The only deviance is the J to I. The J was a thinly veiled metaphor so I decided to switch to first person and try to take on a Camus like tone-very sober and distraught with existence in the philosophical context.
Abstract part two:
Enter the Dragon Lady. She came calling in the form of a mermaid I saw lying on the floor at the laundromat one day. She was wriggling around trying to get back into the washing machine-a fish out of water. It was than she materialized like a ghost from somewhere else and than disappeared. That’s the first time I saw her and she would begin to reassimilate herself throughout my life in many forms. In her female form, upright, hominid, fully developed, civilized, ape with clothes on form- she appears caught between two worlds-glam and glam. These are two distinct universes. She appeared to me once in a dream years before but my conscious memory screened it out. Than there she was-jumping out of a washing machine and into my life although I wouldn’t know her for a year to come. She had a tatoo of a fish-a japanese looking carp like thing. That’s why I knew she was a mermaid. She had auburn hair and her body was mermaid like but somewhat bulky. She walked as if she were swimming.
I walked from the laundromat downtown to the library to score a bag of weed and read some magazines. Denver is the type of town where you can by a dime-bag at the library. The weed is ragged and dirty like the aquaducts swollen with sewage overflow. The river has a green hue as I leave the library and walk down to the bike path where bums hang underneath the bridges. Bums, homeless, toothless, sometimes lacking humanity so much they become like alien visitors. Not part of our environment. I sink into my environment. The Dragon lady becomes part of the environment every day. In the morning the masses trudge like Roman soldiers off to their jobs. The streets fill up, restaurants and cafes fill up. The dragon lady becomes part of the hustle and bustle. There are a million dragon lady’s out there at any moment. They can become one and they can become ubiquitous.
The traffic races by down Speer boulevard. I am nearing the river, I am nearing Paul’s Wall. Paul was a guy I knew awhile ago. He could range from bald egomaniac to pathetic pariah. He could be happy sad, despised, the most popular guy, and the strangest of all all at one moment and than he would disapppear into the wood work . He would go elsewhere. Become part of someone else. Paul needed the Dragon lady and she needed him but they both despised one another’s existence. For existence is wrought with endless details. Does any body know who anybody is?
The Dragon lady stood faceless at the bar. Her body was washed in the drinks. The bar tenders were all aliens. They had ears like the Vulcans from the star trek tv drama. They just didn’t show up-you had to be able to see them. The Dragon lady can see them. Paul isn’t at the bar today. I look out and see him wandering off, looking for his own shadow. Paul can’t see the points on the bartenders ears. Only me and the dragon lady can. That’s how we became linked in space and time. The probabilities of molecules coming together to form our common existence is miniscule. We are creatures of pure chance. But the dragon lady is a creature of determinism. She wonders where Paul is, she watches the clock, she looks at her little computer telephone, she talks on the phone, she sees other dragon ladies, she disappears. She was never really there.
The silence of the ten o’clock news. It is time to get back to work. I don’t have time for my buddy Paul or the Dragon lady. It’s only work work work. That’s the only way to get ahead. There is this guy Fred who lives down the hall. Fred is Dead like in the Curtis Mayfield song but he is also alive. He comes and interrupts me when i am working and reminds me that I am still alive.
All of the sudden life becomes faceless. Everybody is there but there features are indistinct. They look like the monkey cage at the zoo. You can’t tell any of the monkeys apart unless you study them. And when you study them you have to join with them. You have to eat, shit, drink, and copulate. You have to be in the pecking order. The monkey named Fred wants out of the Monkey cage but he can’t get out. Sometimes he comes down the hall to tell me that he wants out of the cage. I had to tell him that I don’t have the key.
Now here comes the funny part. Last night I slept in a strange house and woke up with a bird sitting on my face. Its claws were resting on my forehead above my eyes as if to say I can see your eyes and can make you blind. I left that strange house in existential terror and now I am a prisoner in here. I can’t get out. There isn’t a key. The monkey cage has gold bars and tinsel with little silvery trinkets and lots of hoops and ladders and tubular spinning walkways. Above the cage the birds shit all day.
Now I am waking up. The construction site is out side. It is loud and blaring. I am semi employed, self-employed, living a very bare bones existence. Since the Trojans came in and stole my Helen, took her back to the Turkish seacoast where they could eat bananas and smoke black hash all day, I have been alone. I move from place to place but my liebenstrasse-I think that’s German for living space- remains a constant. Sometimes clean, sometimes dirty, usually cluttered. I reach the breaking point but I semi-implode. Last night I thru a can of Soup at my neighbors window at four in the morning. He was up there blasting Nu-metal and blotto-a drunk marine, veteran of the War in Iraq. His Liebenstrasse is sometimes still in Baghdad and he keeps his ammo box in his living room. The guy upstairs doesn’t remember me throwing the can of soup at his window. He thinks I am crazy anyway because i never make any noise. I sit with abient noise, Tv blaring.
“Is there a rhyme and reason to this place Fred asked me one day?”.
Fred liked to drink a pint of hard alcohol every day and when he had his bottle 1/3 down he came uncorked. You could see a demon living in his skin. I met the demon one night. It wanted to attack me with all its vegeance but I made it miss. I learned how to make things miss. I once spent a summer at a mountain retreat in the Northwest meditating and studying Vietnamese Aikido. Everyday I would chant my own personal mantra over and over again-percision, Random, harmony, Prh, praaah…….That is when i prepared to meet the demon. I knew from the clarity of my deep meditation where my heart beat was very slow, my breathing deep and my body completely balanced and shell shocked from being tossed onto a mat by a 120 pound Vietnamese guy, that I would meet the demon again and again, both within and without. Now is the time to chant and come down.
And so my morning went, walking by the Cherry creek, staring at the bums, climbing on the birdshit on Paul’s wall. Paul likes to climb. He likes to be on the edge. I followed him here and I hope to find him here.
The streets are busy and my life is stagnant…………
