Speak Upright

He told me used books were imprinted with the last reader's dreams (through the oil in their grubby hands!) and I was bringing them into the house. He could feel them in the air. It was thicker, older, bringing more shadows and magic dust mites. This made him anxious, rebellious, fatal, and sad. A terrible combination he continually summed up with the word "puke" repeated through the house like chimes from a clock.

Other people's dreams were useless - powerful but useless (another oxymoron to his every growing list?) - like the mirrors he conscioulsy avoided ("horrific objects with a penetrating gaze that can turn you inside out once in their presence"). "Denial. Denial. Denial!" He says its the most the effecient and successful way to live in these modern, quick fix on the rim of Armageddon, times.

He associates love with pain. There are mornings I hear him up early by the back window smoking like a beaten prisoner, hunched and frail, muttering, cursing. When he's upset a slew of "Hail Mary's in quick succesion tempers his anxiety. Love/hate mediation to ease the soul? Someday, it will be my job to pull the plastic bag off his head so only I find him dead cold ovrerdosed and suffocated with a bag on his head.

I tell him dignity in death is another oxymoron for his list. I respect his wishes and he respects mine. The world is always in balance so order is maintained. He worries his teeth are decaying at an unfathomable rate. He reflects on the philosophical meditation that this is "the best of all possible worlds." His deep dark secret is that his blood is poisoned, just like his mind. He losses breath easy. Everything he knows about human relations he learned from TV and therefore never trusts anyone. He frames all thoughts with nostalgia. He is unforgiveably hard on himself and this translates to his friends.

But I love him. We get along. We can sit for hours in the kitchen. Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes listening to music and talking, talking, talking. His eyes changing from hard to sad and back again.

He secretly hates humanity and the world in general. He often confides in me his reason, "this is the best we can do? Cubicles and the idea that work inside an arbitary hierarchy is noble? Fuck that." He says some days he doesn't know how much longer he can do it, the endless work down the deserted highway with blurred landscapers living on memories and hope. He is wound tight. It pulls his face back into a frown.

He dreams of his Queen City. The mystic place of his birth he has been exiled from. He longs for those ancient memories of generic hardworking people and families he believed he knew. Hard drinking men and women who loved friends and strangers the same. Who spoke a common language of cynicism and laughter.

He has lost his angel. He keeps his anger inside. Holds it down like suffocating a geyser. It's there everyday, from the hot oven flare of emotional chaos to the stubbed toe letdown of the everyday mundane and pointless.

The boredom is the worst. He often tells me the hardest part of life is the the realization that the you are nothing special and the world is indifferent. He has dizzy spells.

He isn't waiting to die, he is counting on it.