Taking stock

A moment of gratitude: secret police haven’t yet kicked me in the kidneys and thrown me in a stuffy basement. I’m also not working in a blood diamond mine. 

But then there’s my car, steadily depreciating. Eternal check engine light on the dash. Rusted exhaust pipe, a crescendo of clanking parts like tribal drums at a ritual sacrifice. Splash guard on the ground and front bumper gone. Dolorous wagon of one; I won’t let anyone else ride. Last time I changed the oil we had a different president.  

Not sleeping enough. Cats still adjusting to the new place, crying and tussling every few hours. Only deprivation adds up. One night of good sleep gives you one good day, then you start over. Each night of bad sleep tacks on brain damage. I have the reaction time of a heroin addict without the euphoria.   

One of the cat’s canines now jut from her mouth. At first I thought it was cartoonish, harmless. I looked closer. Her inflamed gums are pushing the teeth out.  

I hope antibiotics clear the infection. If she needs surgery I’ll sell drugs, my body, rob a liquor store, trick a rich idiot into giving me money for an imaginary project.  

Human life is defined by care. Whittle down your attachment as much as you like, you can hardly exist without watching over, tending and protecting. To care is to suffer in trying to lessen the suffering of others.  

To be related to anything is to shoulder the pain of losing that relation. The only way to protect yourself is by separating ahead of time, denying all bonds, hiding behind a glass panel. You bear less sickness and death the farther you stand from others. It works with self-relation, as well. Inner distance dulls the reality of your own death.  

The kind of freedom sought today is a power of passing through. A freedom of movement, a nice gliding along without anything sticking to your skin and tearing your flesh.  

-- 

Another note about the car—someone broke into it a couple nights ago. Technically they didn’t break in, I left the doors unlocked. They took the rest of what I hadn’t moved into the new place yet. Shoes, some clothes, a globe, I can’t remember it all.  

A stranger in my car. Some greasy drifter with eyes for a cheap score. Someone who checks strange doorhandles and picks through dusty boxes and empty cigarette packs, thinking of his future spoils when he smells tar and smoke and moldering Reese’s cups.

Desperation and abundance crowded in the same land. On these tree-lined streets, in the historic neighborhood with the esplanades and fountains and musty couples in their timeworn mansions. Somewhere between the checked out and the unchecked.  

I dream of mobs stealing all my things and my apartment burning down and my car exploding and employers shredding my application and various pasteboard communities casting me out into the desert, personal and impersonal calamities piling up. And it’s never as bad as I want. Reality gives me a weak version of my nightmares.  

-- 

Still not sleeping or working enough. Not enjoying all the entertainment, either. I try to watch a movie, excuse me, a film, the dominant artform of the 20^th century, maybe the 21^st too. A questionable distinction. The artform spanning mass mobilization and then mass immobilization, gathering up audiences and then shattering them, giving birth to select idols and then a hundred million main characters all vying for eyeballs.  

Cinema has drowned in its own showers.  I’m not sure what basks in the soggy center anymore. Our mediums are all extreme. They express a widespread drift. The old cathartic mechanism doesn’t work, because there’s no life on either side of the screens, no buildup of emotion apart from media shocks and hollow provocations.

Art doesn’t channel and diffuse excess energy, it masks the fact that there’s nothing to direct.  

I went south to see my parents on superbowl sunday. Late afternoon drive on a highway splitting the hills in two, sun flashing between the trees. Through the college town where I ducked in and out of classes and rented rooms long past my student days. New apartment complexes and restaurants with fresh pixels, dropped into place with a keystroke. A town that clashes with my memory of it.  

My parents are doing well in retirement, a few health issues here and there, though nothing dire. I should visit them more often. My most recent visit was slightly tarnished by the occasion, a forced obscene spectacle interlacing an athletic contest with commercials featuring geriatric celebrities acting like sarcastic copies of themselves. Inducements to consume next to modern mock pieties. It would be subversive if there were anything to subvert.