Dispatch Absurdia

We get tres Elroy, my Virtue Victoria and I. Call her up drunk and deliver dispatches terse. Her half awake, half dressed, that breathless tone of voice, that remote authority indecent that drives me wow-wild-on-fire.

"So yeah, Ari came by to pick me up for Contemptula's birthday party..."

"Which one's Ari again?" She yawns morning bird of prey she is middle of the night calls are still a price of our relationship she's still working off, "He the one that looks like Riker?"

"That's Kid Hemingway."

"Oh," Her cat purrs through the phone next to her, awake now in the middle of the night, "right, Ari's the one who looks like a cross between Louie C.K. and Allen Ginsberg. So which one's Contemptula, again?"

"Magpie's long-distance bette noir."

"And you only call her that because you hit on her and got shot down."

"..."

"It's okay, I know how you imaginative you can be when vindictive." Her cat purrs by the phone, shift of sheets, strange cell phone echo. "Did you have a good time anyway?"

"Yeah, it was kind of cool. I've been cooped up working on the Halloween Burlesque the last month... Black Sabbath and Slayer diet... felt like I was 16 again."

"You know you love it..."

"I do indeed, my love... but point being I forgot how much I missed them."

"Who?" She giggles knowing damn full well who I mean.

"You know who."

"No... tell me."

Sigh. "My... allies."

"Your who?"

"My friends..." For her only I whisper.

"Aw... you love your friends so much."

"My friends are dead or far away, Babe."

"Save it for Facebook, tough guy."

Sigh.

And so it goes, this brief period after a long project is filed complete and I'm left wondering if it will just vanish into limbo (oh my Jack Parsons rock opera, oh my Lovecraftian pulp) or y'know... become something outside of me. Something real. Something someone outside of my head sees, feels - inspiration, joy or contempt - but alive in that moment when art becomes the experience rather than the backdrop. So for now, ecstatic, relieved, yet tempered by that nervousness that comes when only one shoe has dropped.

I tell her as such.

"You want so very much to be a part of something and to stand apart from everyone at the same time." She tells me as water runs in the background, bathroom cup of water, swallow of asprin, splash of water on face. "Contradiction makes for fun fiction but a sad biography."

Lighter fish, flame, cigarette drag, deep breath of nicotine and open up. "No, I want to make something bigger than any one person can make... but I don't know how to navigate other people to make that happen."

"That's not true, I've watched you out on the town. You make people laugh..."

"People often laugh at the social cue offered, not the quality of the humor presented." I remind her, wondering once again why I don't liquor at the Hace.

"Uh-huh..."

"They're just being nice, s'all."

"Uh-huh..."

"It doesn't matter..."

"Except you woke me up to talk about it."

"Except for that, my love..."

And the cat purrs in her lap some 100 and change miles away.

We talk some more. We laugh. We confess. We spill and we give until we hang up.

Now I sit here buzzed in my portable fortress of solitude.

Listening to Scotland the Brave on Youtube because talking to her makes me want to listen to bagpipes. I don't know why, either, she just has that affect on me ( or effect, Grammar Nazis Assemble).

Anyway, dispatch filed and open to the public until probably tomorrow deleted. It's a weird thing to have the Word in my hands again, especially when for my sad-drunken-secret-orgiastic-future-yearning-heart it alone serves.

Oh, how I miss being the man I never was.