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.