The Young Man's Musings

I - The Young Man - I walk the streets of a North Ohio town and sit along the border between Canada and the United States. I - The Young Man - smoke self-consciously just to smoke, to ritually scourge my lungs with the forbidden. I - The Young Man - walk alone in the sidewalk in a broad flat city built for cars and asphalt where pedestrians wait at bureaucratic checkpoints with my head tilted down and my eyes drooped to the floor and my shoes pointing duckfooted in opposite directions as I wait for a path forwards.

Feeding my roommate as he mewls on the floor in the dirty mattress of our unfurnished apartment. He is deaf and blind now. He lost his eyes fighting beneath a bar. He lost his ears in an orgasm of music louder than his eardrums could bear. He had a final blast of beautiful noise and then a lifetime of silence. I play noisily, I play Counter-Strike on the living room table next to him, he howls and mewls and digests his food in mute contemplation of nothingness. He is dull, his surroundings are dull, he lives as a stain of scraping flesh rubbing itself to salty bone with abrasion upon abrasion on the grinding concrete of his surroundings. I ignore him and experiment, exploring strange maps made of cargo cult textures. He’s noisy and moaning and slowly abrading himself to nothingness until death comes as a terminus where no more ink is left in his veins to be spilled on the snow and stone.

My roommate only has one thing left to him after exhausting the speed of life. His spirit has been spread thin across the flat plains of our birth and he is nothing more than an insult against God, a naked stone laid bare against cold winds that taught and prickle him with reminders - you shouldn’t be here! you shouldn’t exist! die! go away! be gone! no longer exist! you are an affront to our purity! planes need to land here! this needs to be flat!

His insulting flesh being abraded away is all he has left to give.

I love to drink Diet Soda and feel the bubbles and caffeine. I love to withdraw and feel sick and alive and crawly and bug ridden. I love to squish spiders on the windowsill of our plain white walled apartment where plaster comes together in an unfurnished hovel that makes me Machine for Living where I practice my aim on the M4A4 and AK47 and my roommate moans against salt and silence. I love the chemical smell of colors on wrappers. I’m surrounded by plastic. I’m grateful in the rare moments when I can find a bug to squish - almost never.

The land is so empty. I drive for hours to find mountains and sea where I meet my old friend in a hillside manor. He’s engaged to his mother, their incest part and parcel of the old traditions locked away solitary on the high hills over crashing seas. Amidst wood paneling and gold, I look through them into a world of ancient mysteries that always come out the other end of discovery underwhelming and stale.

I sit alone in a subtle hour between dosing and redosing. The pool I frequented as a child is empty and cold, only the dreamy blue lights left to turn the water to oil. It smells like chlorine and I’m fully clothed. The smell takes me away from time. A third dimension of the screen’s blue glow, no time, no place, a fourth dimension of space. I sit alone as my train arrives at a fourth dimensional station. I am alone.