and Sisyphus walks down the mountain

There is a story told by old men round fires, hinted at in words that never reach towards meaning and thus never fall short. We are but a weak and desperate people. We know of riches, greatness, power beyond compare. We have seen these things, we have lost them. The Universe is capricious and indifferent to the plight of her most vain of all inhabitants. Thou shalt not challenge the gods. Thou shalt not beat the Devil in a fiddle contest.

Give me words, give me space, give me lies and the inkling of meaning. And I will spin a web for you, I will take your trash and detritus and in return I will give you reality. I will tell you what goes on behind the curtain and you will believe me. If there is no meaning, I can say whatever I want. If there is no meaning, I will make my own. If there is no meaning, I will give you meaning. Take it or leave it, but lies are the only game in town. And I’d like to think mine are more fun than theirs.

Unspeakable horrors. Let us then tell. Doctor? … You must have me mistaken for my brother. I swear we don’t look alike. Then again, who can tell anything ever these days? Blending into the nightmares are dayscape dreamrunners with highlighter tinted sunrises blasting through the shower curtain covering my windows, drowning out the less than silent competing rooster cock bellows and alarm clock mating chants as I try to fall asleep once again on my one free day of the millennium. But we maintain, because it is all our kind can do. That or die. Suicide? I guess, but it’s not really my thing. I know we’re all dying, but it’s not my time to go yet. No, not yet.

I try to carve out madness from the wreckage, wrest it from the unholy grasp of the industry. But my only tools are literature and booze and whatever scattered chemicals wander in my direction. And I find no madness I find no rest no solace no grave. I just get tired and then the desperation comes on bitter and reeling and I just get drunk and drunker and the fall all over myself and others dance of pathetic dissolution peaks in a bitter silence and I fall, unknown, unblessed, unwanted, asleep to bitter silent empty dreams. I wake with no memory, no madness, no enlightenment. Just the melancholy knowledge that there is nothing left for us. Nothing left to get away with, no country left for us to run to. They have taken it all, they have taken it all back. There is no freedom, no escape, no hiding, no peace, no country for young men. And sometimes a hangover.

I’m told that reality is what you can get away with. Or maybe that it’s just perception. I’m told a lot of things but I never really remember them. With flash mad editors excising sensibility. I don’t listen much. Or at least nowhere near as much as I ought to and so I lose a lot and I forget a lot more. I just have this casual relationship with causality, a drifter’s sensibility of maybe this and maybe that and sleep when I’m tired and eat when I can find food. Maybe the world of life is passing away. Maybe. But I don’t figure I’m dead yet, so I guess I have to keep writing for a little while longer. As the Winter’s Death creeps closer and the deafening silences close in, stalking one more innocent helpless vagabond. It’s hard not to believe your own lies when they have been screaming inside your skull for so many drunken misplaced years. I was older once, wiser. Better. Such vast immeasurable potential. Lost, drowned. Forgotten. Forbidden.

… … Oh, I thought you said the Great Bambi.

It’s hard to trust a man that won’t dance. What’s he hiding? What’s he afraid of? That joyous release, the freedom of movement, the revelry (and the hints and possibilities of a return to a past long forgotten never remembered whispered in dark corners in twisted garbage strewn alleys in abandoned warehouses begging to be converted into first artists’ lofts and then upscale apartments for the fatuous yuppies of a brand new soulless generation). One hopes for such things, but one dares not speak of it. It would be blasphemy, it would mark it a lie, a snarling impossibility, the junkyard dog of shattered historical remembrance. I don’t like strangers though. I am afraid of what they might represent, of who they might be, of who they might require me to be. I haven’t practiced my routine for them, I don’t know my lines. I need someone to ground my reality, someone to make sure that I don’t drift off into the dead static white noise nether realms of urban screams. But I’ll dance with you, if only you’d ask me. Or else I’ll just bop along with the group, pretending that I am having a better time than I am, but still having a pretty good time. Because I’m here and you’re here and it’s a beautiful Friday night and what the hell else are we gonna do?

And Sisyphus walks down the mountain.