H.G.T.

Late at night, odd doggerel shoots through my mind, black and white semiotic fireworks that give no quarter. These phrases and rythyms intertwine and lock until my idoim has ceased to be any other person’s, a laungauge of my own that’s a product of the night and solitude.

Tú eres bonita, to forgive devine . . . what does that mean?

The rythym of words fades and pulses.

Retreat? I have not yet become the light.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. . . I have a habit of devloping contigency plans for various life altering events. My plan for losing an eye is to open a bar called “kindom of the blind.”

In western bars, there was no drinking age, but there were often prohabitions against coming in from a day of dirty work . . . No Miners . . .

An elbow joint makes a wet crack that cannot be described when it is bent backward. When I can invent an onemotopia for that sound, I will have arrived as a writer.

There’s a lot of pain floating around in my crowd right now. I watch my friends, that family I chose for myself, adrift and hurting, each in a way of their own.

Some of them seem so, so very awash in aimless froth, becalmed in an apathetic sargasso.

I don’t want them to drift from me. I don’t want the pain to take them. Because then I’ll be alone with it.

Remember the Rockbiter, who was left alone? It doesn’t matter if you weather the peril, if no one makes it through with you.

The peril I worry most about is something that seems to overtake you at about 29. I know so many barely 30 somethings that have just . . . fallen away. There’s these shells, just shells, with flat flinty eyes that just bounce from day to day and drink to drink, show to show and fuck to fuck.

They’ve lost the will, not the will to power, but the will to change. They’ve devided life into a mental hinterland where dreams are for kids and everything is a long mediocre slide, and all you can count by are individual good days.

I will not live for indvidual good days. I will not live for three day weekends. I will not live for quick, mechanical sex while the kids are at soccer practice.

I will not choose life. Screw the electric tin opener.