Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist
Nov. 22nd, 2015 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonThunder rolling from the mountain, that's how I arrive back in town, disembarking from the Greyhound after being canned for two hours with the other slices of Third World Murica. Sat next to a woman who felt relaxed enough in my company to kick off her sneakers and curl up into a ball with bruised bare feet pressed against the seat in front of her. Meanwhile the space barbarian war chief that, after a most gruesome and violent death, had reincarnated into the baby behind me screamed out the last memories of her bloody conquests. As for the man sitting in the seat directly across the aisle, he seems to content to whisper apologies and death-threats into a candy bar doubling for his phone.
I close my eyes, reach a few hours back through the growing south between us, and snatch at the Space Wifey's kiss goodbye at the station. Adjacent to us is an unmanned prisoner transport van, its driver watching us without care along with my future fellow passengers. But something always pulls me back north into the now. So I stare out the window, watch cold highway sunlight sparking between the last flames of autumn foliage clinging to the skeletal trees. The weight of her absence always heaviest the first few days I prep for melancholy ops and take the dollar store horror around me in rolled eye silence.
Ah, but then the bus takes a turn onto 85 and after a few minutes it begins. The first signs of graffiti bubble out across the husks of abandoned buildings lining the asphalt shores. NOPE! SEVER! HENSE! The forests fades into clusters of strip malls, apartment blocks, empty lots, garages, cluttered porches dead lawns, wing shacks, countless doors concealing the wonder and tragedy of everyday life. Then she rises up before us through the front window and if I see this view a thousand times it instills no less a charge of electric magick than it did the first time. My skyline nowhere near as vast or as packed as the one I was born under but just as strong, just as defiant, born like London from the flames, born like the old West from the rails she launched, born like all the great cities of the world on hope and horror.
So yes, it's thunder rolling from the mountain when I step off the bus, here where they sell drugs down the block from the very jail they put you in for selling drugs, where the solider stands with a fatigue equally valiant as the single mother nursing her baby behind him on line, where the couple huddle against the odds even as their child dance victorious amongst the luggage. Here where tragedies, absurdities, fuck-ups, adventures begin and end unseen a thousand times a day. Here, where I made my stand against the past and gambled on being one day able to tell a great story knowing that even if I should fail I would have lived a great one in the process.
I close my eyes, reach a few hours back through the growing south between us, and snatch at the Space Wifey's kiss goodbye at the station. Adjacent to us is an unmanned prisoner transport van, its driver watching us without care along with my future fellow passengers. But something always pulls me back north into the now. So I stare out the window, watch cold highway sunlight sparking between the last flames of autumn foliage clinging to the skeletal trees. The weight of her absence always heaviest the first few days I prep for melancholy ops and take the dollar store horror around me in rolled eye silence.
Ah, but then the bus takes a turn onto 85 and after a few minutes it begins. The first signs of graffiti bubble out across the husks of abandoned buildings lining the asphalt shores. NOPE! SEVER! HENSE! The forests fades into clusters of strip malls, apartment blocks, empty lots, garages, cluttered porches dead lawns, wing shacks, countless doors concealing the wonder and tragedy of everyday life. Then she rises up before us through the front window and if I see this view a thousand times it instills no less a charge of electric magick than it did the first time. My skyline nowhere near as vast or as packed as the one I was born under but just as strong, just as defiant, born like London from the flames, born like the old West from the rails she launched, born like all the great cities of the world on hope and horror.
So yes, it's thunder rolling from the mountain when I step off the bus, here where they sell drugs down the block from the very jail they put you in for selling drugs, where the solider stands with a fatigue equally valiant as the single mother nursing her baby behind him on line, where the couple huddle against the odds even as their child dance victorious amongst the luggage. Here where tragedies, absurdities, fuck-ups, adventures begin and end unseen a thousand times a day. Here, where I made my stand against the past and gambled on being one day able to tell a great story knowing that even if I should fail I would have lived a great one in the process.