1. Give me some of that ubiquitous hatred, he calls through cupped hands as I stumble into the merge line. There’s no point of reference in the gutter, in the flophouse, in that fucking bar. We all start at zero. Blanks marching in the night—
2. Not marching, but crawling—crawling—no, rolling to and fro in the same ditch, browned by the mud and the piss and necrotic bloodlines that stretch or crawl or roll centuries back.
3. Airports reinvent fatigue. The hard, slogging routine of return. The anticipation/draining passion before exit. The space of airports is cavernous, oppressively open—we are the game and this is the hunting ground. I have my ticket. I have my bags. I’m leaving point A or arriving at point B. My guts bubble. I should’ve brought some goddamn antacid.
4. If my life were a film, no one would watch it voluntarily: a series of disappointments, much-to much reflection, the still image of that anxious Devil Daddy Death waiting for me at the end of it all, Pepto-Bismol and a shot of whiskey in hand.
5. 33,000ft above ground: the plane begins its descent. It’s a small plane, barely visible on the horizon. I lean back in my seat, feel a rising or falling—a sense of rising or falling—lunging at the periphery of my consciousness.
6. The unconscious takes hold: a John Gacy lookalike in the seat beside me sucking severed fingers. He says the plane won’t crash. It’ll just drift forever. Now that’s hell, my friend, he says, picking his teeth with human tendon. You emerge from the nightmare. Diverge into third-person.
7. Gargling saltwater, he looks in the mirror and promises himself Never again, never again am I drinking that shit. He lights a cigarette and exits the bathroom. The clerk, looking at the package of salt, asks Are you planning to pay for that?
8. There’s something to be said for airport fiction. Something to be said for the microscopic Oscar nominees chirping away on our laps. Something to be said for this suspended horseshit tedium, carrying me from the crawl. Drifting. Braindead. Celestial…
9. …maybe comical or tragic or tragicomic. You don’t give a fuck. The clerk, Pam or Christie, hands you your airport sealed Playboy and returns the change and you say I don’t give a fuck. You’re not sure what that means but it sounds promising. You have a new mantra. You board the next plane, the five words playing in a mental loop.
10. You decide to start filling in the gaps. You don’t need the skeleton. You don’t need the blueprint. You dictated the introduction. The end will find itself. Meanwhile, somewhere else, somebody is dying of a disease you can’t name or coughing pink foam while staring wide-eyed at the screwdriver protruding from his/her chest. You can’t take hold of the form. The narrative takes you wherever the fuck it wants to go…
11. So you board the plane and find your seat. The plane ascends. You open your laptop and switch into first person. I usually watch porn on planes. Low quality digital images fleshing out my fantasy, gaps in the pixels. This distracts me from the thought of imminent death by plane crash. I watch porn and tell myself the pilots aren’t suicidal and want to survive the flight as much as I do. I don’t want to die. I want to live, but I don’t know how.
-
pavorst likes this
-
thecoldestmonths posted this
