.

* Happy Halloween, everyone!

I couldn’t help it: Virginia Tech was playing Virginia again in football. I HAD to leave the house for another chunk of five hours, in the middle of the day.
Of course, when I came home at eight, I really should have noticed that my fly was open. Also, the carton of milk was left out, which Eric shot a hole in with his bee-bee gun, leaving it to drip out empty.
Felicia, of course, was over in the corner applying more black eyeshadow. Just as yesterday, my two children had been subsisting entirely on Ritz crackers and Tang. The thought of buying them food for sustenance hung over me like an irksome black shroud, but unfortunately I had sprung for like four rounds of Grey Goose and vodka for the guys down at the bar. Hey, they were real cool dudes. I had to do it.
Walking into the bathroom, I went to brush my teeth, mostly out of vanity, and noticed that my fly was down. I decided to leave it down… it might be covered with germs. Glancing, then, into the mirror, wondering whether or not Virginia Tech even won the game I’d spent the last five hours watching, right through its entirety, I let the salve of toothpaste permeate my mouth, and ruminated over the deep, meaningful look I always had in my eyes. It’s just like that time I took Felicia to soccer practice last year. Always being there for them. There’s no doubt, I was quite the Dad.
I came out of the bathroom and remembered, gosh da**it, I have twizted kidz. It was Eric who came at me first, and with my ex-wife’s butcher knife of all things. She’d died five years earlier ‘cause I’d left the car running in the garage while she was sleeping in it. God da**it if this little squirt didn’t dig this knife right into my throat, at which time I immediately lunged for my car keys to drive myself to the hospital, wondering how much this da** wound would cost to fix. Then came the bite from Felicia: right in the thigh. She really sunk those incisors in. “That’ll teach you to make me quit soccer!” she yelled. “Christ!” I thought. Soccer, who needs it. I lunged for the front door and the car outside like a sleek nighttime bat, with the fire in my eyes all over again, ready to do battle with this world and make my stamp loud and clear. But then I saw the worst part, on the TV in the garage: Virginia 33, Virgnia Tech 28. Da**it, I thought to myself, maybe I should’ve bought another round after that THIRD score.

The objects we see around us —
The streetsigns, the buildings and the lightposts —
They SUGGEST events, they suggest feelings,
Destinations, purposes like rivers for the gratifying fording,
.
And so with the envisioning of this transformation
Comes an anxiety unbearable and bequeathing of self-concept,
To the point where you’ll do ANYTHING just to know who you are:
Insanity.

You entered life
And all you ever found was
A bunch of people wondering
At what life is,
.
Between taking orders
Under two timing moons
.
And at the mad charade’s end
You realized
That it all took place in under one second,
In the springing jolt of a man’s hand
To his face.

One time out in Colorado we saw a house burning. It was the end of a long day (aren’t they all) canvassing in an environmental campaign in suburban Denver, and we were headed back into the city, a group of four of us, by car. Someone remarked, “Whoa, look at that,” and a couple of us others went “Holy sh**,” or, “I wonder if they called it in yet!” I’m pretty sure one of the people just sat there, not saying anything.
We continued to drive on, most of us, if not all of us, thinking about the fire. Thinking about what we had just seen. The backs of houses, along I-170, emerged, depicted themselves, and then obscured, again. We were mostly silent — thinking about how the day had gone. There was no need for anything else, at this time. Much of what we had, much of what we were, much of what we were doing, was working just fine. The rest, we figured we’d just drive right by, for now.

I see it every time I walk up to those glass doors — I look in your office, hoping for just one more clue on how to live, how to wrest my life out of the biting grasp of candy bar dietetics, of turning down the thermostat in winter, of living a second class existence. Sometimes I see your cat rolling around on the rug in there. Then I’ll see you, emerging out of your corner cubicle. Your skin will look just like mine. I’ll swear I’ll see a mirror there. I see in you nervousness, almost like you’re coated in some lizard sweat, all the obligatory things you’ve been doing, “fun” things, with a false enthusiasm, always that nervous smile. Sometimes I wonder if you’d rather change places with me, and have your life be composed of endless shouting matches, of nobody saying hi to you, of your every moment being consumed with the thought of how you’re going to make your next rent payment. It’s something in your eyes. You’re happy, but you’re never TRULY happy, happiness is part of your job. You thumb your nose at the unmitigated bile — unthinkable forms of our species crouched in dusty corners for what seems like eternity, wanting only the demise of everyone who passes, wanting only annihilation of this entire form — the houses, the computers, the passing of time, everything that has placed them in this miserable condition of “honest worker.” And time passes upon your vacation in Cancun — upon the last one, and the next one. Time works on those like sands from a star, masking their autonomy, crashing into them like a tidal wave from California. Movies work on time, you watch, from the Hollywood machine, how you took that gun out, didn’t you, how you finally got your way, didn’t you.

Somehow, we coaxed one more coked up op rock song out of the slow dive war vets,
And with faces like waxen marionettes
They march to set into flowing
Veritable wormwood
From moments we never saw.

I heard some men talking in the main room, as I began to ascend the wooden staircase. The building was old, and so the walls, though full of character, were obscure, shanty. As I drew closer to the huddle of men gathered around an isolated table in the main, well-lit room, it became apparent to me that they were actually handling me as a collective discussion topic. They were expounding on one of my paintings.
“I can’t believe it,” I heard Danny say, and I got excited, as it had been so long since I’d seen these gentlemen. “Just how different it is from his other stuff, the post-modern stuff. You know, all of a sudden there’s just no structure, all of a sudden there’s just no rhyme or reason.”
“You’re right,” I heard the cold, assessing nasal affect of Freddie drone in. “I’ve often wondered if he’s even real. Or if he’s some sort of ghost painter, or even more largely, simply a GHOST, in the first place, able to toggle through different identities, different SOULS, if you will, within the same body.”
The men shared a laugh over this one.
“Freddie,” said Elvin. “This is what we pay you for. The check’s in the mail.”
The sound of the men’s cheerfulness made me even more eager, as it had been so long since I’d seen them, and got to have a conversation with them. I loved the old oak of the building, and the view of the cars out the front door, although lately the cars had started to look so futuristic that it was somewhat astonishing.
But wait, on this night, as I opened the door to the room, I looked out and the cars were as they were 16 years ago: there was even the same broken window on that streaky black coupe I’d remembered from when I was just out of college. Still, though, I was filled with an overwhelming joy, because I had ARRIVED. I was real. And now, at this tabernacle of men, I could finally make the finalizing proclamation: I AM ALIVE. I AM REAL.
But as I made my way over to the table of men, none of them seemed to notice me, even though I was sure they must have heard the door sounding. I started to walk faster. I started to get a strain around my ankle tendons, but faster and faster I walked, until I realized, I’m not getting any closer to the table. The room began to turn vaguely blue, and when I looked at the blue itself, its identity subsumed me, until all of a sudden, through the entirely blue room, the blue air, the blue plants and the blue lobby clerk, I looked over to Freddie’s angry face, and he was exclaiming at me.
“YOU brought us here! It was YOUR fault! And now we’ve been sitting in this room for 17 years, cursed to miserable lives of tedium and monotony!”
I was afraid to look at the other men, feeling myself slowly growing into a corpse, slowly, on the inside, the worst way of all, the way we hope is truly invisible, as the cars outside only get older.

* Irony – An element of a situation which entails outcomes different from those implied by the composing premises of the situation.

* Metaphor – A comparison of a described word to an image-garnering word using language to indicate correlation, not just similarity (as in a “simile”).

The intrinsic qualities,
They flow and flow,
Until only a fool would attempt morality,
Unless of course morality
Is just a light color in someone’s eyes
On a snowy November morning,
Lamenting inwardly,
Roadside at the grace be gone
And then looking back toward the town,
At nothing in particular.

What happens to the snow
When you take acid one more time,
On those February mornings of glistening sun,
Blinding reflections
.
Shading us from the view of reality
Which they will instill in us all the time,
Of our imminent sinfulness,
The so noxious rays we give off
When we were sure we were just walking down the street
To go get a snack.