TWO

A rant against text messages

He had to write two thousand words. He had been reborn already twice that day.. in a haze of ecstasy and LCD screens, glaring so bright he had to put on his headphones and wear his blue tinted ten dollar sunglasses. He saw a gorgeous girl at the line at Panda Express and she was gone before he could see enough to describe her face to this blind friend of his who could draw perfectly from other's memories. This was going to be a problem. Inspiration flickered and faded like all the girls he almost liked.. and they came back in desperate bits of prose-poetry.. a sudden memory of chinese food.. a text message sent describing Bob Dylan's holy electric fire Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. And that same sinking feeling when he realizes/realized/will realize.. tenses make no sense after a while. Nothing does. Bob Dylan's holy electric fire (word repetition, text length inflation) reminds him of course of the Royal Albert Hall Bootleg (actually at the Free Trade Hall Manchester).. how many times he had gone through the liner notes (libretto? The reaction is compared to the premier of Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 after all) back in the ninth grade.. taking in the impossible cool.. the shades, the pointed boots.. and the snarl in the second half.. “Tell Me Momma”.. and the Jesus comment of course. Endlessly mythologized. Where is Dylan now? How vital is he? How vital are his vitals. He speaks Blowin' in The Wind. Last Song to Robert Zimmerman. Fishes flowing upstream, then climbing up on trees, blowing up into the clouds and into a very plastic pink heaven populated by Beverly Hills right wing activists.

This is all going to be stream of consciousness shite. That's the only way this is going to get written. In a haze of nothing in particular except some occasional alcohol and some occasional soul-crushing loneliness. He wishes he had read Mrs. Dalloway. He wishes he hadn't been such an over-eager idiot with so many girls. He wishes that he could recall Lacrimosa (Mozart/Sussmayr) well enough to hum it over a Tom Waits track. Things are changing but they always kindof remain the same. There's those text messages. Crippling heartbreak text messages. Why the fuck do text messages do so much to control his everyday existence. One SMS can make all the difference between being depressed and being hopeful (of sex? Of love? Of companionship? Of not being depressed for a bit?). The cellucor is good. He likes the prickly sensation that he gets at the tips of his fingers and he likes Spanish women. He is jealous of Michael Cera.. and he is more jealous of George Michael Bluth.. Spain is so far away. Mark Knopfler didn't perform Tunnel of Love a fortnight ago at the Long Beach Terrace Theater.. but that song lingers long and deep and thorny in memory. Something about Mark Knopfler.. the way his music effortlessly segues in with elements of OUP's life. This is difficult to write and impossible to read. But 2000 words remember? 1000 would be okay too. And memories form, often just from writing words in seemingly arbitrary non discursive sequence on whitespace. Tapping on keyboards like Time on Paul Simon's depiction of a dying relationship.

Everything in life has bittersweet associations. Especially songs.. especially Overs.. how he talked to her about it way back.. so long back.. so much yet to happen. Fuck causality. He wishes he could warn her. He wishes he could warn himself. But everything happened as it did.. and the speed of light in vacuum is a constant. And there's other priorities if he could go back temporally.. and so many paradoxes to explore. Seems cheap to focus on relationships.. but sometimes that's all that affects him. Cheap human emotions. No better than anyone else.. perhaps and probably lesser than a few. Fourth mention of Tom Waits in less than 2000 words.. including the vaguely surreal ghost-mentioning prologue. But night-time music is for night-time writing.. and he imagines being in a drunken bar late at night and having conversations with the stranger in the mirror. But he's been there and it never really works like that. It doesnt always work out bad though. It rarely results in happiness...but sometimes it doesnt result in additional sadness. Hank's is the best. They should play Tom Waits all the time.. every damned evening.. but that's hard to do. It'd drive the customers away. But there's the narrow corridor.. and there's the crimson light.. and there's the lonely end of Downtown Los Angeles strolling past outside.. and police sirens and cigarette smoke. So perfect so lonely so reminiscent of everything that's gone before and to come. Le condition humane. Everything reduces to a lonely bar at the fag end of a fruitless week.. everything reduces to that one shot of Jameson that he gulps down to make the girl at the far end look that little bit prettier. Everything reduces to memories of poetry linked so impossibly intimately with Page's soloing on Since Ive Been Loving You.. and the mirrors and the big Indian guy with the cut hand. And that girl with the very blue eyes. Everything reduces to blurry memories. And that's just the way it is.

If you write long enough and pointlessly enough and spontaneously enough then patterns start to emerge. At least that's what he was trying to tell himself. A novel has a structure. If it doesn't it's adjudged either crappy or experimental or both. This then is what exactly. Probably not experimental. Probably just nothing worth an idea. Nothing worth a drink.Nothing worth a smile. Just fingers and wrists hurting from a Kerouac impersonation with questionable talent and zero benzedrine and minimal experience of anything really apart from sadness and different stages of sadness and the ironically happy realization that this is how it is meant to be and will be and will never be any different.

ONE

Prologue of sorts

The ghosts of his friends slowly crept across the hall, taking turns to knock on his bedroom door, rap rap rap rap tap. There was a waltz playing, as there should have been. In no sort of unreality could he have not expected a waltz to not be playing at that moment. At the moment when he went up to the door and it creaked open before he put his long fingernail-bitten fingers to twist the doorknob clockwise. The ghosts of his friends stood out in the hallway, fragile and brown and dead-scared of entering a room inhabited by the living. They crowded into the door like memories, yet no one took a step in. They waited for him, Our Unnamed Protagonist (OUP) to make the first move, to nod the first nod to acknowledge the things slightly beyond the quotidian. OUP caught a glimpse, past the many familiar figures waltzing in ¾ time in place in his hallway, and it was hardly his hallway anymore. The grubby old Big Lebowski rug was one of stars and pasted un-vacuumable memories. Vicarious and otherwise. Second-rate magic tricks burst in and out of the little bit of the hallway sky that he could see. Birds and rabbits and handkerchiefs and gold confetti merging into one not-so-menacing Ouroboros cycle. He knew he was dreaming, because his dreams were always more pleasant than his wakings. In reality when the ghosts of his dead friends knocked like memories after flitting gently across a carpet of burning stars to his bedroom door, it wasn't often very pleasant. They wanted more from him then. They wanted Time. Time that he could not afford to give. They wanted Time with ever-growing claws.. scratching long poems on his door.. scratching uncauterized poems like the scars that he wanted to forget. And the hallway sky was on fire then, in reality. Bits of ember rained down, and OUP got singed. And Tom Waits played then, played to a soundtrack of train whistles and kettle-bells and bones ringing like rattling dice deep within an empty oil drum. Dreams were better. Even more so of late, if not absolutely, certainly in comparison.

He gestured gently with his fingernail-bitten author's fingers. And the ghosts came in from the hallway, shyly, one by one by one. Tom Waits again, gentler.. still train whistles.. and empty stretches of years with no memories turned into a sudden gust of wind and blew the door shut, leaving the hallway alone with its stars and confetti. This was surreal, and rightly so. This was retirement for OUP.. retirement and rest and magick. Piano piano ah how he wished he could play. But one of the ghosts sat down and poured an instant piano mix onto OUP's bedroom floor. OUP closed his eyes and thought of crows resting their wet feathers under the eaves of green trees, dripping with summer rain, and dark clouds and the scent of wet earth. And it rained on the piano powder in the middle of his floor and there was a piano and the ghost who had poured the powder sat down to play Ruby Tuesday just perfectly. And he thought of broken faces and flooded pavements and loves which were almost by definition unfulfilled, but it was better in the dreaming. In reality he would slowly sink into his chair.. and the ghost playing the piano would start playing slower and slower till his fingernails grew ever so long and the piano keys became silvered mirrors, and the piano player ghost's fingers screeched a symphony (screech) across the piano-mirror and OUP would put his hands to his ears, to find that he had been wearing earmuffs but it didn't help. Never did in realtime. In The Dreaming it was better. He had been trying more and more of late to stay there. Stay there late. Waking up was hard. But he couldn't deny reality very long.. he had been working on it. Working on it endlessly. But things began to creep into the Dreams.. slowly almost imperceptibly changing everything from the inside out to the outside in. The nightmares started gathering like bits of hot late-summer Sun at the edge of the sky threatening to cancel a rained out school holiday.

He knew how it started, and he knew it was getting worse. But knowing about it did nothing to prevent it. It was all a variation on a theme.. a Sonata form of a dark symphony that started off on a slight major but got deeper and deeper into minor. He knew how it started, and he knew it was getting worse. But knowing about it did nothing to prevent it. It started with the sadness. The crippling incredible awful sadness.. and he stopped writing. He stopped writing empty set in sequence nonsensical critically maligned personally despised masochistic exercise words on a dust-covered laptop with Tom Waits singing about war sadnesses on OUP's Harman Kardon speakers. And he sank back into his chair and the room got colder even in the middle of South Central Los Angeles.. where the residents don't need alarm settings on their phones because the police car sirens wake them up even before dawn. And he kept writing did OUP.. and the version of Ruby Tuesday sped up, at first imperceptibly, then more and more till it extended itself into ugly gibberish and came out as a shriek. He saw bodies entwined, like Dylan's Johanna.. except it was his Johanna.. and he could just watch. And he thought of exit routes. And car sirens. And endless realities. And the futility of exit routes if these endless realities should choose to exist. (She sighed as he moved within her, like that Leonard Cohen song which Jeff Buckley adapted to a version that brought endless infinite drowning pools of tears where his reflection blurred beyond any recognition, beyond any repair). (And he could only watch, and hide a painful arousal). And by this time in his head the storms of a thousand cold nights howled and Ruby Tuesday was one never-ending shriek and in his bedroom the ghosts of his friends had changed into photo albums and deleted emails.. and memories of Moondog discoveries. And there was a rapid pounding at his door.. and a scratching, and long tendrils of smoke creeping in through the cracks in his fabric of dream existence.. and OUP could then only just close his eyes and wake up into Reality. Where the hallway carpet was singed with persistent fire.