The morning comes. There is a quiet alertness, the light outside too focused and violent from the fires, the noises in the house at a stalemate in mime competitions. The only logical choice in music is Dido at full bass. For the moment I feel removed from myself--a fairly pleasant dispossession. It all approximates a 20-something night out, more a cauldron of possibilities than a crystal of limitations.

Over the course of hours I wend my tongue along a volume control knob. Do I rake against the striations, or wrap wholesale around the polypropelyne beast?

I am a thrift store stocking silence; I am undivided in sheer fragmentation; I am poised to stroke the bald stomachs of turgid hallucinations sporting horns and dopamine. I've checked the itinerary for when the fuck God is supposed to get off on this train stop. Maybe He/She/It/They said 205th instead of Grand Central; then again, who the hell hears God correctly?

The worst part about living in your happy custom-fit box is that it's cardboard. Things gnaw through: obscure pager hits from shit you'd forgotten about, postal packages, night terrors, conscience. That's the irony of sealing; knock on the ground and ask the dead sometime.

The trick is to dramatize these breaches of security, to write a play about it all, to collect these occurences into a cohesive plot and become the star in the process. This is not sarcasm. We love good stories, charities and lost causes. This is not always a bad thing. We see shrapnel-shrouded angels holding misery on high like an Oscar, embracing and lacerating friends and starved puppies alike...yet sometimes we just see lonely people walking long roads, the morning mist still heavy, their feet obscured. This is not a cry for help by anyone; it is either counter-productive adoration or misdirected seething hatred--also counter-productive.

I bring this up, in essence, because I'm occasionally reminded of what I choose to ignore/deny. People don't do this so much for/to me. Today it was smelling the woodsmoke from a fire as I hiked around the mountain. Some days it's been feeling bedsheets. Some days it just happens. To say it doesn't bother you sometimes is like denying you have skin. Longing is just a pitbull that sometimes bites your ass.

So I just don't bother to fight it. It's that whole cardboard box irony thing again, I think. You can fight against the shit that tries to burrow into you, but then that just feeds the beast; that's counter-productive. If you genuinely accept what you ignore, however, whatever is burrowing has no resistance to push against. For those four-legged hangers-on in your life: suddenly their cause ceases to be a crusade of all-consuming desire; their pet project--you--stops being a challenge to direct their resources at; their own dramatic plot twists can't incorporate you into their Joe Millionaire on Broadway delusions of grandeur.

I speak from experience: I used to be a burrower like that.

Now I just walk where I want to walk, through the mist or a mini-mall, with or without company--and nowadays without any complications.

You miss these complications sometimes...but the circle keeps on turning...and you forget, you recover, you endure.

Your ass heals.

----

Speaking entirely in obscure metaphors gets me hungry like a mofo. I'm going to chow.

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