What I Would Like
This One’s Just For Me
I only write when I wake up from naps, but when I do, my literary order is ready.
I spend my time on my phone, looking at clouds, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, until I hear the bored cashier calling my name at the counter, gloved hands shoving a smeared tray, a soggy paper bag and a soda cup, overfilled, sugary contents bubbling over about the straw aperture, Diet Coke on a plastic moon-cratered landscape.
I always ground to an image, a single image, of a anchor trapped in concrete, and it’s me, and I will never get it out. The point, I am told, by a voiceless voice-over, the omniscient narrator who speaks is in symbols, is to grounnnnnddddd, dragging the word-not-word out, two-fisting the telepathic sandbag for dopes like me, because that’s reality, that’s life, it’s not stories and clouds and finding yourself in some Hollywood montage, some trip to Tibet where you crane your neck grinning stupidly as enter the halls of the mountain monastery, rags in your feet, and some cloth-of-gold draped monk comes forward to meet you, welcome, daughter, we have been expecting you at this palace of nihilism and nirvana and lowered expectations, and the crane shot pulls away to reveal the Himalayan landscape, the your two figures get smaller and smaller in some whooooaaaaaaa moment, look at how big those rocks are and how tiny the people are and how humans are so small and we die and are nothing.
Here’s me but it’s an anchor in the concrete, not in water but concrete, it’s not fluid at all but all fixed, you just can’t get at it, why try, kid, why try, start smoking early and don’t dream too big, nobody gets very far, get me a beer from the fridge and be satisfied in your rent controlled apartment where you don’t need an alarm clock because there’s no place to go, no work, just the government handout, the paper check in the mail and the sagging relief, the drop on the roller coaster that finally levels out when you see the crisp official seal through the crinkly plastic window of the envelope. Anyway, the neighbor wakes up around nine and starts blasting Jerry on her t.v., and if that doesn’t wake you up, nothing will.
So.
If that won’t wake you up, nothing will. That’s not the point, to get the anchor out of the concrete, the point is just to pull on it.
So.
You can know that it’s there, that it’s not going anywhere, that it will be there like Styrofoam in a landfill, because isn’t that a comforting version of self. The fortune teller says, hey, you want to know who you were in a past life? A peasant. You died giving birth to your ninth child at age eleven. Cross my palm with silver.
That’s the grounding image, but for a dreamy, introverted, idealistic person, it’s refreshing and comforting, like visiting an old relative who never went to school, and there it is again, they have a soda for you, it’s warm, the couch is ripped and the springs press on you at unexpected angles, but you ground, you ground, and you feel grateful for it, because you don’t have to worry about whether the universe is accelerating or decelerating, because the relative says of course when we die we go on, the Lord accepts his sheep, we pass through the gate, and after we marvel at the solid Rock of Christ and how all other ground is sinking sand, sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand.
Then. In heaven.
We have to find a place to live, says the cynical older relative, and I bet you there’s still paperwork that didn’t get received in time, mailboxes and checks and Jerry through the thin walls, and ain’t that a bitch, but that’s heaven and earth and the afterlife, all right, just like the Old Egyptians said, just like Old Pharaoh who they dragged out of the Nile as a baby or something by some whorish Egyptian princess who thinks she can reform and take care of a baby now, with the government’s help, of course, just like Pharoh and the Old Egyptians said, it’s pretty much the same all over, on Earth and in heaven.
What was I saying? I remember the old trauma surgeon in the old trauma room at the old hospital, saying, during the code, I want you all to know how much I am enjoying myself right now.
I was saying That’s Just Fine ( like the Weird Al, song says, that’s just fine for an Amish like me, even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone. I’m on my knees in the streetlight, scoring points for the afterlife. ( Yancovic, Al. “Amish Parasdise” https://youtu.be/lOfZLb33uCg. MLA says this is you reference a Weird Al song in your self-indulgent Medium short prose.) That’s just fine that my muse is not some starchy Grecian girl with bouncy black girls and a Selma Hayek face, because isn’t it so that since I was eighteen and started working at the mall Chick-Fil-A, you resent a uniform until you learn there’s some places it’s better not to be a regular, and that’s the truth.
My muse says break time is up and that’s what she and I would like, the drumming circle where it is too expected and hipster, the park on a Sunday, and even in the car that always runs like I don’t know…..I don’t know…..you’re asking an awful lot here…like your mother hearing that you plan to major in English and Psychology and still move out on your own eventually…I don’t know….do people do that? I don’t know…..when I wake up from nap my order is ready and it’s what I would like. It’s bad for you, but it tastes great. We haven’t evolved to distrust it and our bodies recognize it as food in the same foot dragging, inefficient bipedal hominid way. The ancient ancestor who never made the history books and whose last moment of delight was the carrion meal before the panther dropped from the branches overhead. (Surprise!) The burger is hot, and the grease is congealing, and the cheese is half melting in parts and hardened in others, adopting a pattern something like people doing the wave at a sporting event. It’s all the wrong food. It gives you diabetes and high blood pressure, maybe cancer, like the water at Camp Lejeune, and you could get a check if you were born there, but you were born in Ohio, dammit, I don’t think that’s anywhere near, let me google it on phone before the t.v. lawyer finishes calling out the phone number for the eighth time. It’ll kill you in the end, but so does everything. No worries.
