One for the NASCAR Lovers

Memory #142

I remember standing outside of Centennial High School, in Glendale, Arizona after taking my SATs, with all that fear of realizing I had to actually do something with my life, bitch slapping me like the pimp responsibility would turn out to be. At that exact moment, life was fucking my face and making me deep throat decisions like, Where will you work for the rest of your life? Who will you marry? How many children will you have? Will you be happy? Are you happy now? Does college make a difference in a persons’ life? Does anything make a difference in a persons’ life? Then, while charring beneath that “dry heat,” and seeping into the ether of that smattering of a mostly empty parking lot, I saw this blonde girl in a shitty, silver, 4-door sedan (if I was more of a man then, I may have been able to identify it further) drive past me. She was going over the speed limit, which was only 15mph, but it seemed rebellious at the time because that’s what I wanted to see. She had purple sunglasses on (they might have also been brown) and, most importantly, she had Ha Ha by Mates of State shouting as loud as it would go on her blown-out stereo and she was dancing, slightly. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I remember this, but not many other things.

Yes, I Do

You wanted to be loved, so you spasmed out an unlocked zipper, always shining to the world, like the glint off some frumped lady’s diamond everyone can gather around and seethe green over. You wanted to hate so you accidentally ran into doors and lamps and started throwing rocks into the river, but that escalated to keyboards through computer monitors, laptops halved, car doors keyed, wooden front ones too, once, you even burned a pentagram into a stranger’s couch with the cherry from your cigarette before throwing rocks and milk in his pool. You wanted to be problematic so you told people you loved them and then didn’t, because problems are change and it’s easy to change, so it’s easy to cause problems. You are a crushed, empty beer can on the handrail of a second-story porch that the wind will knock off the next time it gets cloudy. It’s cloudy today and you want to spit on the woman without a jacket because she won’t notice the lugie between drops. You wanted to be on the Internet. Well, here you are, tattoos and tits and all. There are certain people you stay close enough with your whole life just so that their friends know to notify you when they die. You are that to me.

Satan is my Lucky Number

            I see your success and want to kill everyone who knows you. I know it isn’t real, but on the Internet, success is always real and that’s all anyone sees of you. I saw my reflection and suddenly realized why you did what you did. I looked like I wanted to put my head through a window and I still do. Every time I think of how I fucked up, I catch another view of how you will always be a tapeworm in my heart, how, when I am fucking other women to attempt a compensation for your absence, I will realize emphatically, like being held under water during P.E. in elementary school, that, for the remainder of my span as a human, you will eat any chance I had at being happy with anyone but you. You will be at my table for all of my existence because of one fucking night when we talked about serial killers and you put the camouflage leggings wrapping your skin over my waist while we slept in blood and glass on your bedsheets, shot through with cigarette burns. Concerning the contingency of things, Spinoza was completely correct.

            A man I know fairly well told me that the women I will and have loved will be rings within a tree trunk. We discussed that, no matter how much someone tries to paint over or rub out the dark edges of those eternal circles, they will permanently endure all time and faked hatred and heads through windows. You are the first circle in my trunk and when everyone sees me, years deeper in existence, with a woman in her thirties, they will imagine her to be this worked-for outer ring, a halo of my soul, they will think they know that I now know what love is because I am older. But wisdom is a bruise, not a band-aid. Wisdom is knowing when to guillotine one’s senses, in hopes that new ones grow in its place, like a Hydra, or a lizard tail of understanding. But mostly, wisdom is a callus over the soft spots of our baby skull hearts that will never blister and fall off in the heel a sock.

Band Concept #463

I want to start a band called Gluten Tag. There will be one member who is in the band solely to smear German pizza all over the drummer, screaming, "KEEP THE BEAT, ADOLF," hopefully loud enough so that the real lyrics won't be heard. Those would be entries from my sister's diary when she was 17. One song would be all about her driver's license being out of reach. I think this is a good idea and one day, I'll get really close to doing it.

Revisions in Living

When the ideas about you come out, they intervene like a dog that doesn’t know which bowl to eat from, considering the options. Perhaps there are none. Perhaps all the animals can’t tell which valley to fall through, being watched by a hunter hidden between oaks, pines, or aspens so sparse and albino. They know there is the point of being hunted because that just means being alive, but one can only be sought after for so long.

When I spell out your name so anyone listening can write it down correctly, I see brown hair the length of years spent in some other life that I receive visions of hints from. The dogs still bark at night over your beauty when I am in a bed with you. Photographs taken by all the people I don’t know and will never meet convince me of the crispness in your body. I heard a drive-by hitman make his mark in the world while I considered the first night I will finally know your body.

When the intimacy I want finally sets in, there will be centuries of love to consider. Alexander is in a convulsion of epilepsy over a woman that told him she wouldn’t feel the fall of his sheets on her body. There is nothing to consider now and I can’t feel the fits in my drunken cells left out in the sun to dry among an Arizona heat that reminds me of your tongue filling up my mouth.

Self-consumed

I feel wrong for every time I’ve said I’d fallen in love. It seems to always have been desperation to have a female near me. Still, all the women who fell below my body are remembered differently. Some were a conquest. A simple means to feel bare and I’m sure now that they invited the challenge as well. Others were only a staggering advance in the wan light of convenience. The last increasingly minute and exclusive group were a true aspiration in which I saw us sliding through the sheets towards evocative futures dolled up in idealism. Regardless, it was an idealism I thought could occur.

Aside from all these, one in particular is included in none of these sects: a puerile girl who put on make-up too early. She is too far off in the past to drink herself away from it. She is too locked in the gaze of the mirror. She is too sealed in the public eye, because if she calmed, what storm would there be for the masses of erections to stare at? Her translucent jar keeps enough mystery to entrance, but not enough visibility to entertain. With this one, I cheated myself into trusting I was more than another begging erection. I could have loved her, but I’d have to share her with the mirror and I see all the faces.

I talk and receive similar stories in response: everyone fragmented from tumbling after the boulder, trying to convince Sisyphus to stop his trudging and enjoy the trees around him. He responds with a story of a woman who ran off with his best friend. He says that his boulder is his sanity. He says that his boulder is the same as us doing the dishes to keep our minds away from it. We all then shuffle backwards as he moves his weight out from behind it. The earth shakes as his boulder chases gravity again, because even the most pragmatic among us still make wishes when the clock speaks of doubled numbers.