I‘m holding on the line with a mental drifter, who seems to be unorganizing my mind with delays and interjecting partial bits of knowledge into the space and air. How modest I must seem if I am receiving this deluge of delirium. I’m a patient man but soon I cut him off and theorize that my own madness may have put him to this task of blabbering. It gets quiet in the house then I hear the kid next door burning up his driveway with a noisy exhaust and hope that clangs. I look quickly at him out my window and note his pace as he exits his car, the ice is everywhere and thick so he can’t speed through time and I appreciate the effect this puts on his soul as he glides towards his girlfriend who is standing at the door. This kid is the little gnat I used to despise…with the terrible habits he once had. Bouncing basketballs at 8:00 a.m., needling my hangovers through the soft summer air. Back then he was gleeful and unrealistic. “He must be taking his lumps like the rest of us now,” I think. Now, dull and bored he still wants to speed but doesn’t know where to, or what for. He too is grounded in excessive middle poverty, where only the bad dreams and fireplace smoke floats home to comfort you. My daze won’t leave so easily, I’ve tried to pour it into one hundred glasses and it will not repent, it’s a lion or a shepherd to me, I don’t know…something that won’t allow me to live like the rest of the world around me. I’d rather be the knife than be the birthday cake or the pavement rather than the car. It seems that destruction is more useful than the path I should be taking. When I am left with burnt ears and fragmented stories I’m at my best, even if I sit down to write this when I didn’t want to and wasn’t trying to. When you’ve lost faith in not having faith, you get these ramblings which make me sure I don’t want to believe in the slightest bit that art, humanity or religion mean any thing more that a squirt of piss. I’m in a lurch, in a suspended fall and the voices still pretend to know, what’s going on, what’s making us tick, and I think, ” Who knows more than this average dolt?” I tried to mean something to someone and ended up here with my confusion splattered across useless pages. Who knows more…that’s the game we play. We must play it because we are fools who choose to ignore the inevitable void. We remedy this with partitioned off graveyards and ash scattering ceremonies. We shed tears into the void and the blankness that extends beyond our mind’s capabilities. “Sticks in the wind” they used to say of paratroopers in the big war. Now the claw of reality has pulled me in…and it’s early.

*     *     *

My god, the damn phone rings again. It’s the same guy who just called. “I forgot to tell you something” and I black out and just wish to tell him. “I’ve got mental problems and I drink too much Bourbon. Still you call my phone, presumably to make sure that I haven’t offed myself or maybe become a religious kook. You’ve never been as bad as some make you out to be, I know that much. Your trying to prove you have a heart, which is not as weak as the mind. A brain dies without a heart but lasts an instant longer. When death finally arrives, you may have been right to attempt to prove something.” I don’t say it though; I just hear more mumbling and technical jargon. We hang up again. I’m running up to the beer store and I get there quickly because our population is hiding, they stay in more. Our stores are nearly empty and the traffic is light; the liquor sales are way up. We seem to be waging a silent war on consumerism and capitalism. I’m still paying up, I need a drink! Lately I’ve seen more dogs in the street and out here in the sticks the streets are few. Angels just don’t appear to solve our problems, we really have to search them out, ah yes here is the liquor store. Fat old men hang around this store in the Michigan countryside. Playing scratch-off lottery tickets. Some sit on cases of beer blocking my path to the cooler. They too are unemployed, on disability or lazy, some are just stupid.They sit around all day looking at the clerk in her tight jeans. Staring at me through dark sunglasses wondering, “Who is this guy? Why does he buy so much beer, does he drink all that Bourbon alone?” I know they do, a friend heard them saying so. When you ask them to move, they go slowly out of your way. It takes them much longer to move that it should take the normal man. They feel entitled to this luxury of lying around like fat toads and staring at the clerk, hating me as I buy the expensive six-pack and a fifth of eight-year-old Bourbon. Hell, they cant even hold liquor, get it up or go home…this is their welfare; at least they are out. After the episode I make my way back to the truck. I do feel bad for ripping them like I did but only a little. My mind is gobbled up by facts. I hope for a reprieve that never seems to come. I’ll tell myself, “Just don’t think, don’t listen to the many voices on T.V. or radio. I miss the young mind I used to have and suffer with this new overpopulated mind I have now. I’m back home and will try to empty a fifth of booze into my soft gut. It doesn’t seem to be working and I fumble through the stacks of paper on the table. My kids get sent home from school with flyers from the Lutherans, also a flyer from some author who sells his books through the school system, at six bucks a book. The program is called “REAL HEROES READ” as if the reader doesn’t have enough to digest; we get this slogan attached to the cause. We are supposed to be happy this is being done because our kids are allegedly getting much more smart by paying for books written by this guy. Of course this is not a mandatory purchase, however it certainly is recommended. I’ve got the flyer here to prove it. Well the phone is ringing again it was a real nice afternoon to broke on.

This story was originally published on Supraterranean in April 2009.