abzurd

green pieces of sleep-crust tumbling onto the comforter with the morning eye-rub - every day these people wake with no social memory, but plenty of intelligence and the capacity to improve skills, effectively function, but not like robots, they had personality, and they understood their daily plight - not knowing one another until today, but trusting that the things they did would not be remembered tomorrow. this produced a thoroughly confident and tolerant nation of people who didn’t know the meaning of the word self-conscious. they met one another with respect and curiosity and delight, feeling free of pressures, fully open, as it wouldn’t matter in a bit, that event would disappear without embarrassment or shame, so they did plenty of outrageous things that “normal” human beings keep inside - urges to dance with a stranger, sing as you walk, air drum with real arm range, invisible sticks bouncing off tightly stretched nonexistent instrument-skin with a breadth as wide as an actual set as you sit on some regal-looking concrete steps leading to an even more regal-looking government building, not that that last bit even matters. they learned to appreciate a moment for a moment because the past didn’t exist and the future didn’t matter until it happened. they were themselves every second because it didn’t make sense to be anyone else. they transcended the baggy weight of context and associations that muddle your thoughts when you’re trying to enjoy the scene. they experienced with perpetual wonder, and they were never silently suppressed from hopping place to place if they damn well pleased. they weren’t invisible now, but they would be tomorrow - their actions not even leaving ghosts to linger and remind.

big cities have this effect, in a way. one is effectively invisible and forgotten for their daily acts of weird unless they do it in the same place everyday in the same outfit or something. then they become a legendary corner figure, like “oh yeah, that’s the westing and 5th st box jiggler, he just stands there and like, jiggles a box for about an hour in the morning, he’s outside my office across the street, i see him come every day…nah, i know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking he held it in front of his crotch and like jerked off for an hour - the same hour, mind you - every day right in public, the fuckin financial district, even, for crissakes, but no. he holds it way out in front of him, with his arms out straight and horizontal, and he just jiggles it. it’s probably a workout on the arms, i wonder if there’s even anything in it, like what could it be, what could he possibly be doing?…what’s it made outta? lemme picture it, wood i think. i think it’s a wooden box about 16 inches wide, a cube it seems, i’ve tried to study it from afar soon as i noticed him doing it every day…i wonder how many days i missed, like how long’s he been doing it? i mean, the one day i saw him about three weeks ago, and i look out the window sometimes but not every hour, so i didn’t see him for two days, i wasn’t exactly expecting him to come back, and then i happened to see him a second time, so i began looking for him. he was there every day, same time. strange, y’know? crazies are everywhere but it’s rare that they keep returning as faithfully and punctually as this guy. one day i’m gonna go down and talk to him. see what his deal is.

…

you’re never gonna believe this he’s fucking brilliant. the box is made with wooden shingles i guess so it makes the box look like a kind of cage with really thick bars. he wouldn’t say anything about what he was doing, or what was inside, if anything - i couldn’t really tell because the slits between the slats were too small - but he was a great speaker, just wonderful diction, real articulate, he happened to be a semi-famous orator. he never once stopped jiggling the box while he talked to me, but he kept the conversation short and told me to come back when the hour was up and we could get coffee. so i did that and that’s when he asked me what i thought he was doing out there. i just shrugged and said i dunno, other than that maybe you were insane, but i was always just curious, ‘cause you had a face that seemed to understand what your hands were doing, so i figured i’d talk to ya and get your story, who knew you’d be some well-educated manhattan man with a relatively pricey apartment. i said all that to him. we drank coffee for a good while, and i had to get back to the office, i knew i was pushing my limit on this work break, but i was so close his rationale i couldn’t let go. i knew it had to be juicy, some reason i hadn’t considered that made it all make sense, but he just told me, this is all he said: sometimes you have to do something completely without purpose if you ever really want to fully understand your own purpose. i think he was a quack.”

Their car, compact and liberal-looking, wasn’t local. The man with the monstrous face, once taut, gone saggy, with deep valleys and ridges, like a bust of a head made with moist clay someone had dug their fingers into a little to mush around the skin layer of the medium to morph its facial features to look disturbed and maybe even a little horrific. He watched this little, “goddamn-lib” car pass by his house three times from his porch, once speeding and kicking up dust, once slower - he imagined an annoying child sneering to a driving father, “haven’t we been here already?” - and then once more, when they came to a stop in front of his property. They lowered a window and yelled, “Do you know how to get to Loo-iss-ville? We’re in Kentucky, right?” The man with the monstrous face grumbled about northern fucks not having the common courtesy to get out of their car instead of makin’ him holler. He got up from his chair and walked through shin-high grass towards the lost travelers.

“What was that now?”

“Loo-iss-ville? Do you know how we can get there?”

“I don’t know a city by that name, ma’am.”

“Are we in Kentucky?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t it like the biggest city in your state? Uh, Loo-ee-ville?”

“Ah, Loo-ee-ville, huh?” His stress was ambiguously facetious.

“Yeah. We meant Loo-ee-ville, -” the passenger paused, “…sir.”

“Well, why didn’t ya say so? Keep heading in this direction-” he pointed to his right, “until you hit the building that says Union of Grape-Stompers and Allied Trades, Local 2-5-1. They have a gigantic sculpture of a bunch of grapes so you can’t miss it. It’ll take a while now, though, but I couldn’t estimate really, it’s been a while since I left my house. Where are my manners, do you want to come inside?”

The passenger opened his mouth a little, as if in subtle agoraphobic horror that he was being asked in. “We’ve, ah, really got to get going, but what do we do when we hit that..was it a grape-stomping union hall?”

“Local 2-5-1. Once you hit that union hall, you’re one left turn from the city, a few miles down that road. Now, this ol’ dusty trail wanders here and there, don’t be afraid of its turns, they’re leadin’ ya down the right path. Remember, 2-5-1.”

“Thanks a lot.” The female driver tipped an imaginary hat and pressed her foot on the pedal. 

“Not even a ‘goodbye’ or a ‘have a nice day.’”

—-

-i remembered a friend’s anecdote about kentuckians messing with out-of-towners who pronounce city names without the colloquial affect to it, and like gringos in their own country, they get sent in the wrong direction

-written in sept 2011 for a fiction 1 class

Now here’s a girl with her finger on the pulse of nature. She’s got a healthy dose of good humor, an above average level of detachment from her environment, and a reluctance to undertake responsibilities.

An unbiased anthropologist fascinated by the personal interactions and mating practices of her “peers.” Peers in quotations here, not because she considers herself to be superior to all of these humans she spends her time with, but because she feels different from them, in kind.

Maybe it’s her hyper-self-aware introspective magic powers - a skill involuntarily employed by her brain all of the goddam time and she can’t shut it off no matter what she-

To my dearest audience, please forgive me. I’ve become distracted and deviated from my authorial role, thus destroying some ethos here and there. But I suppose it was for the better - you might as well learn now that I deserve little credibility and all of the doubt available in this universe and 8 others.

In any sense, the synapses firing in her big amalgamated mishmash of lobes and head spaghetti are always dispatching little trains of thought to chug along this way and that into the weird, wide world. At least 79% of the trains get lost somewhere along the way and never make it back home. These forever forgotten thoughts used to induce anxiety. “MY GENIUS IS FLYING AWAY.” But more recently, she has reconciled with this fact of life and many others.

A champion of mediocrity; a content and floating soul (WARNING: metaphor in progress); a freak in every respect. But a happy one, a comfortable one, a confident one.

As for what is deliberate and what is said in passing, the reader can guess. The reader might ask, if a creator never creates in seriousness, can anything they create be taken seriously? Exactly the type of question she does not care about in the slightest.

—-

imitation clouds are painted & hung above my head,
sloppy; speaking of haste
reflective splintered wood, jagged edges
bubbly warts on their 2-d surface
let them break free and crash on my head one day
they’ve been interesting to look at all along