.

Art is the systematic manifestation

Of internally conversing, cerebrally sequenced

Mimeses which

Together

.

Act as

Replacements for the

Nurturing secretions from the

World or the mind

.

Which would harbor an environment

For transcendence or

Procreation.

There are times in life

When I’m literally loath

Before the idea of

Doing the right thing

.

And though that might seem a little extreme

And perhaps misanthropic,

It’s an inkling I have nonetheless because

.

A being which always does the right thing

Is essentially dead — it bespeaks automation

And a robotic mentality

To never explore the decadent realm

Of fu**ing up and especially,

.

What a malady it would be

If we were all immortal, if

We were wedged eternally

In this life, doing right and

Hugging the median

On the railroad tracks.

We’re inundated with so many stories of heartbreak,

Of girls doing guys wrong and

The world just being an unfair place

For reasons along these lines,

.

So it’s funny to sometimes see the

Reverse side of this phenomenon,

A guy so draped over, gawking over a

Girl, so self-centered in his commentary and so

Bland with his

.

Vulgar “love” and ardor,

That a “heartbreak” coming along

Seems like something rendered more like a

“Correction,” as it to kick him in the butt and say,

“Hey sport, you’re alone like the rest of us,

Learn how to live, and make it snappy.”

The writings on all of the buildings had even started to seem like lies. It was to the point where everybody wanted change. You always want change. You just don’t want results from it, like that feeling of euphoria in looking down and seeing that your leg has just got hacked off by a chainsaw.

The floods had dissipated, the polar vortexes receded, and we’d had a fairly pleasant if slightly uneventful summer. Men had sat in bars on the south side as basketball season traipsed through August, armed to the teeth with knowledge on who the best player from every town in Indiana was. Football season started a month later like an underdog thud, like a dog barking from down inside a well, and with glazed eyes we avoided sight of each other and went about our business.

Eventually, the yellow leaves started popping up, and my friend Chloe asked me if I wanted to go to the restaurant that was haunted — like go to the top floor and play it off like we were just getting a beer but actually go into the bathroom where they said were ghosts flying around and sh**. I said sure, kind of reluctantly. It hadn’t exactly been the most eventful year and staring at bartender’s bodies sure gets boring when they’re all wearing masks.

I met Chloe there after work, then, one Friday night, which seemed to be the instinctive night we both sought the supernatural, having grown up on Nickelodeon, which seemed to always unleash its most eccentric, Dionysian viewing material on this particular night of the week. I was in my clothes from work, a Dismemberment Plan t shirt and some chef pants, and Chloe was in this big, ugly, pink and frilly shirt, a leather jacket and a white top hat, with jeans. We certainly looked like a couple of… well… losers. We looked like two people who’d just fallen out of the sky and landed in someone’s attic, to there select all our clothing.

The bartender, male, kept asking if we wanted a food menu. We kept cheerfully declining. I had a tall Sam Adams in front of me so I wasn’t getting too antsy. Some nights I didn’t get hungry until like 1 am and Wendy’s was always still open, so I wasn’t worried about anything, I was just checking some football scores and stuff.

“When do you wanna do this?” Chloe asked.

“What?” I answered. “Get married?”

“Yeah,” she replied sarcastically. “I meant go see the ghosts, dummy.”

“How do you know I’m not already seeing ghosts everywhere?” I retorted, in fine, robust and competitive form. She punched me in the side.

“Ahh,” I said.

“Baby.”

“We should have gone to the haunted house,” I said.

“They’re too busy.”

“Yeah, Hacienda certainly doesn’t have that problem.”

The restaurant we were at was situated in this 100-year-old building, in downtown of the suburban town. It was made of brick and had this giant tower on it that somebody had apparently just built for the sake of erecting something phallic and awe-inspiring in a superficial sort of way. More and more, deluges of corporate restaurants were materializing, everywhere, offering quicker service and lower prices, and stealing any amount of business from the local places, which tended to be situated closer within town. The only identity these new places seemed to have is that everybody was really nice and well dressed and the women’s clothing seemed to be skimpier and skimpier. Men seemed more lonely than ever. More well dressed, too. None of the clothing stores were going out of business. I wiped some nondescript crust off of my seven-year-old Dismemberment Plan shirt and checked my Facebook app on my phone.

“Facebook,” barked Chloe at me. “We’re on a ghoulish vision quest in October and you’re checking your FACEBOOK.”

“You know what?” I snapped back at her. “You go check your ghosts. I’m having a fine time just sitting here being a hopelessly median 2020 male.”

She rolled her eyes at me, especially probably since she didn’t want to go in the men’s bathroom alone.

“You REALLY don’t want to come?” she pled.

“I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. I mean I know what it’ll be. It’s just spirits. You and I already have spirits, sitting here, though we might not always show it. That bartender in the slender, customary black t shirt, he’s got a spirit. Those ghosts in there have spirits but they’re trapped — they don’t have bodies with which to walk around. You and I have bodies with spirits IN them. And that’s pretty fu**ing cool. We have bodies we can move around with intelligent control but we can FEEL.”

Chloe was just sort of smirking at me so I went on. None of the other patrons could hear me.

“And it’s just like when I ask you to marry me. You’re so obsessed with your FREEDOM. You know, I bet you’ll be the type to haunt this planet long after your life is over, too, but you might find that that very ‘freedom’ you’re after is really a trap you set for yourself. I mean, think about when you get your leg chainsawed off. You know that brief feeling of euphoria you get when you’re looking down at it, blood squirting out like Mount Vesuvius?”

Chloe spit out her Long Island onto the bar and then hastily reached for a napkin to wipe it off.

“That’s what you’re missing,” I proceeded. “That’s what marrying me would be like. It would be like having your leg chainsawed off, but in a good way.”

“I believe that,” she dryly replied.

“Hear me out. All those buildings out there. All those signs that say ‘Got Love?,’ that say, ‘Forgiveness is paramount’… they’re all just lies, aren’t they? But they were conceived with the best intentions. That’s what your ‘freedom’ is like. And you’ll end up like one of those old, weird ghosts, with the pointy hat, flying around in the Hacienda bathroom and turning the lights on and off, over and over. I mean how many times can you turn the lights on and off, anyway? It’s like a stale acid trip.”

I grinned at Chloe. I kinda liked her. I could tell she was thinking. She must have been close to my zodiac sign, or something.

Upon a brand of thought

Which may have been somewhat tenacious

In certain potentiated ways,

I’ve realized that

.

The thought of failure

Is necessary for the support of happiness

Within the mind.

.

That is,

Without the conception of what defines

The shameful, the inadequate,

The disposable or the fetid,

.

It’s impossible to define one’s own

Situation, position or disposition

As successful.

.

A smile knows nil

If not the frown

It skirts and smiles at.

Deep down,

Women know when you are in pain,

Tortured, looking at them and

At an impasse,

And they like you for that —

.

They feel good in an holistic sort of way and if

They don’t acknowledge this,

Don’t appreciate you for the light you shine on them,

If they’re cloaked in ambition, rigid,

Scowling and thinking of

$1000 bed sheets and

General misuse of and disdain for any number of others,

.

From there may spawn the homicidal

Impetus but really,

Something else has already killed them anyway.

We’re sitting here today on the heels of a 36-20 Patriots win over the Raiders (it’s still weird thinking of Cam Newton as the “Patriots quarterback” since that was Tom Brady for 20 or so years and to my knowledge the Patriots have never started a black quarterback in their history). Given that Cam Newton is our subject, then, it’s hardly surprising to observe there’s a considerable multitude of headlines surrounding the proceedings.

One incident proviso of such reporting opportunities has involved the shoes that the quarterback wore to the game which, according to masslive.com, indicated that he “salutes Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther on his feet during pregame.” There was another one after the game, which of course followed reports of his exceptional performance, that was something about how Cam Newton liking the “vibe” of playing on the Patriots. But in googling words in an attempt to find it, I got something else unexpected, the Boston Globe headline that “Cam Newton is giving off really good vibes at Patriots camp” and another one relating that “Patriots wideout Julian Edelman likes Cam Newton’s vibe.”

Now, let’s just backtrack here, because sometimes I just can’t even reconcile, or process, the reports I hear about a person. We’re talking about an individual here, who may actually also be the first black quarterback to ever start for the Patriots, for whom a Google search turns up not only literally no negativity but also this bright, toothy smile that anybody with anything remotely resembling a “heart” would want to root for. Anyway, we’ve in recent months leading up to this Patriots deal had any number of “analysts” condemning his attitude, his objectives, and everything else you could think of, including one individual who I believe was Skip Bayless asserting that “Cam Newton only cares about Cam Newton.” The general consensus was that he was egotistical, arrogant, a “prima donna,” etc., but maybe it’s time we reevaluate the implications of somebody having such an alleged “excess of self-esteem,” if you will. The guy has been nothing but a positive firebrand and a force to be reckoned with on the field with the New England Patriots. Of course, nobody who saw him take that hit in the ’18 playoff game against the Saints should have doubted his toughness or competitive drive. At least, reason would certainly seem to dictate otherwise.

It’s funny to think of entities in our world coming into existence. That is, a table comes from wood, and wood comes from trees, but what do trees come from?

And if your life is composed of letting other people tell you how to dress, looking at numbers and computing them, and keeping a “company wellness” factor in mind, how do you, you know, make your life good?

It’s the same thing as making a table when there’s no wood. It’s like the trees not knowing how to grow.

I recently had a day off from work. When they asked me how it had gone, I said, “Ok, the weather was really shi**y.”

My boss replied with, “That’s no excuse.”

He continued with the following oration: “You’re always supposed to do something, go out and run around naked in the rain, whatever.”

My boss is always spouting all these sort of left-brain orations, almost as if some sort of sort of formality. Actually, much of his job involves the left brain. Actually, much of all of our jobs involve the left brain.

But then, we live the lives of robots.

The right brain involves how to LIVE and this had, basically, been my boss’ point when he’d reprimanded me for not having a good day off: it’s our own responsibility to infuse these entities into our own lives, elements of magic, elements of renewal on a psycho-spiritual level, elements that distinguish our lives from that of a faceless, median executor of outside orders.

The right brain is the ANIMAL in us. For confirmation of this, given that it’s the side of the brain which would impart freedom on a day off, you need only observe that animals have been running naked in the rain since time immemorial. But then, maybe they’re just doing this out of necessity, like a cheetah running from predators on the African prairie. Dogs always run around a lot, though, for no reason, which is part of why they pi** me off, kind of. But then, a lot of people like this exact thing about dogs, I think — they go their own way and in this way have a refreshing effect on people looking at them. When in pain, they’re almost entirely tacit, withstanding the discomfort in what none would argue is a commendable sort of way. People can learn a lot from them, in this way. And they take away our pain, too, by making us less lonely. I’ve never had a dog. I have a boss, though, which at certain times seems like a similar kind of thing.

I was lying in bed one night, wondering why they didn’t have a vaccine for AIDS. I’d just seen a story on Facebook, in September 2020, “Most Americans to be vaccinated for COVID by July,” meaning 2021. It was even a couple of months ahead of schedule.

And I didn’t get into discussion of who was going to get the first access to the vaccine. It seems across the board it’s agreed that it should go to the elderly and higher risk.

But I did get thinking about AIDS. This is a disease that’s been around for 30 years and has a 100-minus-Magic-Johnson mortality rate, more or less, to COVID’s 5%, or whatever.

I had to get tested a couple of times. I’d been raped while drunk by cops more than once. It’s a fu**ed-up world we live in. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Just looking over to my desk I found this pamphlet I’d procured my last time into AIDS Assist — “PREP,” or “Pre-Exposure Prophlaxis.” It’s a pill that you can take continually to help prevent HIV infection, as opposed, of course, to a vaccine, which is only a one-time deal and sometimes can last your whole life as an immunity-granting agent.

Now, I’m not a scientist, but I couldn’t help but lie there in my bed and wonder if the differences between the two diseases, how one can accompany a vaccine and the other not, were purely anatomical, or perhaps political, as well. And I got to thinking about evil, both cellular and corporeal. I thought of this dude I work with who survived cancer. He’s got a real good attitude — every young, attractive girl he sees in work he goes, “Hi, sweetheart!” He’s homophobic but that’s just ‘cause he’s old and he likes talking to me about baseball and sometimes music. And I really don’t think The Cars were “a bunch of queers.” But I guess that’s beside the point.

But I wondered about his bedroom cogitation, as mine. I wondered what really pictorially manifested in his mind, when he lay there envisioning the world, this chasm, this abyss, this unrelenting arbiter of the unexpected and potentially deadly. And I wondered about his demarcation of the self and the world. You’ve gotta assign one thing to one and another to the other, or so it seems. The animal strives to put food into his belly. The self strives to reach an overarching truth. The human strives to be ready for anything, hence showing his pointedly delusional ambition. The messiah strives to save. The final is ficticious, so death stares us in the face, like a flooding, black lagoon that is finally almost as inviting as it is menacing, that final messiah at the end of that long ant’s tunnel, back there, grinning and mouthing the words, “I told you so.”

She stands as something

That’s been scrubbed of animosity

In a tie-dyed sanitation mask

And we make great conversation,

She high-fives me with her left hand

(Which is maybe more casual than the right)

And her body is what I like but

.

God damn I like a lot of things on this night

Like the old lady who asks me to dance with her,

Like the dude up on stage playing original songs on guitar

With his girlfriend singing

And ok maybe that gorgeous, busty 23-year-old server over there

.

And I think about my existence

And the posing aspects of casual love making,

The cinematic emptiness and the

Din of unnecessary dirtiness,

And I lean to the side with my tall Yuengling

And feel ok anyway.