Sometimes I Lie Awake, and Consider Bad Luck

A Fictitious Monologue From Someone With Good Intentions and Questionable Methodologies.

Thanks to J.W. Yablonsky for the edit. I really appreciate the people on here.

---

Some nights I lie awake and consider Bad Luck….

…Scooch closer. Y’all need to scooch closer together. The sound of my voice must enter your ears but also wrap around your heads and meet in the air behind you. If this doesn’t happen, everything falls apart.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

You’d cross your fingers for something to come your way, you’d miss it, and then as you processed the rejection, you’d have a near miss with an automotive accident, or you’d stay home and avoid a barroom brawl that spiraled out into the crowd. If you’d have gone out, you’d try to break it up and your only reward would be facial reconstructive surgery. Such is the fate of my clinically stupid friend who intervened. A bar tender whose face got rendered, unto oblivion, playboy.

It could have happened to you, as I’ve heard it from someone whom it happened to. Are you following?

It’s a hell of a thing to try and do good, but what is good, really? Sometimes you just have to let the Russian MMA guys kill each other at Barney’s Beanery, because valor is the fodder of the face leaking, medical debt and the rest.

Hey, break it up! Let me attempt to appeal to your nonexistent sentience in this moment!

Ever see a brick get thrown into a washing machine? It tries to do its thing and this endeavor tears it apart. Only way to go is to make sure there is never a brick in the wash. It’s amazing how easy it is to put a symbolic brick into your subconscious wash.

Perhaps all the failures, under-deliveries on your destiny, all the times passed over and all the chances squandered, perhaps you’re actually experiencing the feeling of a purchase. Your spirit buying some more mortal time at the cost of some illusory notion of “material success.” Isn’t it nice to think that way?

I’m so touch-and-go with death. It happens somewhere close to me and I can hardly speak of it, hardly ordain it, and this is all a gift of my culture.

Death is nothing to this world. Everything has to live forever now. 20th Century presences haunt the 21st. It’s a century of usury, no one knows anything and a few people are filthy rich because of it.

We have admitted that life has no meaning, and this means it will have no ending, there will be no resolution. The only resolution that could be promised is an unraveling of the previous resolution, then a re-examination of the unraveling of the resolution and the various responses, some of which emerge from a quite sound argument that, in the grand unitary nature of things, there is an equal distance between the resolutions and the problems. Everything will refer back to a previous mirror. What we are talking about doesn’t really matter anymore. What is demanded is that the conversation balloon to an absolute point of absolute understanding, absolute presence. Whether that can be achieved through the phone or through the body, all means of absolute presence will be pursued.

Speak at all times towards me always

So shall say the voice.

Never listen, always hear, always ready!

To a never ending meditation, to another celebration amongst colleagues and friends, in particular your friend Lorraine. Yes yes, Lorraine, who orders from Fresh Corn grill. No, no, she’s not in any danger. We are just talking things over, in particular a range of healthy investments that, if monitored over a period of 15 years, could lead to a vast number of financial stabilization methodologies. She’ll be right back with you in a moment. Beyond that, she was also interested in purchasing a .357 magnum revolver with a brown rubberized handle, a purchase with purchase. You get me? It would be another sound investment in these most uncertain times.

Trials and tribulations come to all of us, don’t they folks? I understand what it’s like to feel as if your back is about to break with the load. Pause. Get your mind out of the gutter, please for the love of God just listen for a moment without making things weird.

The Dow Jones going down and you’re in the dumps over it? What about the economy of the bullet? Don’t tell me you don’t want to invest in the one commodity that will withstand the collapse of all civil government? You’re a peacenik, eh? Well you’re welcome to be a peacenik in a mass grave, but some of us don’t want that kind of unceremonious ending!

Let me tell you honey, the west is washed, the gold has been sifted, the meaningless coins minted, everybody is giving lip and nobody is swatting any knuckles with a ruler anymore. Corporal punishment is still basically legal but a heavy social faux pas. All marital couples are monogamous, now more than ever. Their immune systems were destroyed by COVID and they’re too tired to fuck anybody else. Read the room. The Big Room. The room we are all in all the time, your side of the carpet and mine too.

It’s a hollow point I know. But one which will still have value even when the lights go out. It’ll be the frontier again, like it or not. Lorraine understands. I understand, I’m hoping you do too. If this is to be a dry, spotless heated rock burnt to a crisp by the sun, then only snakes shall remain, warming their bellies and hoping they get to eat something besides their own tail.

What you have here is the deed to your home, a home which possesses a basement, a basement within a quarter mile of another basement. Essentially, before Lorraine asked for a gun, I was in the midst of proposing a subterranean network of interlinked basements. There was a lot of hand waving and excitement, I do go a little overboard. Everything is off track, which is the perfect force majeure of the network, what if the roots were woven? You got me? When there is a deep enough wound, you need stitches. Band-aids ain’t going to cut the really the deep cuts. Woven. Woven. Woven. The flesh pulls itself back together and sews over the sewing. Reaping. It is in darkness that we may atone.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Everybody could hang out and be friends, and if anything bad were to happen, the network would already be set up. It could be as simple as…. a…. potluck! Everybody throws in, Kahmel brings the deviled eggs, Denise makes the latkes, somebody hosts in one basement, dishes in another, kitchen in another, you see the vision, don’t you? Woven.

It’s an absolute understanding we have is it not? Please don’t mind the pistol as I gesticulate. The barrel may flash over your face and the red bead in the sight may glimmer in your eye momentarily, but I assure you, my trigger discipline is as practiced as it is visually evident. You following?

I’m talking long game. My money long like this game, hahaha!! Listen, don’t look away. You are with me. Everybody has to be with me. Smooth is this moment when we all turn the page together. Our next chapter begins with the economy of the bullet, comes to fruition through the effervescence of community, dances in the rain at the point of highest tension, disappears into the car seat cushions as the molten change you were supposed to use for the parking meter, wonders about the stench from underneath the house, checks beneath the home and finds the rotting corpse of your beloved pet, beneath the beloved pet is the rotting corpse of your enemy, beneath the corpse of your enemy the dust of processed bones and muscles the microscopic bread crumb trail of genocide, beneath the human particulate the liquified fuel which exists as an effigy to the dinosaurs, this same effigy a raison d-etre for so much suffering. All the basements would sit upon all that death, and embody vivacity. And as we are sandwiched between the fatal-memories and the sunlight ever-present and as of now unseen, we will recall what it means to bathe in warmth. We will re-learn how to hug and kiss.

Lorraine understands this, every last detail. But you? You seem befuddled, resolute in this moment of just about halfway in knowledge, either you take your foot out the door and start to turn your ass back to ignorance town, or you start admitting you wanna get your paper work filed for citizenship in the real world, stupid!

Seldom in this life is such a clear dichotomy offered, walking the golden avenues or jumping from poop puddles to shit sinkholes. Your choice bucko. It’s in your and Lorraine’s best interest that you choose wisely.