries of our time. A secret only a dog and one bearded Barstool will ever know.
Dude are you done staring at that damn dog, I asks him. What, he responds. Come on you crazy mother fucker, stop eye fucking the dog and come back into your house. Literally, we finished our cigs like five minutes ago, I says to him. Well given that is my house, as you quite kindly stated, and that I presume it is my weed you want to go back in and smoke, I say we stay out here as long as I god damn well please, he says to me as he lights up another cig. I knew he was just being the loving asshole we all know and love so I didn’t take it personally. So I lite up another cig in part and continued to watch Barstool watch that fucking dog. This went on for 15 mins. I know that’s not too terribly long, but it’s a long fucking time to watch a ginger sex eye a fucking siberian husky. After we finally went in and smoked a bowl, the sun began to lower near the horizon to set, I thus gazed upon my cue to leave. I had somewhere to be. I said goodbye to dear Barstool. I said goodbye to me dearest Franky and Denise, who so happened to live with said Barstool. It was a bizarrely perfect pairing of minds and souls for roommates, but they made it work alright… well kinda. But anyways, I was off. Driving. Off to ponder. Off to dream of my own inequity.
The music enveloped me. Made me feel like I should have been driving through the static neighborhood I never had growing up. That neighborhood. That home that was always in motion as any Brat will tell you. That home I never had and never shall. And now, as I slowly progressed towards country highways, I wonder what a still childhood might have been like. A still house. A still existence. I had begun my nightly travels with a roll through campus before exiting the town of Oxford. Miami University, if it is anything… it is beautiful, especially at night where flickering lights cast distant shadows and the wind coos the auburn burnt leaves to rustle and fall. Like a painting of itself ever to change, yet freeze and ever, but stay the same. Surreal realities of ages gone. That was Miami. A place of estranged youth entice to forever abode in its enclosure.
From such a place I would leave from time to time. To escape. To leave. To get the hell out this little bubble I had called home for the past four years. Interestingly enough, living here was the longest I’ve lived in one place since the dawning of my seventh year. 4 years of the closest I would ever know to stagnation in location, and most likely where I shall too make my grave. 4 years lived in this hollow city, only to become the place where I would forever lay. Not exactly the still existence I might have yearned for in my prior lament, but I guess it will just have to fucking do.
Anyway I would leave and drive to the city. Cincinnati to be exact. Through the rolling hills and calmly farm lands. Through the little villages that lay sleeping to the whispers of nearby rivers I would drive. Past the cross on the side of the road bearing a man’s name I knew was not my own. Was that my fate? To become some cross or mass of stone that but bears a name yet to fade. Some cross that belongs not to the self, but to someone else’s heart now. To someone else, for it is the one home no man can ever own. Gone, but left by the cross. Gone, but… Ohhhh fuck there she is!!!
My city Cincinnati, how lovely thou truly are!!! That skyline will always be my skyline, at least as far as I’m concerned. It glimmers in the quiet riverside banks of my memories. I never really had a home growing up, like I’ve said, at least not in the traditional sense. Being a military brat had its grandeurs. The places I’ve seen. The people I met, but in this lay the tribulation. The problematic life of a brat is this: though the places may make mind’s awe wonder and the people may warm one’s heart, it is restless for the homeless. He whom is without a place of his own. Displaced. Friendless, though friends never cease to appear. Consistency ever lacking in the trail of stillborn tears. Blessed is the curse. Sweet is its bitter twinge. But then again that was all over now, at least for the rest of my family.
Home was not just where my dad was, but a possibility for my brothers now. They could move on with their lives the way they wanted and not just move to the next place Dad was stationed. I guess the static was not in God’s plan for me though. For in my dying days I would surely retain this restlessness I’ve held all my life and unto the ground I go finally to sleep. Finally in peace whether abyss or salvation be where I return to unless that is in hell I am forced continually to shake. To sleep. To dream. A son prodigal now finally home. My sunset, would it happen here? No surely this wasn’t the one. Though the skyline had its illustrious glamor, this be not the sunset of my yearnings. It was close though, I could feel it. It lay just over horizon’s edge. Was I waiting for it or was it waiting for me. Christ only knows. For fucksake I don’t at least.
As I drove back I decided to take a different route than normal home. Maybe get lost for a moment or two. I hate getting lost normally. There’s a lot of existential anxiety in that whole business, whether the existential component is noted or not. But nonetheless I was off into the lost lands, away from the dancings of city lights. As I glided over new terrains and distant stars I came upon something unexpected. Most probably have never seen this sight. Not that there was anything exceptionally perceptual about myself or anything of the sort. Shit I almost missed it as I sped by and slowed at its gaze. You could barely see it if not for the translucent glowing lamp post a couple yards down from this little country house across the street. If not for this lamp post, and the dimmed lights of a house now in slumber, this peculiarity would be lost to the tides of the night.
I saw it only for a moment. I was going too fast. I was going to fast and I couldn’t stop in time, nor did I quite know what I was looking at at first. It reminded me of the serene madness that lay in the wake of a man’s passing. For all this life’s wonders and failings, death will always be left as the mystery of terror. No matter what we tell ourselves to get through the day, life still ends and we know not where we are to go. That’s what I began to think as I slowly zoomed by this little overgrown graveyard where two headstones lay standing. Standing only per chance that they had one another to lean on. Was this done by man or nature I will never know. There’s a lot of things I guess I’ll never know. So much to read, to consume, to saturate in the human experience and so few months, such short days, to do so. I’m open about what I believe and I believe that this is not the end but, then again, we can believe whatever we may like. But know we cannot for that is man’s lot. To know not from whence he came nor have anything but a tragically precocious faith to where he might in fact go. Two graves leaning on one another. May this to be the only solidarity to be found in the grapples of death? That two graves might touch and hold one another up till they to must crumble to the ground from whence they came. May this be… May this be the only love after death?
I feel happier than normal, but then again I feel too that I am isolated… a desolate oasis amidst the churning seas of sand. I feel so because I have done so I guess. I have isolated some of the people that matter most to me. Isolated them from myself in order to allow the new person developing from within… my old self no longer be… well not entirely. I felt abandon. Like their hope for me to live was strong, but all hope they could have for me as a person were gone. Did they think of me a wasteland? A hopeless stoner drugged out to forget the pain. Or did I but think these were their thoughts because they might be my own. Perhaps. Perhaps. I wonder what they actually thought outside of my own projections. What was their love after all of this had happened? How was I to know? How was I to know they actually loved me and but not hid their scorn and their complacency for me from visible sight? Could I have the faith to believe their thoughts be kind and their hearts be of love? How does man live amongst one another where there is room for such plagues of doubt?
No amount of medicating can wash away this sort of unpurgeable pain. The existential knot tied in the noose of what is the human condition has no release in Abilify or Valium or whatever the fuck you’re taking... only an ever quickening drop and crack of the neck. But sorry. That’s a little depressing for a Tuesday I guess. I don’t know, pessimism runs about as thick as blood for me on Tuesdays like this. Darken skies on a sunny day as far as I’m fucking concerned 30% of the time. Fucking depressing right? Fuck Fucking Fuck I need to get a fucking therapist. But then again that requires me to chase something I have long feared, and even longer resisted, and that is my own resolution. The resolution I so long sought in the blending of red and purple skies, but dare not even glance at it in the eyes of my brothers and sisters. I chased after sunsets… my sunset as salvation. That as skies became crimson I might finally find my peace, but maybe it wasn’t there. Maybe somewhere else hidden right before me. Maybe… Maybe...
I was sitting in my room. I don’t especially like my room. I don’t like my bed. I spent two weeks laying in bed in here one time. That’ll sure have a way of making you hate a certain parameter of your living space. Being in here doesn’t make me feel well. Well, in general I don’t think I’m doing well. Not just because I’m in this room. Not because I’m laying here in this bed under sheets now crumpled. It’s because of her. It’s because of me. I don’t think I’m doing well thinking of her… thinking of her. She haunts me. She haunts me and she doesn’t see. I see her, but… I see her and I am alone. Alone with this girl I have not yet known. What be the evils of her charm? What be the devil in her smile that has yet to entice me so? She is not real buddy, I says to myself. She’s not fucking real. She’s what keeps the real thing from surfacing you dumb ass, I now yell in recesses of thought. Stop poeticizing her in your mind you fuck!!! She fogs my vision I begin again. I see her in every alley way. But meet we never have. Stop it fucker, are you listening to yourself. I gasp for air. You’re just fucking doing it again. You’re just fucking doing this to yourself I sob. She was a mystery and to my dismay a fatal curse. She was the cancer I feared most, but loved most dearly. No you bastard, it’s a real fucking cancer that’s killing you not some stupid ideal fantasy you’ve created in your fucking head. My tears flowed freely at this moment. For even my most dastardly of acts can seem like acts of love when perpetrated in the right fashion. Self-deprecation is one hell of a son of bitch, for what you call masochism I know only as humility. A cruel mistress dressed in fine satin when on beast she truly lie. The beast of one’s inner turmoil. A man’s self loathing, self seduced by the harlots wine. Damn my heart to hell. Burn my sorrows away. Cast my dreams into lakes of fire. And make ashes of their stay. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SAYING???