.

You

“Know you’ll be alright,”

And then

You’re back on the smack?

.

I have no idea what possessed

You to say that

.

And the football coaches who celebrate

Are the ones soon to lose and get canned and

I

.

Don’t know

What possessed you

To lose sight of the vision

But it makes for good comedy,

That’s for sure.

Around my old high school

Various girls appear,

Teenaged,

In various adornments

Such as a black sweatshirt

Or giddiness on a nice day

Walking with a boy,

Who make me drop everything,

They make me humble,

Make me want to work at Planned Parenthood,

Not caring if I get fat,

Make me want to put on a smile,

To be patient,

To talk with them,

To unload the contents of my mind

Into theirs

Like a gorgeous sort of photosynthesis and

I’m not sure how long this will last

But I feel as if in heaven

Observing a sort of blind faith in the moment

Within slender figures

Laughing at clarinets in the sun.

I was walking around the old, derelict high school which had just closed down. Here and there, people would pass me and smile. I looked, really quickly, into their eyes, and then looked away. I knew the feeling — it was like when you went on a nature walk and felt like you had to immediately become Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Inside, again, we’d cower, operating under the tenuous premise that the world was still, in any way, functioning. Long ago, I’d stopped getting the newspaper. My last newspaper exploit had involved going into the library, getting a paper and looking for the classified ads for jobs open. I couldn’t find classified ads anywhere, in the entire issue, and toward the end there was this vast, infinite section devoted to recent transactions that had happened at auctions. The whole thing, too, was written in this shorthand sort of legalese-approximating shmear, making it all but impossible to read, even for me, a person with a bachelor’s degree in English.

I watched a lot of sports. In general I felt like people wanted to kill me. I would take my makeshift, haphazard identity and maneuver it the way I could, knowing all the while I didn’t want to have kids on this planet, and somehow, usually, harness some celestial light which would make people homicidal toward me. This was also, though, what made me feel better, on an everyday basis, ironically.

In the bar where I worked, there was this dude who would take pictures of the hot bartender, when she bent over. He was in there every day and would turn his entire head and stare seamlessly, at women, all the time, if they walked up to the bar, even if they were with a husband and even in the case of a 70-year-old woman with a lot of wrinkles, at times. The girl he took a picture of, I have to admit, was so hot that I started hyperventilating, looking at her, one time, when she was bartending at Hooters. I’d actually developed a slight fantasy, one time, though short-lived and ephemeral, of eating some of her feces. When I’d heard she was signing on at the bar I got word that she was cuter than the current, petite and redhead bartender, which I hadn’t prior thought to be within the realm of possibility for anyone.

These were, generally, the hires they made in that bar, which was less than half a mile from the downtown library, where it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary to see a person whose face was so haggard that they were wholly incapable of making facial expressions. The city was now down to three public schools. I’d heard a story about, the very year after I graduated high school, a stampede taking place there and an assistant principal getting his ribs broken, the result of one of the cross-town public schools closing, before which event there had been five functional public schools in the city.

Everywhere, you saw advertisements, and messages like “I know I can / I know I can / Be what I wanna be / Be what I wanna be”. Recently, in Wal-Mart, this black girl, mortally obese, had cursed me out, and then ushered a soft missive which I made out as “Fight me.” I think I remembered her from my high school class, actually. I hadn’t remembered being anything but perfectly polite to her.

In another grocery store, one time, this black dude glared at me when the white woman he was talking to gave me a glance. I was actually just trying to get some allergy pills and get out of there.

When I talked, people tended to laugh. I wouldn’t usually tell them anything, as a general rule.

And all across town, amidst all the late-night cat calls, amidst broken glass, empty buildings with busted-out windows, amidst hostile people on drugs and fat people yoga pants, there could be gleaned the skin initiative. The psychotic eyes of a man with hairy arms lorded over the community like a desperate gossamer, longing, wishing eternally to manifest into an organism more complex than a chimpanzee. I chilled in the Jamaican bar, eventually. The DJ sucked but I didn’t care. The bartender was this nice, kinda cute girl I’d worked with at the Irish pub. The Jamaicans who hung out in there looked generally pretty happy but kind of grossed-out and disgusted, which I liked. I liked sitting by them and I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me. These black dudes would come in, seeming really horny for white chicks, but they didn’t really bother me and I’d make small talk with them about basketball and stuff. And, across the street, stood an old edifice, full of fluorescent lights, full of ghosts harking to a time when our streets and buildings filled with messages, signals, little paradigms which indicated that life as a human being were anything more than a debased exercise in primate desperation. I thought of old men telling me stories and jokes. I thought of this old man in Burger King, I’d heard going on a rant to me, telling me he hoped the people died who denied him his degree from Notre Dame from ’96. The lap dance is so much better when the stripper’s crying, so they say.

Cleopatra’s boyfriend

Walks somewhere in or out of town

In a manufacturing plant

With a clipboard

Covering the walls and machinery

With his smiles

Like slime,

Covering the silence

In victorious battle cries

As he thinks about doing the job

On the cinnamon-skinned beauty

And she will ignore,

Even disdain him,

Knowing him for an oaf

As I point out how he

Trolls me like an eighth grader

And watches the NFL and

We all know a lot of this is best ignored.

I’m not sure if it’s just because we’re getting toward the time of year of my birthday, or whatever, but I find myself in the last week or so kind of looking for the paradigm — the overall model by which to live. As we all know, in capitalism, this can be a challenge, sometimes, with the obvious inclination toward a competitive, rat-race paradigm pervasive for humanity.

I’m looking for the truth, essentially, and in order to find this, I need symbols, and I need plots of land to be designated as sacred, somewhat like is prevalent in Rastafarianism (a sect probably unfeasible in America with its widespread land owned by foreign corporations). Lately, the high school on the north side of South Bend, my hometown and current city of workplace, has closed on account of lack of funding. This was the high school closest to the University of Notre Dame, a prominent Catholic institution and college football beacon.

As a Michigan fan who studies Zen Buddhism, I find it a little more complicated going to this side of town and gleaning paradigmatic truth or morality. So I have to get kind of creative, you might say.

The infinite light fixture retail expanse rests right on the main highway that takes you from South Bend into the state of Michigan, where you might go for beach trips, marijuana dispensaries, or, circa 2005 or so, to buy any alcohol on Sundays. I think I must have beheld it once at a young age and kind of pushed it into my unconscious. It resembled Mount Trashmore, in a sense, for its sheer, vast anatomy, like an earmark of our bulbous capitalistic society overseeing levels of transaction and economy which are hard for the human mind to conceptualize. (Likewise, this level of goods production would simultaneously seem to imply the inevitability of an unwieldy level of waste, to follow, hence, of course, potentiating things like “Mount Trashmore,” and such.)

About three or four years ago, following an apartment eviction down state and ensuing bout with living with my mom back in Niles, Mich., the I.L.F.R.E. just kind of reappeared, to me. It was like I’d reached a state of mental hopelessness which gave me the ability to appreciate the establishment, which, as far as I know, encompasses only one proprietor, or company, a fact that truly boggles the mind. The lot stand at about four acres, or so, probably, of parking lot/light fixture vendor/back lot/dumpster space. It’s located very closely to the Indiana tobacco shops that sit near the state line because of Indiana’s more lenient taxes, and ensuing lower price points, of said. There’s a country bakery, a Dollar General, some houses and so open, rural space. In this way, the I.L.F.R.E. takes on a phenomenological disposition totally ironic, even foolish. It’s the type of garish capitalistic wrinkle you’d expect to find in, say, Lake Station, Ind., or Commerce City, Colo. — some very unadorned, off-the-beaten-path suburb to a big city that provides cheap land for manufacturing and proximity to a ballooned quantity of potential consumers. 

Well, the closing of Clay High School should help with the I.L.F.R.E.’s budgeting. In general, at that, the north side seems more and more like a problem child all the time — there was a shooting at Cheers Pub, recently, which in fact even rests outside of South Bend’s city limits, and lies closer to Notre Dame’s campus than any part of the city of South Bend. I’ve been in the Clay Pub, before, and heard really perverted rhetoric emanating from a 50-year-old man (that penchant for making bartenders uncomfortable seems way more common in  70s and ’80s high school grads than my Ludacris/Nelly generation, for which I’m somewhat grateful).

Finally, at some point, my reality pared down to the simple predicament of riding in the car with my mom back to her small house, where my tiny room with a bed, some Spotify on the computer and maybe some ESPN+ would await me. And I finally connected with the I.L.F.R.E. in a way I never had before. Its luminescent mainstays seemed polymorphous and beautiful, finally, in a new sort of way. The overall endeavor somehow resembled the afterlife — an infinite, blinding light, yielding a vast prairie of nothing. It provided contemplation, consistency, identity, and, almost, a kind of purity, for its guilelessly uniform objective set of selling light fixtures. And just like the night around me made no pretense for offering any light or moral clarity, the I.L.F.R.E. stood, proud, stalwart, objectionable and indefatigable, on a night that, nobody would argue, was either an odd or even numbered day of the given month, whatever it might have been.

I moved into the town

That’s like a grid

Where people look away

And take the expedited paths.

.

I moved into mice,

Cracked windows,

A broken boiler,

Broken window blinds and a

Landlord who seems generally fearful.

.

I moved into a junkie,

Totally bombed,

Standing in my driveway,

Looking to the side and

Not moving his face or eyes.

.

And I moved into you, Hardy’s.

.

I always knew you were out there.

.

You creep in like a snake’s venom

And as I’m inebriated,

Floating down the Dionysian stream,

A 50-year-old gym teacher starts talking to me for three hours,

A flaming-hot girl flirts with me

After having her ass grabbed,

A dude from Mozambique relates to me stories of Madagascar,

Upon my request,

A totally non-globalized nation,

.

A dude from Chicago

Dressed in a hideous, black long-sleeved thingie

Of some sort

Admits that Green Inferno was decent

But The Human Centipede was more intense.

.

He’s going to the horror movie festival

Next month.

.

And the pills come.

.

I wake up in my apartment,

In a daze,

Throwing jackknives at this

Fu**ed-up world and

All the while

Knowing that I’m subservient

To the menace in the night that’s

Like an underground gossamer,

Unearthed to reciprocate

Light years and light years of disease.

I am stripped of my teeth

By human attrition pervading

All of my quadrants

And I want to reach out to my bed-ridden uncle

Who articulated something really memorable

In the card he gave me for my high school graduation

But am surrounded by burned bridges

Like the aftermath of cathartic explosions

Embodying alternative rock songs,

Perhaps anti-carcinogenic

In their own rights.

.

I go to my cousin’s Facebook

And she seems distant and foreign to me

And bringing up any issue will surely precipitate

Wayward thoughts, motives, conceptions, etc.,

And it’s not like I’m weeping for my uncle

But I can’t help but apprehend

Our utter futility in this life as caretakers

And I wonder at my future,

In old age,

How many I’ll curse,

Who,

Where,

Why,

When,

How,

And how da** stale that

Da** Picasso painting will be getting.

There’s Tracyanne,

The husky cashier,

.

There’s Michelle,

The upwardly mobile,

Ambitious customer service clerk

.

And,

Among others,

There’s Grace,

The Amazon shopper

Who looks like a real, live,

Stuck-up bimbo.

.

It’s like something

Out of a movie.

.

In and out,

People file,

In rapid fire,

Not bothering each other,

In this college town in the mitten,

.

Some with kids,

.

Of good nature,

.

Calm,

.

Some with eccentric motives

Involving vermicelli noodles.

.

A semi-sociopathic front end manager comes up

And tells in a serious tone

That it’s a $10,000 fine

To leave the rail down on the ladder

While we’re on it.

.

I joke around with the kid from Detroit,

The lady from Ohio talks to me slowly,

Lets me in the back door,

Where a dude sees me checking out my reflection

In my smart phone and smiles.

.

And I sit out in the sun,

Unhinged,

Wanting to curl in on myself,

Wanting to be anywhere but here,

Anyone but me,

And

.

I learn to put one foot in front of the other

And creep closer to the end of my workday

When I can retire to my hotel room,

.

Can fantasize,

Can heal, and

.

At some point

I’m flanking the refrigerated case with the expensive cheese

Doing some odd job

And I seem to have once again connected

With the rhythm of humanity,

Glancing up and meeting a smile

From a 50-something man who looks like a professor.

.

And he seems like a genius

For his ability to be truly himself —

.

Why would genius not manifest

As appreciation for everyone,

For every moment on this planet,

In complete control and

With complete power?

Sometimes it seems

To me

All my achievements in life

Lead to overproduction of skin cells

And to itching and scratching

And

For all the purple corridors and rooms I’ve traversed

I’m always

Once again

Subservient to those little microbial organisms

On my skin

Without which I would not be me and

Which laugh as I kill,

Kill,

As a necessary sustenance for the universe

After the storm subsides.

Do I want to go camping or not? I have no idea. I have no idea whether or not I like camping. I always adamantly adored it as a youth with my dad hating it.

I was thinking about getting a tent. Unfortunately, anyway, I’ve never pitched one in my life. It seemed like diffusing a bomb.

There’s this girl I want to go with. She works at the Wings, Etc. in Rochester. She’s very friendly and shy, usually laughing at anything I say, and smiling really wide. I like that. I find that presence appealing and think it would be good for my blood pressure. I like her look as well.

I wanted to float down the Eel River, too, in Miami County, Indiana. I’m not sure why that’s important but the fact stands nonetheless.

I think of the reality of being there, at the campground, out in the middle of nowhere, with everyone being very restless. Personally, I’ve never been the restless type. For instance, at the cross country camping trip, after I’d graduated and I was there as an alumni, my coach made the remark that I “looked about the same as (I) always did,” just staring into the fire silently. I’d of course had some good times at the camping trips but can also turn to introversion, habitually. I think of glancing off into the northwest and having a girl look into my eyes. Nervousness would follow, surely. My chest would start heaving. I’m not sure what she’d be exhibiting but I’d be perceiving moral quandary, pollution, climate change and waning resources and housing, as a punishment for having kids. It was just another day as an arrogant casanova, you might say.