"From Childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness."
-Graham Greene from The Quiet American
The fan beats slightly cool air onto my half naked body.
The room is hot, and I'm reading The Quiet American, which cannot be helping.
Right now I'm on my own trip. I'm in this strange mental mix of Heart of Darkness and a walkabout. I have mixed the metaphor of Apocalypse Now and A Cooks Tour and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. I'm lost. But I have found out about myself.
It is really a strange place to be in, when you know what you want that is attainable, and what you want that isn't. And you are thinking on and planing and scheming all the way around both situations. And all the time, I'm hot, sweating.
As I beat feet on the streets, or watch sporting event du jour with C., or just laying in the lonely empty bed, the fan beating tattoo on the air to little effect. It is just hot.
-
I wake up in the morning to chill and breeze, and a different mood.
I think that I slept some. But I know that I woke up in the middle of the night again. Full of hope that I was wrapped around someone, that turned out to be a tangle of blankets and pillows. I'm moving upstream, but there is no Kurtz, there is no goal, there is no destination.
Just upstream.
The fan is still going. I can hear it, and for some reason I want to hear Wagner. Scratch that I know exactly why I want to hear Wagner, and have a .50cal, and listen to hot music, and pray that summer still keeps going.
This is a reggae summertime.
What is winter for, other than to cool me down.
But that didn't help last year. Last year there was the K. and whiskey for the walk home, and women that I miss sometimes, and a woman that I will never miss again. My life took some kind of hellish left turn while I wasn't paying attention, and winter is coming soon. And I have no home to stumble back to. And no body to hold close.
I hate alone.
I hate cold.
I want more summer to find my way. To beat city streets in worn out shoes. To find my way into the arms of troublesome women.
I miss my children and stability.
I don't know where I am or what I'm doing.
Just moving up stream.
Just moving up stream.
File under Vice.
4 comments:
i like the moving upstream idea, like the salmon you move out of some primal call to migrate north upstream. i dig it
It is actually a horrible mixed metaphor.
i don't why you dislike it, that it can be understood multiple ways makes it accessable to more readers. granted you may be sacrificing some of the meaning or emotion you wanted to create but in the end no one (potentially, i can't read minds or hears) no one will understand what you are wanting to give them. this isn't a bad thing it is just the nature of art.
Well I'm glad that you get it. I for one get it too, so that is at least two people.
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