jack_babalon | Et in Arcadia Ego Trip

I've been hiding in a quiet place for the last week. A buddy of mine called me recently and asked me to house sit for him while he and his were out of town. For my efforts I would be paid in bricks of golden solitude, a full refrigerator, a well stocked bar, the use of his wide screen TV and a fifty dollar bill that was already spent on comic books the moment it hit my wallet.

I agreed with a speed that saw my bags packed before he hung up the phone.

However I quickly discovered that I had certain duties to be performed in my stay that went beyond the mindless wasting of his utilities and vigilant occupation of his couch. These included the following: The feeding of his three ravenous beasts of dogs who live off a diet of raw hamburger meat mixed with a splash of cheap whiskey, the nursing of his wife's aristocratically senile cat (who now believes herself to be the reincarnation of Rasputin's third cat - 'Miss Butterpaws'), the daily lighting of votives in front of the John Wayne Memorial Shrine that has been erected in his toolshed, the reading of poetry to the roses in his garden during the sunset hours (they dig Whitman the best he insists but I read them Ginsberg anyways), the occasional game of Spades to be played with the silent ghost who 'lives' in the Sun Room, singing Broadway show tunes to the fish in his minature pond whenever it rained, the cleaning of his pool every other day - a task that includes the use of a harpoon gun, a shark cage, a diving suit and the donning of a necklace made of plastic seashells and an old Aquaman action figure tied to a fishing wire (this last item supposedly provides a totemic protection against an animal called the 'Kraken Toad' that occasionally makes its nest in the deep end of swimming pools in suburban Arcadia) and finally, most importantly, to ensure that his home would under no circumstances be used to shoot low budget cowboy porn ...again.

So it went.

In my spare time, when my tasks hadn't rendered me too wounded to do otherwise, I would sit in his cavernous basement, huddled over the second draft of my novel, chain smoking Buddha Cigarettes with an IV of coffee percolating a main line into my veins. This was to keep me both going forward and from going insane. I would break late at night to watch old Johnny Quest cartoons on Boomerang or to read Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories - The Elephant Vanishes - that I had accompanied by a Brian Eno soundtrack playing off the surround sound. Around three or four I would stagger off to the guest room, crawl into bed with Vee (who generously agreed to keep me company in my self-exile from Terminus) and without fail find that my thoughts would sharpen into an unbearable clarity the moment I turned off the lights to sleep. I would just lay there, for a time that could have been either counted in hours or minutes, listening to the sounds wafting through an opened window: The stray rain tapping along the roof, the wind crackle-rustle through the drooping trees, the love serenades of stray Tom's from the unmowed lawn and once, on a Wednesday dawn, to someone screaming from down the block in the park. Inevitably I would slip into dream before the first light. Around noon the three dogs would get me up with a little routine their owner calls 'the Guantanamo Alarm Clock'. I would let them out into the backyard to pee and engage in a brief squirrel hunt while I would eat a breakfast of frosted cereal with melted mint chocolate chip ice-cream as a substitute for milk (ice cream being cheaper than milk now and tastier... thank you impending food crisis) and then I'd slip into the diving suit to begin anew the loop of chores. Then back to the novel, that I discovered had begun writing itself at one point... finding the author to be of so little help as to be almost a hinderance to its efforts to be finally free of the prison of my imagination.

All in all I had a great time and why not? What could be more relaxing than to vacation in another man's dream home? Where all the work has been done for you, the bills paid without a glance at them and to find that there is nothing to do but engage in the noble art of Doing Nothing.

So it went from last Friday to this morning.

Back in the Witch house now, back on the Indra-net casting drowsy penny-thoughts into the collective electric wishing well. My hermetic seal broken and the word genii spilling into a stain across the flying carpert mind. Back not where I belong, but simply where I happen to be... home.