Monday, February 6, 2012

Samuel Beckett walks out of the Wallgreens


There are not enough words in the dictionary to get across those areas of emotion that, while lacking the full force and heat of feelings that have bubbled up like lava from some formerly dormant crater none the less make your week a series of textured anxieties. The magazine stands you pass in the drug store remind you of a lover from college who has since found her own life and lost herself in the process, the prescription you're picking up in the pharmacy has a trace of your mother's voice instructing to close the kitchen door, the daylight you walk back into, the parking lot you enter, the car alarms that are sounding off in a variety of tandem duets all make you feeling that something is missing, as if lost. Or perhaps it's more like that there was nothing there to start with, merely a rumor of what this existence is worth, a poetry disguised as metaphysical certainty. 

There is no one word in the dictionary to tell you what that is, as everything is slowly revealed to be a fabric of definitions, each word and concept in the definition crystallized by yet another set of definitions. Yes, all the cars in the parking lot look alike, and the skyline resembles the profile of every other decent and deteriorating city you've ever been to, craggy cement and brick skyscrapers being hustled by sleek glass spheres and spires, each edifice and building material holding as story about  the builder's preference, apologies of choices made for the general good and the attempt to bring something back to the  cities that commerce , eroded tradition and ugly names for bath oils and fruit salad rolls ushered from our consideration, the only demonstrable reason  being the only word that requires no concordance, no explanation beyond a hand gesture toward a back pocket, it is money, it is that thing we occasionally call currency in our more precious moments , it is current, it is right now, it is what can be used in transactions that will change the landscape, the language, the neighborhoods at the present moment.  History is useless deadwood and the future never arrives. 

You put the medicine in your pocket, you look for car keys, you look at people at the bus stop nearby discussing something heatedly, with large, over sized gestures, movements of arms and hands to illustrate explosions and a fist to an invisible jaw. It is the conversations you can't hear that are the loudest ones you remember.

1 comment:

  1. Lucky Pozzo3:34 PM PST

    Somewhere between the rows of liquid dish soap and the discounted bags of Doritos you are seized with an epiphany that electrifies you from cranium to coccyx and the sheer immensity of the product panoply bifurcates, no, quadfircates the mind into constituent parts of consumer and consumed like a squirrel in an exercise wheel staring straight into his own sphincter in colloquium with centrifugal desire and fulfillment until you tumble down Aisle 8 past the racks of Archie’s Digest and Doublemint Triple-Pacs careening into the gum machine, a swollen bubble-brain of hard-centered happiness, round, fixed, certain as Alpha and Omega, the cheap chew at the end of all wisdom, and you without five figgin cents…..

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