Head On Down the Highway

Hard work and a modest amount of prosperity generally mean that from time-to-time, he feels he must pay the devil her due. It’s a sacred tradition for him. On his own, after dark, he plots a course. Fulfilling the mission is now just a shadow of its former self which has disappeared into the depths of his subconscious. There it happily keeps company with all the obvious desires of the young at heart.

These days, his needs are sustained by a familiar voice which is impossible to ignore because it insists, “there’s what’s right and there’s what’s fair!” He has earned the right to be here tonight, to parade around town his store house of sublimated desires. If later he is to be held accountable, he will claim that he was in fact being true—true to himself. As for loyalty, frankly speaking, it has always been and will always be a sentiment that he and his secrets have complicitly ignored.

Time was the anticipation of the act outpaced the thing itself; then the thing replaced anticipation when it became an art form and every act was an attempt to re-create a masterpiece; then, much later in life, it ceased to be art when the thing was widely available by the truckloads and at reasonable rates.

Typically, these days, if he finds her, he finds that she is a woman relatively mature in age. She's taken on board as much for her needs as well as for his. 

This act can be as simple as a kiss or as complicated as, well, as complicated as a woman.

The Wind Is Risin', Leaves Tremblin' on the Tree

I awake from my post-flight nap and belong to the night, my stomach hungry for grilled chicken on a stick, my amorphous, magical tackle, a vigorously misguided fallacy of needs. I’m up for a familiar, long meandering walk from soi to soi, rubbing elbows with the sidewalk merchants of Sukhumvit, cold beer in hand, pharmacology on the brain and Aphrodite by my side, again steering me clear of the honorable questions, and keeping me from running aground on imperfect answers.

I have a gift for separating me into two parts; the “me” who thinks that discipline offers me nothing of any real value and the “me” too terrified to admit that it is everything.

Principles and integrity become the flotsam and jetsam of my dead-in-the-water ideals as all concepts of right and wrong become vagaries, all now well beyond their sell-by dates and are therefore as irredeemable as I am.

I may never get to know the One on a first name basis, but I can amuse myself, his creatures of the evening and share a part of my good fortune in exchange for some flimsy excuse for a fusion of mind and flesh. I believe psychiatrists refer to this sort of rationalization as delusional. But. So what? Sooner or later, Gabriel will be a’ blowing smoke rings in my face, and when that time comes and I finally have no more points I’d like to make; no home to abandon or return to, I will have to admit quite casually that I purposefully and without regret have long evaded all of my end time preparatory duties. I've been busy.

These times, those times, that time, this time--never has there ever been a right time for me to put my disordered affairs in order because all times have always been the right time for me to indulge in the  interest of my best of times. So year after year I devote myself to the passivity of Weltschmerz management during my allocation of valued down time when I visit neighborhoods of familiar sites, sounds and fragrances, places where I have a talent for wasting time.

Looky here. What it is, is that all of it comes down to the needs of just one, unprincipled but marginally risk-free individual. What’s so fucking hard to understand about that? Losing collective values is a complex undertaking and it is a lot of work. So I have my own set of values and ideals which I have collected from my own epiphanies and  ethereal hunches and OK, maybe there is an untarnished communal truth out there somewhere, but I am sure it is none the worse for my never knowing it.