rdking.net

I did not want to leave my city. I did not feel it necessary or even correct to flee any of the accomodations, trials, dilemmas I had inherited at birth. Murky business, or love—I hoped to see no difference. I was caught in that thing that contained me and saw no reason to become a refugee on a country lane. Besides, it seemed more appropriate that I should be one among seven million. Among seven million. It was an obvious sanctuary.

So I read various books. I practiced various practices. In groups, at private homes, in numerous houses of worship, hotel rooms, rented halls, in plushly furnished offices at sixty dollars an hour I spoke with men, authorized men, who sometimes chatted, sometimes chanted, sometimes praised certain ways of devotion—arts and sciences.

Possessing wisdom in the most intricate of manners, they assured me. I could achieve this; I could discontinue that. I could transcend and become nothing, or everything. I was fortunate to have the time, inclination, and money to be promised anything, offered anything. It was all very agreeable and serious, in some cases documented, for which I thanked them in earnest.

The clumination of what I attempted to learn is this: what I thought I wanted, what I thought I needed, what I felt was merely the most appropriate routine to be asked of me was simply the accomplishment of a raptureless abandon. A tensile yet established energy, organized and sensible as a magnet. I wanted to blanket the situation, volatile or not. I wanted to act, respond, and react in just refusals, just acceptance, just accomplice.

But I don't sleep well, or I don't sleep at all unless it's in her arms and she's still awake. I can close the curtains and the city lights shoot right through the curtains. I can see my own privacy and move back from the window to where it begins. I've begun to think of it as a different geometry—cubic, with its own walleyed assumptions, corrective equations.

Or I can stand in the living room, pressing against the plate-glass where there are no curtains, and watch the traffic stalled on the freeway below. Headlights and taillights. Incoming and outgoing. Mad-purpose or unsuspecting. Dream-target or itinerant. Adjective and antonym.

I can face that freeway and understand it has a multitude of faces with eyes locked on dreams, destinations, road signs, with eyes that have the glow of resolve, of design or desire or purpose—the mind in transit. And perhaps one of those faces is facing up to me, as I pour another glass of California wine and realize that face may not be on the freeway. So I think about the grapes someone is pressing for me. The random wait. The casual possession.

I shall be a casualty of nervous wear and tear. Although it will earn another name, I shall move toward obsolesence. I will suffer from chronic and often joyous over-consumption. I will drive and get tickets, tickets to game shows. I will crave transit and the off-chance and the right place at the wrong time. I too am a contestant—tempted, disdaining and frayed, willing as often as not.

So I return to reading Ionesco in braille—my eyes are rarely impressed, too dazed or bloodshot from juggling ecstasy and dirt. My fingers push along the impressions, tips calloused from guitar strings—my mascara shiny in the heat.