“There’s no…
“There’s nothing to it. It’s easy as glass.”
“It’s a storm.”
“Now you’re just being hopeless.”
“…”
“You like it, don’t you?”
“No.”
“You’d like to smile at your misery, if it weren’t supposed to be solemn.”
“It’s certainly better than nothing.”
“But it’s not better than up.”
“It’s a phase. Humor me while I pass through it.”
“Well all right.” He looked down at his watch.
“Just don’t leave me.”
“But that would signify the position of the phase even more. Miserable… alone and miserable. It’s like a phrase you hear. Alone and miserable.”
“That phrase refers to sexual company.”
“Fine, I’ll stand by then and insult you.”
“It’s not a phase if there’s nothing to bring me out of it.”
“It’s not much of a natural cycle if it must be prompted.”
“Prompted. Not created.”
“There’ll be prompts.”
“Not if I’m alone. Natural cycles take place only in natural situations. We are designed to be with company.”
“Now you’re just being a subjective asshole.”
…
Night, and there is a knock at the glass door. Eyes appear through parted blinds. A click, and the door is pulled open.
“We are downstairs,” said Jay.
Nick followed jay through the lighted kitchen and they started down the stairs. The patterns in the carpet at the bottom showed in the light from an aquarium. Music was playing. There was a neon sign on the wall that read: “Coca-Cola @ Nite”. Jay pushed the door open and there was Pat and Nicole sitting on the bed. Pat was holding the hose to his mouth and the hookah was bubbling. He blew a ring and exhaled “hello” to Nick.
“The party continues, by night and by morning,” said Nick.
“Yes. We were talking about tomorrow’s sunrise,” said Jay. “It should be well.”
“Yes. A new Totem?” said Nick.
Pat looked over his shoulder at the painting on the wall that depicted four shapeless minks dancing around a flute with various shapes issuing from the minks as it were some visual rendering of sound.
“Conceived earlier,” said Pat. “In memory of the night of wind and dance out by the ol’ wall.”
“Yes. It communicates that vision well,” said Nick. He turned to shake hands with Jay.
“Appreciation,” said Nick.
“Gratitude,” said Jay.
“Why the white light?”
“We were waiting for you.”
Jay passed Nick and flipped the switch at the door. The music stopped, and they listened to Jay’s progress as he fumbled with the cord, then there was the distinct rumbling sound of a plug finding its mate, then the click of the plastic switch, and the purple rod glowed and filled the room, and then teeth and socks were glowing. The music recommenced.
“Has Rave been yet scheduled?” said Nick.
“Two more bowls, said Pat. “Strictly grape.”
Then he turned and poked Nicole’s kidney, and she emitted a suppressed squeak.
“Yes,” argued Pat.
“No.”
“You must,” said Nick.
Nicole looked at the floor.
“It does not even out.”
Nicole nodded yes.
“But consider the product. The only virtue is and always will be happiness. You are not happy, and we are not happy, that you continue to assume the position of the caricaturistic woman in a society which contains otherwise men for the sake of aesthetics. Some amount of artistic value should be sacrificed for the sake of our enjoyment and your participation.”
Pat and Jay straightened their backs and raised their noses and issued a stiff applause. Then normal activity recommenced.
I am in glassI …
I am in glass
I watch the people drinking and dancing
I want to feel the wind when a new man opens the door
I want the music to shatter my silence with spears
I want my skin to grate into the sidewalks
I want to feel the sharp slice of glass
I don’t want dull bruises
I don’t want mottled skin
I don’t want slow headaches
I don’t want thick coffee
I want to put ice in it
I don’t want honey barbecue sauce
I want salad
I don’t want the leaves to be limp
I want to reach into a stream and come up with cold
gravel and sand
I don’t want the mud
I don’t want the heavy clubs
I want arrows
I want brilliant sun
I want fast rain
I have seen the…
I have seen the death of everything
I have seen faint teases at rebirth
I have seen patterns in the paths of stars
and in my sneezes
And I have hung this web of twined neurons as a
canopy in my skull
And watched the reactions of lone premises
Watched them congregate in cliques
I have watched some give way and leap in, yelling of
freedom
I have watched the more social members of this web
fuck, and on some nights arrange an erotic
free-for-all and I have raised their children,
Throwing out the weak
We have watched our hands shaking on the rope
We watched the first signs of numbness
Have seen the fingers start to give way
May have started crying then
Have seen the first inch give and heard the first
wet squeak
Have watched the fray build up in our fingers
Have held tight through the burning and tighter yet
as the skin had been torn out that the rope
would not have had an easier way
And we have felt the silent despair as the rope ends
and we were falling
We have filled the silence with our screaming and
our thrashes and
Our protests die with the wind that always ceases eventually
And when it does, when all is silent, we are welcomed to the Void
By the absent majority whom we can connect with by means of the universal
thought lingering that: “we have all lost”
And we roll the fray we have collected
And put it into our pockets
And go to sleep
But I still go through the motions
I have twisted my share of fray into a new section of rope, and with that
I still go through the motions
-Jared Salzano
I know that on this page I post stories and poems without ever actually addressing the reader but here I would like to share something because I don’t know where else to put it or what else to do.
A couple of weeks ago I was walking in the woods. On my way in I heard a loud noise like a big dead log falling and making contact with another and I heard the reverberation of the electric fence. At first it startled me and I was scared for a minute but nothing moved after that. I followed the trail and went down into the valley to the camp that was across the stream and I went to the bench there and sat looking down at the blackened fire pit and when it got dark I watched the stars come out. At the edge of the camp there is a short and steep hill and just at the top of it there is a cow pasture. When I got up I turned around and saw a very tall figure standing at the fence. It was black against the sky and I couldn’t see the face but it wore a suit and I could see the white undershirt and the black tie. The legs were very narrow and tall and it stood about 8 feet. I turned and ran across the stream and up the valley and when I looked back it was gone. I walked the trail slowly and watched for it but I didn’t see it again. I have gone back multiple times since but I never saw it again.
You are engaged in conversation with the Government. He is sitting back in your reclining chair with his feet up and his hands folded on his stomach. You had returned from lunch together and you guys are getting comfortable as friends. You both are laughing at some abstract sort of joke. It is a mild joke but the unison laughter is rejoice at the empathy in the air. Suddenly his hand fumbles with some dark object and you see it roll down his abdomen and towards the crevices of the chair but he catches it and returns it to his hand. He looks up to meet your frozen stare. The laughter is gone, and there is terror in the air.
Take a look at raindrops on a window. Get a chair, make some tea, sit down and take a long look at raindrops on a window. You’ve always watched them as a kid, but with age you lost interest in watching things like this.You now require a more intense source of stimulation. You need to eat. Eat raindrops on a window. They are an overwhelming source of stimulation if you look at them right. You will forget your desire for other sources when the raindrops inspire new thoughts. The stimulation takes place in your mind sometimes. As a kid you watched them, but now you can watch them with a trained eye. They’ll do things that you didn’t see as a kid, and they’ll inspire new insights. Your mind is more experienced now. Reality didn’t get duller. Your mind isn’t now jaded, incapable of true wonder, you are. But you can fix this if you’d watch raindrops on a window.
Go out and sit in your yard. You don’t need any tea. Just go out and take a seat in the yard and face the sun or some passing clouds. You haven’t done this for a while. The last time you have done this is years ago, sitting with your sister and looking at the clouds pass. You have been busy; I understand. You have been busy looking for something do to. Here is some food: go out in your yard and have a seat.
You might not take my advice, but consider the consequences of continuing to live exactly how you do now. Perhaps you don’t know what you are missing because you have not yet experienced the other side. It’s not that hard, just go sit in your yard. And there you are, within a few minutes, on the other side. You are lying down, metaphorically. Stand up. Stretch. You’ll feel better.
“The sun is going down,” said Madriene.
“Yes it is,” said Martin.
Madriene breathed in the cool air.
“The perfect conclusion to such a nice walk,” said Madriene.
“Yes, I liked it too.”
Madriene looked past the row of trees and at the street.
“I wish we would have walked slower,” she said, “I don’t want you to go. Besides, the street is noisy and I don’t like walking along it.”
“That’s okay. There will be many more walks for you in the future. Just no more for today.”
They stepped onto the sidewalk. They were holding hands.
“I hope you sleep well tonight,” Martin said.
“Thank you.”
Both of them were watching the buildings as they passed. They stopped at a door and turned to each other. He kissed her, and without a word she smiled and turned, and Martin watched as she walked away. He turned to the door and went in. He took the stairs to the 5th floor and went to one of the doors in the hall, unlocked it, and entered.
Inside, he removed his coat. He reached into his pocket and took out a tiny syringe, walked over to the glass table and set the syringe on it. He turned and stood, looking around his room. He went to the kitchen and took out a clear glass from the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap. He went to the freezer, took out three ice cubes and dropped them into the water in the glass. He sat on the edge of his bed by the glass table and raised the glass up to his eyes, and looked at all of the little reflections. He saw the way the glass molded the shape of the water, constraining its width at the top and allowing it to expand outward into a heavy bulb near the bottom. He saw the way the light was shaped within the glass itself. He took a sip of the water, closed his eyes and swallowed. It was cold. He drank some more and set the glass on the desk. He stood, looking at the syringe. He went to the window.
“A final walk?” he thought.
“A final walk.”
He put his coat back on and went outside. The sun was now just dipping below the horizon. The streets were mostly empty but for some couples and a few lone walkers. Martin had his hands in his pockets and was walking slowly along the sidewalk. He wasn’t going anywhere. It was comfortably cold for Martin and he enjoyed the lightness of the air and the way it felt brushing on his face and through his pants. He took his coat off and dropped it as he walked. He sat down at the metal fencing around one of the trees in the sidewalk. He sat with his legs crossed, looking up at the tree. He sat there still for a while, not conscious of anything other than the tree. He felt something on his shoulder. He felt it again. Releasing a breath he lowered his gaze and fixed it on the man who was leaning in towards him, tapping on his shoulder, holding his coat. Martin could not hear what he was saying.
“No, I don’t need that,” said Martin.
Martin stood slowly and walked around the man. He went inside again and climbed the stairs. When he got to his room he removed his shoes and, going over to release the blinds, he looked down and saw his coat lying on the doorstep of his apartment building. He watched the coat for a long time. When Martin turned, his eyes were wet. He sat down on the edge of his bed and looked around his room. There were no reflections in things like there were in the glass, not anymore.
The house was silent but for the tiny crunching sound of cat food in the corner. There were shadows cast from an afternoon sun shining through the trees and into the glass door. Evidence of the sound of wind outside could be seen up in the trees by the fluttering of the last leaves of Fall. The silence was broken by an entry from a side door. There was the rough, liquidy sound of the door breaking free from its seal, and the rolling sound of the release of the doorknob, then a deep thud of the first step inside. This routine of noises was familiar to the cat. This was the sound of Martin coming home from school at three o clock. The door closed, and he proceeded down the stairs to the basement where his room was. I would imagine that the noise sequence was different from the silence in his darkened bedroom. Martin entered, turning on the light. He threw his bag in its place on the floor and kicked his shoes off, removed his coat, and turned to the open doorway and waited. He heard the sound of the little footsteps coming down the stairs and was greeted by the black body of Edgar, who trotted into Martin’s outstretched hands. He lifted Edgar, squeezing him in a way that he knew was not comfortable for the cat and went upstairs with him. He went to the window and looked out to the woods. This was normally the part of the day where Martin would remember how much time he used to spend out in the woods, and how much a part of his life it had been, and then he would turn away and retreat to the basement to play piano or read. He knew that he could not create interest. Though he didn’t want to accept the fact that his interest in spending his time in the woods was diminished to an occasional walk of nostalgia, he knew that the only thing he could do was wait until the interest returned.
The only difference in this particular sequence was that today he made the decision to go out. The day was nice, and he thought he might as well say goodbye to the warm season as he felt that winter could not wait a day longer. He put down Edgar and went back to his room to get his coat.
The trail was nice. It was still clear because, although he didn’t walk on it, new shoots wouldn’t be up to fill the path until Spring. He looked up to admire the sky. Morning walks were different from noon walks as afternoon walks were different from evening walks because the sun lit everything from a different angle, and Martin felt that it was a new forest at each time of the day.
When he reached the point at the crest of the valley, he sat down on the huge rock that was embedded in the hillside remembering the time he used to sit there and look at the farmer’s field on the other side of the valley. It was for only a few weeks that he did this, but he remembered it well.
A cloud passed, hiding the sun, and the forest turned grey. Martin got up and retraced about one-third of his walk down the main trail and turned onto the path that led to his campsite in the valley. Nearing the bottom he noticed that a new tree had fallen. Usually he would know which storm had caused the tree to fall, but he had not been to the valley since the passing of several storms. He passed Corey, which was the name he had given to a particular tree last summer, but he did not feel the right to say hello. Corey marked the point on the path that turned to follow the bank of the stream, and here Martin walked along the path until he reached the crossing which was a series of stepping stones that he had placed in the water. They were all still in place.
Martin was impressed by his camp because he had not seen it in a while. There were benches and tables made of cut logs and large rocks which were firmly set to remain in the shape of functional furniture. All of this he could not appreciate fully before because he had been accustomed to it, but now that his memory had been given a chance to settle he could see it for the first time as he often wondered it looked to the people, mostly hunters, who may have come across it. He went to the log bench and sat, looking down at the black area on the ground left by passed fires.
The cold season was always quiet. Whether it were the lack of animal sounds or an illusion of silence created by the stark scene of Winter he did not know. Martin was startled by the intrusive ringing of his phone. He reached into his pocket and looked at the face of it. It was Thurston. He sighed, answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“In the woods.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yep.”
“Just walkin’ around?”
“Yep.”
“That’s cool. Anything happen in school today?”
“Nope. Still avoiding the deadline?”
“Actually I already finished the project. I just decided to stay home again, so I pretty much ended up writing all day.”
“Awesome. What did you write about?”
“Today was just continuation of that poem. It’s gonna be HUGE.”
“Wha- Oh the one about the patterns of life and all that.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I’ve got to explain this sort of theory. Actually I think I can start it this way because it would be easier for you to relate it with your experiences. The past two days for you have seemed different, right?”
“Well yeah, but that’s because I didn’t go to school.”
“Exactly. Okay. You know how we talked about before with the little worlds?”
“Yeah where there’s just little worlds of interest that belong to all aspects of reality.”
“Yeah, well no, this is different. It’s not like, well remember when I used the example about the teapot? Where you just look at a teapot and you’re reminded about the world of tea and all of the times you spent drinking tea and all that?”
“Yes.”
“Well it’s more like in a time way than a physical way. Instead of taking an object or idea like tea or fountains or books it’s more like a brief period in your life.”
“Hmm…”
“Like you can imagine a time where you did something, maybe reading a certain book, or okay the time you spent writing that one story about the horse races, and the story makes you think of the time you spent writing that.”
“Yeah like when I told you about my trip to Manhattan and I just felt like I was in a dream or something, and so I can always remember-”
“Yeah well think of it this way. You know how there are little schedules in your life, not really anything you’ve planned but like, you get home from school and you go to the computer or something, and then you eat dinner and go work on homework-”
“Yeah.”
“-and there’s all sorts of little schedules, but they change over time. Like for a few weeks you’ll be really into something like playing guitar or whatever, and you don’t think about it then, but then when you remember it you get sort of like a nostalgic feeling about it.”
“Yeah like when I was spending time with Courtney and we’d always go to the movies, and then after we broke up I remembered those times more vividly, and I knew that I wasn’t having all that much fun at the time but looking back on it I regretted breaking up with her because in a way the memory was better than the actual thing.”
“Exactly, now you’ve got it. And our life is made up of little sections of these different schedules, and if you think about it, the extreme ones are better or more vivid than the mundane ones.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Yeah. And usually we’re living in one of the mundane ones that we won’t remember. Well I’ve just discovered, well I guess it’s kind of obvious but I was thinking that you can just deliberately alter the things you do in your life to create more extreme worlds, and you’ll have more to look back on – just keep changing the things you do to create more of these worlds.”
“Well I don’t know if it works that way. Based on my current understanding of reality, things just happen naturally, and when you try to change it, usually you’re misunderstanding something and it never really works out.”
“I don’t know man I think I’m gonna try it. That’s like what I was saying a couple days ago about depression being a good thing, because it’s more of an extreme mindset than a mundane one, and while it’s horrible to experience, once you get over it you can look back on it and it’s great.”
“Hmm… You know maybe that’s what Poe was talking about.”
“When?”
“Did you read that story I told you about?”
“Oh yeah, no I forgot.”
“Well he was talking about how he is the Imp of the Perverse because he’s tempted to do things because he knows it will promise excitement. He gives this example of standing on the edge of a cliff, and he almost convinces himself to jump off because he says that surely the experience of falling to one’s death would be exhilirating.”
“Hmm, interesting. I’ll read it tonight.”
“Well at least that’s my interpretation of it. Who knows what the hell Poe was thinking.”
“You know, I just realized this whole thing ties in with what I was saying about running and walking, where you can’t move too slow and dwell on things or you’ll go insane, so you’ve gotta maintain this sort of constant ignorance, but then you can’t go too fast or you don’t really see anything.”
“Yeah and you just end up like everyone else.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm… If you wanted to go further with that you could say that, in this theory of running and walking, Zen is just not moving.”
“Hm?”
“I’ve been reading this book about Zen and it’s talking about meditation and not applying thought to anything, just letting things happen and watching, so in this metaphor you’d just be standing still.”
“Interesting. Yeah that makes sense I can see that.”
…
“Anyways I’m gonna go because the woods is great, and I want to spend some time out here before it gets dark. I’ll probably talk to you tonight online.”
“Isn’t your computer broken?”
“Shit that’s right. Oh well I’ll just read that Poe story. Are you gonna be in school tomorrow?”
“Yeah I should probably do that.”
“Alright then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Alright I’ll see ya.”
“Alright bye.”
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