I hated the buzzing, electrical lights in the room and I hated the heat emanating from the vents, providing us with gratuitous, grotesque comfort. I wanted pain. I wanted to see the end of the road. At this point, I couldn’t envision it, so I just sat in the room, miserable, waiting for everything to burning down, waiting for the bottom to be the top and the top to be the bottom, again.
The rash of human malevolence had hit me. For this reason, I felt like nothing was working.
My grandmother sat with a vacant, half-obliging expression of disdain, watching the TV. We’d all eaten. There was nothing left to do but engorge ourselves with entertainment, indulge in the shortcomings of the lesser beings on the TV, whether or not they’d initially been conceived as that.
I knew girls didn’t have any hidden answer to everything. They grasping at straws just like us, patiently, vacantly awaiting the next ephemeral, slipshod conclusion, or nugget of entertainment, to worship temporarily.
Outside, the snow stagnated in cold, relentless frigidity. Most of it had turned to ice, making the roadways a foreboding expedition.
My grandmother lived next to a bridge that went over a set of train tracks. The tracks were home to the Am-Trak train, which ran from Chicago to Detroit, and everywhere in between, including her quaint Michigan town. On this particular night, the trains even seemed to be crying, from the dormancy of humanity, from the ready-made sterility of our everyday lives, which come prepackaged to us for our mindless consumption. Well, Christianity would teach us that we’ve lived an eternity of sin, already. At this point, it was about a 50/50 as to whether our grandmother would successfully drag us to church, the next morning. All of the masses seemed the same. A ritual was something repeated, to ensure a result, hence suggesting that said result had been, in some right, successfully achieved, as a reaction. Perhaps, though, some rituals were just a sublimation of the self, just an antidote, like a blank canvas onto which the individual can paint any paradigm, or any shifting conception of him or herself, for that matter.
In time came bloodshed. It tasted metallic, it tasted clear, we ate it with our morning breakfast and coffee, we breakdanced to it, we wore it like a parka which kept us warm on nights of numbered days on the calendar.
I grew up with a cat. It was a complete hellion when we first got it. My mom almost gave it back.
Cats are real funny — like ha-ha-funny and also strange-funny. One time I saw it looking at a blank wall, glancing back and forth, along the wall, in a potent state of zeal and suspense, as if a bunch of other stuff were occurring, on the wall. Another time, out in Colorado, I found myself lounging next to it, after a work day. It just lay their still, and even silent, not purring very loudly, almost like a slug would. I sank into the moment. There was nothing going on on the wall. Blood had been shed. Bodies lined the death camps and floorboards. We were all hurling toward death, in a miasma of finite colors and shapes, little whips, cracking, telling us who we are, sounding their vituperative song into the night, to die, and to be laughed at in another form, eventually, by a blind, inadvertent cat, seeking the mountains.