.

The man is in a large SUV

Parked at a red light

In the middle of town.

.

He sees me start to turn right

And inches up forward,

Slowly,

In his car,

Face looking at me and braced

In a coiled state of adversarial vigilance.

.

In his mid-forties and smooth-faced,

He smokes on an e-cigarette,

With non-descript plates,

Seven years too late for the

Explosion of the world.

.

He is not as much the owner of an identity

As

The victim of a condition

That must be treated.

When you get the impression that somebody behind you

Is checking you out,

It’s the gods in heaven

Telling you that somebody is checking you out.

.

It’s not radiation.

You would know.

Don’t thank them.

Live your life.

You don’t owe them a thing.

I’m here today to write about success because I know what it is. Success creeps into the mind of a sweaty, bearded man whose phone just broke. Success lights the eyes of people in Papua New Guinea when the first cool breeze of fall wafts pungently off of the ocean. Success crouches, evaporates, surprises and pounces, lighting a cat’s eyes, while the chosen one tries to remember his PIN number. And you know success, when it finds you. You know it so well that it blinds you and success is dirty and redolent of the noxiously ephemeral disposition of all life on this earth, withering away before your ham-handed, greedy optical ambition. It finds you, like the love of other people, and it lulls you into a narcotic oblivion of its definition.

You try and

That’s the truly heinous act,

.

With your wedding dress

Cut low exposing

The sides of explosive,

Decadent breasts,

.

Or coming up to me in the bar

Looking like

.

The surface of the sun,

Rapaciously inundating my senses

With the horrors of nature and

The dizzying orchard of woman’s beauty.

.

You squeeze my arm on the cook’s line,

Looking at me with slow,

Patient, steady and burning blue eyes,

.

In your Facebook picture

You’ve got your hand

Around your guy’s neck,

Your old guy and

.

I see him in my thoughts as you

Take refuge in your blinding glass case.

It’s the COVID again,

Still,

“Agstill,”

If you will,

.

I’m in Kohl’s in the market for

Literally one t shirt,

.

Find it in the

Form

Of

A Rolling Stones

.

After sifting through

Myriad

Childish shirts of
Ninja turtles and

Superman

.

Which for some

Reason were fitted to adults,

.

Finally

Find it to

Walk clear to the other side

Of the store

.

To checkout and

There

Are

.

Literally 50 people

In line and so

.

I kind of

Catatonically wait in line for five minutes

Knowing full well that I’ll

.

Have moved all of two feet during that time,

To walk the shirt

.

All the

Way back to the other side of the store,

Put it back,

All wrinkly and

.

Make my

Way to the

Exit and leave and all the while

“Kiss from a Rose” by Seal

Was playing on the PA and

For a second I’d almost forgot

That that’s what

The universe was like.

My hometown calls me back and

I have one beer at Corby’s,

Then walk up Colfax toward downtown

And see what’s going on there.

 

A 16 year old black kid is riding by me on his bike,

Calls me a cop for some unknown reason

Despite the fact that I hate cops

And have never had the desire to be one and yells

“With yo’ white ass!”

 

I yell back,

“Watch your language, man!”,

A little bit intimidated,

Calling him “man” and stuff.

 

All over town,

Everywhere is closed

Because of the COVID.

 

The upscale place has their dining room open.

 

I stand outside as a family of like 10 hispanics

Slowly files out,

One after another.

 

I’m nodding at all of them

Because my life is pretty good now.

 

I go in and ask if their

Upstairs bar is open and

It’s a black dude is a protective mask

And professional coat and pants,

 

Apologizing,

And

Giving me the

Exact date,

July 7,

That

 

Their upstairs bar and opening

And I’m thinking,

Sheesh,

 

This fu**ing town is

Still here, isn’t it,

 

And I walk out of the bar on a

Completely fruitless search for

Something to do and

 

I have everything I need as

The bright-eyed Hispanic yells

“Listos?”

And

 

My heart pumps fiery

Blood of Sangria rhythm because

When monkey see,

Monkey do.

It’s that smile —

It’s that smile that really scares me

As the eyes splay out

In abysses of unfeeling malaise

Like dark black vacuums

That plunge you depths of

Inhuman torpor.

 

It is a being

That consumes wine but does not get drunk,

Shoveling shelves of panic

On to your sun,

 

It is a being that,

Below it all,

Wishes it were you,

Wishes it could be you,

For one second,

 

Could feel and be human and

In lethal desperation,

It laughs up dust and daggers.

The well dressed man

Came along

And suggested

That

I was wasting my energy

Doing things that weren’t going to pay off in the long run,

Doing things that didn’t make sense,

He had an electronic notebook

In his imaginary pocket and

You

Might

Say

He

Had all the answers as

I traipsed by him and

Learned how to cry into a tree

On the spot

I was developmental.

That’s what they all said about me, all the time, and about all my peers. So I believed them.

So life was a drifting past the next person, hoping to avoid the next cumbersome set of eyes, full of vitriol and wishing only for my demise.

In third grade I’d started this club. Only to people in the club would I give these blue clips that said “Digibind.” I got in trouble for it.

There was no more starting a club.

I was pretty active though. I worked a job, played sports year round, had a slight weakness for Metal Gear Solid on Play Station One but played in “band” freshman and sophomore year and in “a band,” junior and senior year.

But life was a matter of seeing what I, we, could get away with. And so there was stealing an orange recycling bin and throwing it onto the school track on a Saturday night, there was lifting the Beastie Boys Anthology from Virgin Megastore in downtown Chicago, endless teepeeings of houses and stealing other schools’ t-shirts at the cross-country meets.

And at the parties it was getting wasted and pressing my face to the popular girls’ breasts, which at that age is considered a mighty achievement, and rightly so. I didn’t know how to take off bras so this one girl’s unit I just straight up tore, then starting to fondle her breasts and continue to kiss. I saw her in high school a little bit later and apologized profusely and she was totally cool — she wasn’t mad at all, smiling, and glad just to talk to me. She had a “crush” on me, as they might say, when they what they say. We’re friends, today. With the other girl I’m not.

But I was developmental.

That’s what I said. I’d not yet developed my skills. Well, with unhooking a bra I was still pretty intermediate, clearly.

Prom rolled around and I couldn’t get a date and I decided not to go. This one chick flipped out, though, so I decided I’d go. For some reason it was a big deal to this random girl whether I went to prom or not. One time I’d been trying to take a piss at a party and she’d barged into the bathroom and started feeling on me whilst my unit woth spraying yellow liquid, and then I got accused of fucking her, despite the fact that none of her disgusting clothes were off. This is something I’d eventually get used to, as a white man — everything being my fault. See, I guess I actually was developmental, after all.

So I asked this girl from this other school and she said yes.

That day, I lay around listening to Soul Coughing. I’ll admit, I was trying to get tan. And I’ll admit also that it didn’t work. I was still corny white. I always hated how my prom pictures looked.

So I showed up at the big shot photo shoot and you could have heard a pin drop. I felt like a complete alien.

And I shouldn’t have been there at all. I felt bad because I wasn’t really making conversation with my date on the way back — I barely knew her. I had this mix tape in with Blink-182, Oasis and The Ziggens on it, and a bunch of other bands I can’t remember right now… probably Soul Coughing.

She’d given me more than I gave her. And we were still cool. But one time I went back over to her place to give her her share of the pictures and she was dating somebody, this dude named Greg who went to my school and whom I knew a little bit.

She described him as a “typical, controlling, overly involved boyfriend,” or something like that. That always tickled me, that she’d said that, and I’d always remembered it. She’d liked Eminem. Actually, I’d liked Eminem too. It was just a coincidence that I hadn’t put any Eminem on that tape I’d made. The Eminem Show came out about three weeks after our prom.

At the end of high school, I was partying with people from this other high school, a Catholic one, despite me not being Catholic, and finally “Without Me” was on.

Spiritual sidenote: junior year I’d decided to start going back to church again. Three days after I went back for the first time, my cousin Courtney got killed in a car crash in New Jersey. She was about 21 or so. I never went back to church after that.

But I remember this foreign exchange student from Latvia, saying things like “I wanna rape some bitches, in the ass.” Developmental stuff, all the way, I’ll tell ya.

Just earlier today I was lying down trying to take a nap, unemployed on a Saturday that was cold and crappy, and started thinking about black holes, for some reason. As we know, they are areas deep in outer space which possess a gravitational force so heavy that not even light can escape from them. And if that Dutch discovery made last year is right (they’ve apparently disproved that it actually was a black hole that Heino Falcke of Raboud University manifested about a year ago with the EHT science coucnil), then they’re really cool looking, which I suppose doesn’t matter from a moral standpoint but in these grim times we’re living in certainly provides some levity, at least. Those glowing spheres surrounding it, which are essentially the telltale sign of its existence (since the rest of outer space is black too, obviously), encompass what’s know as the “event horizon” — the exact boundaries of the black whole, or more functionally, the last point at which any light may evade the structure’s gravitational force and ergo retain its body.

A couple years ago I think I was just goofing around in the IUSB library and researching for fun concepts like Einstein’s theory of gravitational time dilation, the “spacetime” concept and also black holes themselves, which I think might be even more important to the infrastructure of the universe than we previously thought. In fact, I have a theory that if you actually can observe a black hole in outer space, then you are indeed looking at the “end” of the universe, like Shel Silverstein’s “where the sidewalk ends” except in outer space instead of amassed urban decay. One reason I have for thinking this is that given the incredible gravitational force of black holes, it stands to reason that there’s what’s ostensibly an inconceivable amount of mass to them, or indeed rather to whatever nondescript object might have caused such astrological unrest as a truncation of light and such complete telescopic obscurity.

What is implied by the innards of black holes, by way of basic everyman’s logic and the limited facts we have at hand, is an incredible amount of MOTION. Now, what do we know about objects that carry incredible motion? They catch on fire, like meteorites. It’s a basic law of thermodynamics. It then stands to reason that what’s inside the black hole is an incredible mass of fire, which is probably measurable but whose temperature and dimensional figures certainly vastly elude our present means of assessment.

Now, one advancement in astronomical sciences has been scholars’ ability to observe a “red shift”: the behavior of planetary and solar bodies moving AWAY from each other, hence implying that the universe is expanding, rather than contracting. The opposite, of enclosure of the universe and of heavenly bodies nearing each other, hence implying an obvious eventual impact Armageddon, has yet to be observed and is as of yet a fictitious idea, though certainly a scary one. In this way, though, it reasonably follows that black holes are getting farther away from our Earthly vantage point every day, and so, theoretically, they’re ever less of our concern. It also could be that for this reason, given an increased physical distance that is pertinent to all heavenly bodies involved, that ball of fire in that black hole is getting brighter, hotter and more intense, all the time. And so as that body becomes more powerful, it likewise meanwhile becomes less and less relevant to our everyday lives, which is certainly a funny concept to internalize.