by Aaron Hale

I’ve never had a problem with people changing, because a lot of the time, it really is for the better in the end of it all. Some people really have to change, some change out of necessity, some throw it to the caution of fashion and trends, and some merely hold resistant to the past until they realize. . . they’re dead. You’re dead.

And the thing is, there is gradual, and then there’s a full fledged leap into the ether. Cold water body shock, muscles tense, limbs spasm, and teeth chatter. An unholy feeling at best, I suppose.

But fuck man, the point, the point. Get to the fucking point. Get to the basis of this synopsis, and move along, you fuck. Lost in tangents–never lost in transition.

Sometimes it fucking feels, I don’t know, do you feel this way? Where you just feel like you’re fucking going mad with every fucking blink of your eyes? The roots of your hairs are growing, and you can feel them move? I’m such an asshole, I swear to God.

Today I was on the bus home, reading Hot Water Music, by ol’ Chuck Bukowski, and as I’m reading it, I kinda glance up and there’s this homeless man. Hes stale. Like, you can smell him, and it’s not piss and vinegar, it’s not shit and vomit or alcohol, it’s stale. I studied him just as hard as he studied me, that much I’m certain. His eyes though, looked dulled. Not just fading, but dying. You ever see the look of a dying person before. That look of just–existence without existing? Just a down-trodden moment before the final frontier becomes final, and here he is. . . riding a city bus, for Christs sake. Somewhere there’s something horribly and ostensibly wrong with this scenario, but I can’t fucking figure it out.

And you talk, you know. Talk without words, talk without talking. Maybe there are words, and you just ain’t hearin’ ‘em. I know I’m not if there’s a word that’s been uttered to me in the past several months. It doesn’t matter regardless. It just doesn’t matter.

Maybe I’m just choking myself with dying aesthetics, or trapped somewhere in a world that dances linear with a bi-polar existence of–here I am, working for this machine, a fickle cog that can break, but limps on by strongly on the wings of capitalism, and that part shuts off the second I step outta those goddamned doors, and I’m transplanted into something ugly and beautiful all at once. Where people are people, and people are real, and all of a sudden you’re a victim of your own consequences.

I wonder, really, what Napoleon’s last thoughts were. Did he compare himself to Julius Caesar? “A dagger in the back versus poison in my guts.” Regardless, both were killed cowardly. And how do the cosmos revere Voltaire, or Hemingway? Do they? If they don’t, why do we still do that. In love with our fucking pasts, and unable to forge forward with out revisiting the graves of all our scars, and maybe thats just a civilized version of. . . immaturity. In grand scale.

Ah ha! So the universe does it too! Clasping tightly to the ghosts of text book staples, feeding myth, shitting truth. I’m feeding myth, and shitting truth now. The myth is somewhere we can all get jobs one day, work a fucking desk job, and destroy what destroys us. And stay true to our morals, and genetic patterns–our moral D.N.A.

But I’m shitting truth. The truth is, you can’t. You can’t do both. The truth is the second the poison seeps through, it doesn’t purge itself. It nestles in the organs and saturates. The arteries harden–the fingers yellow, and the cancer spreads. You want to think you’re goddamned Sal Paradise or Tyler Durden.

In the end, you can only be honest to yourself. A subtle hummingbird refusing to move will drop dead. If you hold forks in your hands with your arms raised high in a field, eventually, you will be struck dead.

So you keep moving, and don’t look back. Treat everything like Babylon, and step over the pillars of salt. One day you’re gonna dream you’re in Paris, France, and wake up to find you’re in Hoboken, New Jersey with a connecting flight to Dayton, Ohio. You’re gonna get stuck in a delayed flight, and spend hours and hours drinking in an airport bar. You’re gonna look over, and your gonna see a flight attendant. On the move. Constantly on the move. You’re gonna lock eyes with her, nod, and fuck her in an abandoned terminal. Look her in the eyes, look past her face, look past her biting your lips. It’s too hurried, it’s too rushed. Realize shes dying in your arms. . .

. . . realize you’re dying inside her.

So fucking minute. And to think, when you’re done with her, all emptied out, and she walks east, you walk south, realize every hurried moment right now. How you rushed to drink, rushed to travel, rushed to fuck, only to sit in a carbon gas chamber in a “rush hour” that sits dead fucking still, while you pick your teeth, scratch your nuts (in that order, right? Or maybe not, who the hells watching, anyways?) while a wacky DJ on FM radio pummels your senses with some cheap knock off Howard Stern humor for 10 seconds before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes on. This is your generation–this is the generation without names, a catch phrase, or an identity.

Inside the cages, you’re buttoned down, tie tied tight–love those full Windsor knots, or whatever the hell they’re called. Hair. Hair isn’t askew, breath is minty fresh, shoes shine like the boy from Johnny Cash’s “Get Rhythm” song just did a number on you. This is success, in polyester, khaki, tweed, and cotton.

Say, weren’t you going to be a writer? Nah. You could never stick to the fucking point. You’re delusional, and God. . . you’re such a bi-polar asshole, you’d probably write a novel in your head, and refer to yourself in the the second person.

What an asshole.

“Shootin’ At A Mound of Dirt” by Aaron Hale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.