This is the first part of the evening fable. Chris, you’re in my past now, you fucking crazy ass. Now you’re a Christian or something. Who would’ve guessed? I guess you could predict where I was going. A star is born, right? Scrub those dishes clean. If it’s true that God hates fags then it’s also true everyone is too afraid to tell him he needs to relax. Scrub. Scrub them dishes to the bone. Chris, how are sales lately? How do you earn your crazy living? Did you find someone to put up with you full-time? I’m sure our lists of accomplishments and regrets are painfully similar should we hold them up. This, this is it from you? I have to admit I’m not impressed. I don’t feel good about it. This needs some closure. But I can feel friends slipping away. It happens more often now. The sudden news and shock comes. All we have behind us now are those memories. We didn’t always treat each other well. We lashed out. It could come to blows. Now those days are over. The place barely resembles the memory. Sometimes it rides in on a smell. Did you become one of them? Myself, I left the cult way back there and I can’t say it was a bad decision. I do miss some things. Whenever I light up Nag Champa incense I think of a long string of Hindu temples up the East Coast where we banged drums and cymbals and did our black magic. Now, sometimes, I remember, I wonder what happened to you, and that whole attitude. Something snapped. I didn’t stick around much longer to figure out exactly what. The past burned out. Now I resemble the unknown and my being explodes into mystery.
Another Chris came into frame, a co-worker, in one of the original printshops in DC. Elements of me were torn against one another then. I’m sure it must’ve made everything around me fairly uncomf. And maybe some, anyway, were too sensitive. One young man by the name of Dave used to call me up and ask me questions on a number of things, and it was all very inspiring and serious, until he got to see other sides of me, sides less serious, and ones, at times, so extremely silly, and so his psyche became so repelled. The naive young man told me that I had changed. I was naive enough to take offense, jump on the defense. Honestly, there were times when I don’t think I was very well balanced. It’s okay to admit it now. Had a lot of energy I didn’t know what to do with. It was my own sculpting a line of dominos, resembling the charred remains of a forest fire next to the library. That smell you can’t scrub out without a little more time. Do you think you have the time? I wonder what the world would look like if we gave only sincere advice, unburdened by the Id. Oh me my stars and emotional scars. Address the unrest. Undress death, these serious concerns, our tendency to obsess. Oh me my stars and conversation starters and false starts and blood.
How do I keep from spilling out into the street? A homeless man sat there and told me what the culture is to him and why so often his heart just isn’t in it, he has to quit even a cushy, steady job, get back out on the road, get back to some potentially sad, lonely adventures, much of what happens with us anyway, on the other side of the it. A student’s back talk is smack talk, is a student getting a smack for said cracks, the whole thing resembles jail if you’re feeling as morbid as I am. What you see is the negative in things and it’s cloudy, perspective is mix-matched, confused, unsightly. You know? I guess you would be surprised to know I have other sides. The music fades out right where it’s getting fucking good. You get sent to a little room called the principal’s office with cows swinging upside down, their throats slit, the school nurse mopping up, taking care of it. They call your mother to discuss your behavior and lack of interaction with others and what this could spell out if gone unchecked. You feel crossed out. They say no one wants that. You look back at them and realize they won’t be able to raise you, these same people who pawn their dreams off, and live off food stamps of sorrow.
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