Staying alive

In this city of cosmopolitan cattle, sprawling like a network of bulging veins or a patch of inflamed hair follicles ringing a rectum, every other road lies in a thicket of cones and construction equipment. Each day I play a dull game, two tired games of chance, rather; will my sole means of conveyance go up in a cloud of black smoke, will I get caught in a traffic jam so thick it turns my car into a jar of sickening preserves.  

Drinking a keg of coffee and swerving around potholes that, if I hit them, would pop my tires and blow a radiator, cause me to cut my tongue in half and knock my prostate to the ceiling of my skull. Anxiety and boredom rising together, congenital twin brothers born of the same abyss at the same time but with different methods of torturing all damned souls under the withering sun. One raises blood pressure and pumps infernal images and ghoulish scenarios into my brain, sets the earth spinning and rocks the ocean of acid in my belly, and the other strip mines the inner and outer worlds of all beauty and meaning, sucking all the juices from fruits and soaking up all the colors and bringing the whole span of history before me like a flavorless meal replacement paste.  

Boredom dropkicks me out of my apartment and then anxiety pricks me with a million used steel toothpicks, releases its armies of invisible fire ants and floods the skies with amplified bees and wasps. A rented home; can’t live in it, can’t live outside it. My own soul, my blasted interior, my rude homunculus tagging along like a classmate I can’t shake, with his bizarre interests and feral tics, picking his ears and belching and droning on about bad science fiction, his hair smelling of prescription shampoo.  

Each person I encounter on the road, on the street, in the aisles of department stores, in line at the cafe or on the machine next to me at the gym, reminds me of my own dummy stuffing, the annoyance I feel toward my own existence, the mysteries of my own movements, their senseless heaviness. Breast strokes in wet cement, hoeing the rancid clay, shouting at dead buds as if frustration were rain to make them flower.  

Gym again, work out, work on, work up, working off the calories, the shame, the spectral monkey digging its nails into my back; in shorts and sneakers, changing in the whitewiped locker room while a man with a shaved shining head stands spraddled at the urinal and breaths with drawn out rasps and pisses in staccato rhythm like a lawn sprinkler. On the stair master, an ascension to nowhere, my MC Escher exercise as the speakers boom with jungle drums and men bragging about getting their dicks sucked.  

Training four or five days a week for a feeling of vigor and an image of masculine strength. A private mood and a shadow on the wall. Worse things you could do with your time. Better things too but who’s paying attention. First impulsive answer; everyone; everyone is paying attention all the time, that’s all I ever hear about. No, hold on, it’s that everyone is distracted all the time; no, it’s that they’re laser focused on how no one else around them has any focus; it’s a lot of watching and recording and spying and obsidian eyes prying open images of your soul and inattentive drivers and bored distracted students and teachers and men falling into open manholes and security guards playing candy crush while robbers walk off with cash registers and powerful men making decisions half asleep with a sandwich in one hand and a text from a hooker in the other.  

The more you talk about something the more you kill it, until it’s so dead all that’s left to do is talk about it some more. By the time it’s on screen it’s already terminal. The word murders the thing and then more words murder those words. Circular discourse ends with a Mexican stand-off and the last wounded word killing itself.  

Read about how no one reads. Only by archaic metrics, antique standards. Your average orphan chimney sweeper isn’t reading Balzac on the bus, but every half-wit has written and read more texts and posts and comments than all the letters in The Library of Babel. Every septic-pump truck driver’s brain is an infinite forum of marble columns. Janitors mop vomit during the day and write cultural criticism at night. Physicists dick around with dark matter and watch cartoons on evenings and weekends.  

Elite officials with ivy league degrees have the dumbest interests, see themselves as beneath their children; the childless motel clerk writes like Cato the Elder; traditionalists indulge their Oswald Spengler footnote fetish.  

No one buys books, they say. That’s because we breathe them. Paper cuts in our lungs from the atmosphere. What’s making people fat is the narrative cheese, the verbal cream, the constant snacking on fried and salted essays.  

Art is dead, literature is dead, the author is dead, the internet is dead. And they’re all still here, coked up and dancing in a disco that lets everyone in and never shuts down. Being dead never stopped anything from living.