#235

Crazy thing, just going through the process. Fuckin wakin up. Time after time you wake up, even after the nights you sweat into your sheets thinking there's no way, there's no way, these are my last hours of being alive and to sleep is to enter unbeing oblivion. You wake up and a cat wants something, or a lover, or you're alone and no one wants anything, and you have time to sit and have your first thoughts or you have to jump and start and let the thoughts trickle as they may through the business of movement. Thinking is all you're really good for, you suspect, have for some time, but the world demands movement of you as it does of every extant thing within its bounds, is itself never ever still. You think of a book by a physiologist who wrote in his book about other physiologists who believed that the purpose of organic life, of evolution, of time, is to create poses through movement, that the universe is a vast series of perfect frames, countless fractals of bodies in motion for no other reason than to be in motion. That the universe is dance, set to music more huge and complete than anyone but God could hear in all its fullness. Then you brush your teeth, if you're in the right place in life to remember that you gotta brush your teeth and the ability to follow through on the thought. Maybe you don't brush your teeth, maybe you just open a beer or go straight to work. Maybe you turn over and fuck somebody first, or leave them to their sleep after a kiss and murmurs. Having sex is the time of no thoughts, a time when the physiologists who speak of frames are perhaps most correct. Impressions, adjustments, convulsions, sensations. Only after do thoughts come, usually unwelcome, sometimes exalted. Leaving someone in bed is a little grief, a little practice for goodbye forever. But you leave when you leave, always early, to be the first student at the school building and relish to yourself the functionless but massive power that comes with that accomplishment, or to be early enough to work to leave early or work your full shift and tack an extra hour on the week by the end of it. Just to be early. Doesn't really matter, being late or on time, but the instinct and compulsion is to be early. Early to your own funeral? Even this is compelling, and so more than likely your first cigarette is smoked before seven in the morning, probably before six. Soon as you can make the space for it, at any rate. And whether you smoke four or nine or nineteen or twenty-four more, more than likely they will be smoked in the space before something, some phone call or task or appointment, using the time made available by being early. Smoking weed follows many of the same principles. Drinking distorts time, differently than dropping acid or eating shrooms, differently again the way tobacco and caffeine and weed do, but at any rate you perform time magic, with all these and with your friend's prescription methamphetamines, with video games, with typing and scribbling, with kicking rocks along the sidewalk you contort the time around yourself to fit your needs and you call it trying to get close to something like freedom and you think about freedom a lot, about infinite multiverses, about mistakes made and in the current offing, about the litany of failures that run a crooked line through your life, about how stupid crazy it is that you're still alive, still pulling in breath after breath and that muscle in your chest spinning your lifeblood flex after flex, step after step, looking up at the sky and considering the infinite, staring at the ground gnawing on some stupid brainbone. How much flight, how many minutes and gallons of fuel, how many explosions taken place within an internal combustion engine to get you to where you're standing now? When is the rent due in relation to the next paycheck? Where do you have to be next? Are you going to bother showing up? Is right now a good time to bomb everything, forget it all, quit the job, sever every tie you can and jettison yourself into a random horizon? Are you going to stick with what's going on right now? Are things level, or are they haywire? Are you in denial about either situation? Is it always both? Are questions fundamentally stupid? Are answers? Who cares?

Ah, who cares. The best question. The one that always makes me feel better right away, and lets me shut up for a little while.

--JL