How Can I Help You

How Can I Help You

At some point I have to stop trying to win the affection of my parents. It’s over, it’s inevitable. I’m estranged and there’s no going back.

            What’s the opposite of incest? As if there’s only one. I believe that I never exchanged the words “I love you” until I was consciously aware of doing so, at which point I was intrinsically terrified of its underlying finality. I’ve only said it when I felt it, when I knew it was real, but there’s been plenty of times when I felt it and didn’t say it. Shouldn’t such inhibition and self-reflection sort of cancel out every previous and future heartfelt connection? Or can time and place really have a valid nullification property? Just because I’m trying to make money and you’re trying to have a good time, where is the harm or foul in sharing or not? Because nothing is ours to keep, if it’s even ours in the first place, so we might as well go on believing that we’re sharing this rare and mutual experience?

            Do you know what it means to be sheltered, guarded, and then exploited? Business as usual. The development behind cherished baby blue eyes of crystal water, fed vitamins and forced smiles. The perfect little fleshy vessel.  One day the man of her dreams will finally see the light gazing back and want nothing more than to kiss it and make it better.

            I don’t have a chip on my shoulder that may not be accounted for by the numerous trips I’ve made around the old block. It’s all good. And now I just gotta keep the ball rollin’ because I knew this day would come, I know who I want to be and the world I want to live in. Historically, this is the only way. Practice makes perfect, each and every time in the eyes of a certain beholder, the one it’s drawn to and draws to it.

            Encouragement is the casual, not-so-silent killer. But for me to stop would be a waste of taxpayer’s good money. Something about opportunity cost and doing something with my life, something different that will be appreciated. I have hopes and dreams. I know the only to get what you want is to want it.

            I’m sick, I’m gross. I’m spending wisely and coming up short. I’ve forgotten my investments and what it means to be prosperous rather than to become such. To be the platform rather than to ever climate.

            Someone is always awake, keeping track of time, noticing the details and taking due note.

            I am liberated, less concerned with what comprises a thin line of graphite on a clean linen sheet. My debt is a festering wound. I’m not honest. I’m not honest.

            The church of intrinsic motivation. The name should leave chills in anyone’s spine, chills that don’t run up and down but just are, regardless if they attend or not.

           

Future Tents

             I was born in a hospital, and in that moment, that room and that building and that city had always existed. However, based on our forever as we understand it, that hospital was built and will be destroyed. We will certainly make the best of it while it lasts, maybe make renovations and additions as medicine changes and population grows, find new meaning, live and die.

We will be nomadic, when the Earth is burned and fucked beyond use and recognition. It won’t be weird or uncomfortable, at least any more than what we’re at now. It will be like the old days, the ones that you have to go somewhere else to remember. The ones that no one’s really sure even really happened because it’s been so long.

            We won’t live anywhere or when we can’t, the places that would need homes and regular air conditioning. We will have means and measures of adaptation, cultivation, a reason to be whom we are where we are and no more than that. We may not be able to fathom living on Antarctica, or underwater, or in space, but with a transient spirit we will see what we see.

We could all continue to live in cars if gas wasn’t dwindling. We’d all look pretty silly sitting around in wheeled structures that no longer operate, overgrown and rusted at the bottom.

We can make dwellings faster and cheaper now than we used to, we’re better at it. But the beauty of old buildings is inevitably lost, like the smell of an old book, though we’re tempted to develop facsimiles of tradition. There is a tiny old man who mumbles to himself as he passes out front that we got it all wrong and wonders what the world’s coming to.

             It’s up to us to exploit what we understand before it passes away, before we get old and ugly, when there’s no difference between whether I eat or not. I need to do something, to take care of myself. Everything happens for a reason and I can’t predict why I’ll come back to this body and page. That’s what it takes to read something. The same eyes and thoughts and posture and page. We don’t have to agree. We don’t have to do anything. 

When the sun comes out and I melt so slowly, I will not be broken. I will find a voice to argue with, to distract us from these politics and this warfare and strife and hunger and illness and suffering. I want to be put away so I may make my solid gold album in peace. But life is what happens while you’re waiting for life to happen. I miss my future, my family and my failure. I have all that I need and I don’t know who I am.  Almost one day old.

            We are champions of light, tourists of the underworld. The only thing we have in common.