I’ll add some accent chords to this strip when I’m feeling a little bolder tomorrow. When I’m bolder still, I want to do Wolf Parade’s “Modern World” (you can make the compositions longer by cutting off the end and beginning part of two strips and simply taping them together. Likewise, when I can get around to fixing that middle part, I can just put a piece of tape on the back and it’s like it never happened).
An explanation of jealousy:
“So here’s the thing about the cuttlefish. It changes color based on its feelings, kind of like a chameleon. And when it gets angry, it changes colors really fast so that it almost looks like it’s on fire. Well there was this biologist who wondered what it would be like if you were to show a cuttlefish itself. So he goes down to the bottom of the ocean with this mirror to find a cuttlefish, and the one he finds is this big cuttlefish that’s having sex with another cuttlefish. He holds up the mirror and the big cuttlefish stops what he’s doing and looks at it, and all he sees is this other cuttlefish. So he starts getting angry and he’s changing colors really fast and what he sees is the other cuttlefish in the mirror getting angrier and angrier too.
Meanwhile, in the background, you see this little baby cuttlefish that normally that big cuttlefish would have just torn apart, right? And he sneaks over and he starts fucking the first cuttlefish’s girl, finishes, and then walks away.
How many guys does that remind you of? How many dumb, angry guys are just looking in mirrors getting madder and madder at themselves because they’re mad about something they’re capable of. And while you’re busy doing that, some little baby cuttlefish comes and drops a load in your girl.” – a paraphrase of the now infamous Cuttlefish Parable by Chris Kimmons
It isn’t like I am trying to destroy you.
I just think someone besides me should hear it. Someone should listen. Someone should know that a brain like yours exists. And when they do, I will stand there in the early morning light waving the tape player, my robe filthy and my skin a papyrus, my grandchildren astonished and in awe around my feet. See? I will tell them with my old breath. See? I told you.
I have some stuff that I need to take care of.
At work today,
lots of people got drunk.
The restaurant was so liable
they didn’t notice a lot of things–
they made so much racket
about the kids sneaking drinks in the foyer
and the mother screaming in the bathroom
that they didn’t see me
snatching party favors from the tables
as I passed them by with my tray.
In the bus station,
I had so many things stockpiled
all plastic and festive
I could have shut down Party City
for three days.
I left with my pockets stuffed.
Everyone was drunk
and inattentive.
I got candy and flowers and
tiny champagne bubble bottles
and necklaces and bead strings and
a whole bottle of wine
that I hid partially in my sock.
I didn’t kiss anyone at all
at midnight.
I’m saving my celebration
for you.
To a man whom I know has never once heard of Okkervil River because he would have played them for me until three years later I wished them all dead
A man asked me to a party yesterday and so I went. We drank lots of rum and had lots of fun and of all our conversations, we never once mentioned love, and that was really okay with me.
We went to coffee and the cake was sweet and I drank tea even though I know I once told you a long time ago I hated it. I didn’t hate it. It was okay.
And then when everything was going fine but Big Decision time was upon us, he smiled or at least I think he did (the lights around us were awfully dim), he asked me if I’d like to go home with him, and then I did.
In bed the next morning, we neglected all we had to do that day to smoke cigarettes and talk about work and we said neither of us ever wanted to get married and we decided then and there that that, more than anything else, was perfectly okay.
I wanted to write a letter to you telling you I’d met somebody new and knew you’d never read it. I listened to a song instead, a song I know you haven’t heard and that I wanted to tell you about because I thought it might mean a lot to you, but I didn’t, and it won’t. It will mean a lot to me, some time. Then again maybe it won’t. Maybe it won’t. That’s okay, I think. I didn’t used to think so, but now I do.
The flashbulbs of the cameras blink on and out like the eyes of an angel, stars that die in the darkness with their own kind, and no mention of the glory, no wonderous pop of the Roman Candles or children dancing in the street to the music of the golden. Arms reach out of the sky and shake you. Suddenly you’re drowning and you cough a bit. Your best friend slaps you and you’re back now. The pain in your chest, in your face is real. You’re weirdly aware of your parents watching.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” your best friend asks. Still impossible to separate Jesus from his father.
You mumble.
“This is no time to fuck around,” he says. “We’ve been sweating and cursing and working all this time for this. I’ve busted my ass for you and now you want to quit?”
You mumble. Stars in the eyes. Flowers bleeding. The roads of the Milky Way taken over by pirates.
“God shined his ass on all of us and nobody gives a shit,” he says to no one.
No room for comprehension in these parts. The sheriff is looking for Lazarus and these people are looking for a show. Remember that story he told you about failure, the best of heroes all magnanimous in defeat. On your feet, the ground is leaden. Your opponent is a beast, snarling, growling, the teeth in the jaws all tiny mirrors. They wipe the sweat and the blood from your brow and you move forward with eyes open and hands gigantic. Keep your shoulders square, keep your feet and your brain moving. Fun and love, he tells you. If we all keep that in mind, that’s what this will be. Fun and love.
Your fists, you find, connect with nothing. Stars pop like flashbulbs, like fireworks. Alone in the backyard, in the park, been drinking. The beast a dog, a dog with mirrors for teeth, wagging his tail back and forth, back and forth, a hairy propeller coursing like blood cells through the night.
Tragedy today at the restaurant. Mandatory meeting day, covering all of the major possibilities of tragedy: blood-borne pathogens, sexual harassment, peanut allergies. There were tests that we all magically got 100% on. The manager tried to get us to do the wave to build our sense of unity and teamwork and as a unified team, we all remained in our seats, arms in our laps. I still consider her a failure. I made a list of terrible things I could call my superiors based on the sexual harassment lesson, my favorite being “Penetration Hazard,” for the woman with vicious-looking heels and vicious-looking eyes who constantly complains about my unkempt appearance and the surly manner in which I clean the coffee station. Her name shall be PH for short.
Everything was going as well as could be expected, until the fire drill. Like middle schoolers, we filed in an orderly fashion (some of us screaming, most of us pissed) out the back door, down the long stairwell and out into the freezing air, whereupon we were instructed to continue across the street to a park in which stood a white gazeebo. And that’s when everything went wrong.
In the food service industry, whether you are front of the house or back of the house, it is fairly safe to assume that at least 90% of the people you work with smoke, drink, do drugs, and cheat on their spouses, or at least will, with the right alchemy. That is not to say that food service people do not have morals, just that they possess morals which are different from, say, people who got their masters in Library Science, and while there may be one or two in the bunch who will flatly refuse to participate in one or even all of these activities, you can rest assured that they will be useless when you need them the most, too vocal when you need them the least, and will take advantage of the high rate of turnover, leaving in disgust at the rest of you before the berries that garnish the milk custard have even gone out of season. I am not at all surprised that the gazeebo caught fire. In fact, I am surprised that it did not happen in any of the years prior. What disgusts me was the lack of a back-up plan, the utter unpreparedness for our Meeting Place in the Event of a Fire (MPEF) also catching fire.
There had been a few of us, who were not for the record anywhere near the fire at its onset, who had been asking each other, fearfully, what if the gazeebo catches fire? What then, Chad? What will we do then? and here it was, for we had had such foresight but our managers had not, and we stood there, smoking our cigarettes at a safe distance while our bright-eyed and once-smiling new-hires complained of singed faces, having taken our suggestion to light their cigarettes on the burning structure (go ahead, do it, Sam, it’ll be badass) and paid for such wisdom dearly. While the fire department was called from contraband cellphones (the owners later written up for having them on while on company time), we talked about going to get a drink and where and a few of us pulled flasks from the insides of our coats, most of the providers the ones already in the restaurant’s uniforms, and we stood in the cold, getting warmer by the fire and the whiskey, saying oh what a world, what a world, while our managers ran back and forth in frustration, and the wiser of us giggled about the irony. We were having such a merry time of it that very few people noticed that the ongoing traffic had taken out a couple of our food-runners and that the pasta ladies had fled the scene after the first mention of police.
After the fire was extinguished, the injured food-runners and trainees taken to the emergency room and the pasta ladies and bartenders rounded up from a nearby tavern, we were all given time to sober up and come down before our shifts were to start at 4. I ate the sandwich I had brought in the event of the company lunch being terrible (as it often was) and told my manager that I was going to take off for a bit. He waved his hand and rolled his eyes and I left without any more questions. In the book store up the street, I took a seat by a window in the cafe and sipped on my warm coffee while the wind blew everything everywhere and the sky darkened in the threat of rain. I caught a glimpse of one of the servers in another part of the restaurant, a server I had become a little smitten with. I put the book up over my face and chose a seat impossible to view from his. I settled back down again, put on my sunglasses and stared hard out the window until he left. The great thing about days like this is that I always feel grateful, so insanely fucking grateful, not to be in love with anyone.
Ah, there it is. There is nothing as sad and dangerous and beautiful as Cicero at night. Noir was bled from you, Darling. The green and black blurs of the night, everything neon and cancerous, everything light, silent glowing emperor of my own spine. I have seen you, your incandescence in the evening time, like a mermaid city or the suburbs of one, tiny bejeweled shell buried in the sand of the outskirts. You lay just out of reach of the sleeping factory beasts and black rusted bridges that are their tails, your eyes like oil slicks in the bar parking lot, blinking out only when the sun rises.
