The spot on the interstate that they blockaded just before Kent State is now wide enough to handle the SUV traffic to the mall. We can’t see the stars as well through the luminodrome* of ambient light, but it’s all right. At least I know someone else is awake at night. The arterial of cars and eighteen-wheelers keeps me awake. I can hear them through the broken skylight. One side red, one side white. The pulmonary consumer circulation separated by the reinforced Jersey barriers, concrete not yet met with flesh supplied by the lead-lined veins.
But, this business is sufficient and worthy. This business should fill the days of any generous man. This time is different. No ferries or passers by just endless, faced packages of products that I absorb. That I am with. It’s unattainable but worthy. Time is quantified but unattainable. Cars and houses are bought and sold at a margin. A Shaolin clan applied the constraints for me. They cut up the lines of text and put them back together, spilling what was hiding in the in-between. They taught me about cream, and about how Cash Rules Everything Around Me. They asked me, “If you can’t pay the rent, then how can you represent?” It’s all about representation anyway. It’s all about authenticity anyway. Don’t worry the two are mutually exclusive anyway. Anyway, don’t worry we mutually exclude all authentic ethnicities.
She laughs when she’s serious, I mean businessmen are serious, professors are serious, politicians are serious, everyone is serious but me. I agree though, I too smoke marijuana every chance I get. I lost track of my national resources when we stopped using paper. We bound the documents with a twine of binary and took them to the landfill in the back of an abandoned box truck. The seagulls circle overhead and far from the sea. Atolls of Albatross fill their bellies with pink and yellow polycarbonates. A vortex of swirling, floating plastic drove the gulls from the sea. Now they peck at the exposed decomposing compost of ones and zeros. Rotting office chairs and yard waste release their gases, and it’s collected into the pipes and pumped back into town. We scrub the particles with a green solution from the bottle marked “sustainable.” The word scrawled onto the torn label with a black grease pencil. It still makes my throat burn when I breathe in, but the burning is scented with a mountain breeze. The same smell as the bathroom in the truck stop just off the interstate. I sooth my esophagus with rings of onion, battered, fried and dipped in ranch dressing. The sour cream-chive-onion-mayonnaise-buttermilk texture of the condiment coats and soothes the sore abscess.
She taught me to embrace the uncertainty, revel in it. I’ll revel in these new calf implants. Reveal this new found self, seemingly free from constraints yet constrained. Just like cons train in the exercise yard, each man bench-pressing his own weight. I’m practicing power-squatting the weight my avatar. All this uncertainty is certainly overwhelming. It’s certainly uncertain. It’s certainly weighed down. Certainly, our capability is negative. We throw pennies corroded with spots of green at the walls of the cavern. We lick the oxidized patina from the pads of our fingers as we peer through the chinks in the sandstone wall. We peek at the infinite uncertainty on the other side and taste the metal. Look in isle four, third shelf, between the cans of local organic SpaghettiO’s and the bags of vegan pork rinds. The shelving contains more content than what I can afford at the moment. The shelving constrains the containers into doors perceived as slightly ajar, but not quite closed. I squint through the scratched lenses of my eyeglasses and catch glimpses of the other side. Infinitely vast, and ever-expanding. The iridescent bubbles of aromatized dish soap contract and dilate until they meld, and are at once, one.
*“Lumino” from the English word “luminous,” and “drome” from the greek word “dromos” meaning race course.
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