It’s too bright in this damn room for clear thoughts, but who am I kidding those aren’t coming anyway. Another Saturday night of waiting for that bastard phone to light up with some kind of message, some digital little blinks that hold the potential of immediate happiness. 7:44 never seemed late to me, I like to procrastinate, but where could she be? Will she even call? Does she know that I’ve been squashing my own insane impulses to dial her up and tell her that all I’ve been thinking about during the week is seeing her tonight?
Of course I would never say that to her, no time for romantics in this era of crazies and cold steel realists. Everything else feels like a bruise with a thumb pressing down on it. I don’t want to talk about the future or about a career or money or anything anymore. I want to be in love without being sabotaged by my own head, I want to stop thinking that doom is right around the corner, I want to stop hearing that little taunt that, sooner or later, this is all going to crash and that there is no way anyone is ever going to be interested in you. Be on your guard, summon all the manic energy you can to stay interesting enough for them not to forget you, because ultimately, being forgotten is the saddest thing you can be isn’t it?
Distraction is my friend, distraction will make all these seconds ticking by seem like nothing, but I can’t shake this mercury feeling in my spine that this is where it all goes south, that there will be no happy ending here, that I was fooling myself when I started to think “finally” and all those things that people in the movies think when they find someone they click with. Oh you horrible fool.
And here comes the morbid black thoughts of a man going out of his wits, fantasizing about everything he can do to destroy himself and wondering how people will talk about him when he’s gone. No widow, no kids, just a lot of mad scribblings in notebooks and unfinished word files. Full heads of steam that started off with the promise of pages and pages, three acts, maybe some twist endings, maybe redemption, but none of them ever finished really.
Oh well. The time ticks by and nothing, nothing to pull me away from this wordy rant, to leave it unfinished with all the rest of them. Tonight I’m leaning towards drinking whiskey with the windows open and listening to Doors vinyl while the newborn spring breezes creep into my head. Thoughts of driving up to Paterson and sipping drinks with Evan Toth or running out Haledon and talking over the crowd buzz with Tyler at the Sheppard and the Knucklehead rush to mind. Things that make you feel better about everything for a while.
Tales of old Jack Kerouac holed up in his New Jersey home writing in long scrolls about what probably seemed like jibberish on paper but made sense to him gives me a kind of vague hope that maybe I’m not nuts. Or that maybe if I am at least I’m not the only one.
8:00 now. Prime time. No show yet. Oh what to do when that carnival noise starts.
