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.

California Football

            You are having a shitty night. You decide to go outside to smoke a cigarette; hopefully, it will exhume all your anguish. You hear a referee screech and a loudspeaker. People are resounding. Cheerleaders are chanting inaudible shanties about spirit and pride (presumably). You find your sister’s key to the car she left at the house you are stranded in and move towards the uproar after entering the vehicle.

            There are emptied cars blocking every sidewalk around the bleachers, so you have to walk one block to get there. Seeing that the game is in the 3^rd quarter, you convince the overweight mother sitting at the admissions table (who is also eating a Slim Jim and not closing her mouth when she gnaws its wax) to let you in for free. She offers you a raffle ticket, but you silently deny.

            You remember, from your high school days, how easy it is to spot the home side and place yourself on the stairs, staring at the parents. The has-been smell is overwhelming, and you feel winter slide its fingers between your ribs. You choose the group with the most uniforms that match the players on the field and rest on the thin metallic slab behind them.

            A touchdown is made. The bleachers bounce as the people rise: hands upwards, mouths gaping. The announcer commemorates the children for their lack of skill that is less than that of their opponents. Eventually the crowd calms and you say, “Fucking bullshit. These kids suck.” One or two heads slightly turn in your direction.

Minutes pass and another touchdown is made, but by the visiting team. This time you stand, cheer, then say, “That’s more like it. At least someone taught them how to play the game.” More than two heads turn and one father says, “Maybe you oughta sit on the other side of the field.” To which you respond, “Maybe you should shut the fuck up and let me cheer for whatever team I want.” He straddles his seat, opens his mouth and you swing a fist directly into his jaw. Your body follows your knuckles and you topple onto him and the others below, ragdolling down three or four steps. The bodies under you aggressively move to each side and your head is slammed against the cold aluminum repeatedly. You kick your legs and know you hit one person (hopefully a mother) in the stomach and another in the face. Your head is slammed again and what you can see becomes blurry. A man not far off (most likely a security guard) is yelling above those around you. You taste iron as your head is raised and then violently met with the aluminum once more. You smile as you remember something you read once: To be nothing – is it not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

In a Bar, in Amsterdam

Thursday, June 28^th, 2012, around 11:30pm

            I am happy to be alone here. It is not as lonely as in America. The stench of foreign armpits and top 10 American Billboard songs cause people to love one another. That, or the green bushels they smoke in basements.

Dancing to jazz, I saw drunk—presumably—couples move according to the other’s body: Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? No, Glenn Miller, this was one of the times where the pop hits weren’t pop.

            The locals are kind, but there may be a hindrance in their step, and who could blame them with such a vibrant slash of tourists meandering their cities, expecting things differently, smelling of deodorant and Camel cigarettes.

            It all happens upon you. You meet Norwegians who make you feel like you’ve known them your whole life or a New Zealand mom and daughter at lunch who have already had four or so glasses of Pinot Noir. It is a nice thing to find.

            Perhaps people are the alleys of which don Juan spoke. Even Camus may have admitted through character that he could be having an intensely intellectual conversation with friends, but when a beautiful girl walks by, he would disregard everything that was said previously just to move his eyes along at her pace. It is a strange effect, the one these women have here.

            I feel kindred with a few spirits back home, those who know the look of an empty bar, at least judging by the seats next to oneself. However, there is a solidarity in knowing that one’s soul can stand to be alone.

All those with hundreds of friends and people they are meeting at nightclubs need other beings. But we, we few are much happier without banal conversation of who is dating whom and what is happening in the tabloids. Our lives are sufficient with our inner dialogues. A simple smile or laugh after overhearing a public—often too public—conversation are enough to carry us through this trudge of night.

We will go to sleep miles from anyone familiar, but those plants on the windowsill, those cooling low-balls of whiskey, those blank pages, canvases, stories: those are our good friends.

I understand why Camus wrote while here. I can see him in this bar, full of others just as much unlike himself, but he carries on, like all geniuses. He does not speak—only writes, smokes, drinks. I wish to be as dedicated. Perhaps I am. To be sure, I am, in fact, drinking whiskey, smelling of scents of all so many people. A god somewhere in the history of all the ones humanity has created has to see this attempt in us. We must be appreciated at some point in our lives.

It is my last night in the infamous Amsterdam and I feel a tinge of regret, but it is overcome by being so happy at seeing the world. I am alive and so happy to be so.

These conglomerations of skin, blood and muscle do not know what they are doing. Are these canals a concentric version of the circles of hell? There is too much to take down in words this night and my pen follows my scattered brain.

The loneliness in this barstool is only brought on by more whiskey, but it depends on the perspective you take, doesn’t it? If I were a more positive being I would be dancing in the masses attempting to find a woman, and yet, I am alone and yet, I am happy about that. Now it is time to go back home and keep what I have learned through somewhat drunken strolls and conversations deep inside myself because the night ends eventually, even in our minds.

Solitude

            People have too many friends these days; they’re too well connected. Three hundred fifteen friends on some social media website and I only really know twenty. Some time ago, people had maybe five friends. If they were lucky, they’d get ten. It was only because they were constantly around these people that they actually got to know them.

Now, friends escape like a meal, somewhere beneath our esophagus muscles, landing inside the invisible and escaping as a pile of excrement removed of all we needed from them. We can smile when we’re with them, but do we honestly miss the conversations had and the drinks shared? Would their deaths matter a year after their funeral? Maybe, but only to become that quintessential depressed being that all these new friends want to understand and be close to.

I cannot wait to live on my own and be away from everyone who thinks they are close to me. I cannot wait to play board games with my alter egos, my favorite being the one who flips the cardboard square out of anger as if it was a table in a market. I cannot wait to delve into the drunken habits I wish to acquire and learn an accompaniment of different, new things all by myself. I want to learn on my own, secluded from public, secluded from Sartre’s Other.