Runway Caddy

You! the revenge seeker. were you actually bullied? or just not hailed? did they actually seek your downfall? or did it look more like this: they talk polite with you. they look around while they talk and their body points elsewhere. somebody else walked by, they made an excuse. you hear laughter across the room. were you excluded? you waited for somebody to formally invite you.

Revenge seeker, I know this: the only way you have fun is to feel like someone’s king. to have them describe you with powerful words, the words people use in the books you read. books are better, you think. books are more real. in books they use superlatives. in real life they just say, “that’s nice”.

you deride them for being insincere. you watch them closely. they laugh too quick, then back to frowning. how could that be joy? then sadness. so quick! like realty tv. it must be a farce. it must be a farce. and their intimacy is forced. yours, it unwinds over the course of an evening. yours is proclaimed. for them? nobody gasped. no cameras cut.

you can show the same clip of a housing project on facebook, with two different soundtracks: a cheery one and a hopeless one. the comments look different, much different. the commenters themselves blissfully unaware that it’s the music they selected for, not the image. it’s the music.

have you considered it’s the music you hear in your head, which makes the books you read so much better than real life? have you considered, I sound insincere because I say “i love you” without a soundtrack that proclaims: it’s that time! i say “i need you” without a held gaze at 3 AM. i have fun even if it wont go in the guiness records, in the craziest night alive. have you considered, the superlatives you crave arent real? theyre soundtracks, fake. me and my insincere reality stars, happy on a dime

and who is God, then? does God be, or does God do? God is a realty star. you’re miserable, revenge seeker. God is happy on a dime. God is the story you can do. the territory, behind the soundtracks and simulations

Now I shall tell the story of Nenen, who is wonderful in this way: though living a dry life, he stands with a smile, tells many jokes, and stirs many laughs. Surrounded by nincompoops, betrayers of trust, fast talkers, and doers of evil, Nenen remembers not what commands they push and pull him through.

What can be said about Nenen is that every evening, for two or three hours at a time, he disappears into the mist on the shore of the lake. One of the local kids, determined to discover the irreplicable source of Nenen’s happiness, reports Nenen in one of the caves along the water. The child, hoping to catch Nenen in sin, to prove his degeneracy like the rest of them, hides against the cave walls, listening in. He reports to the town later:

Nenen, every evening, slinks off to the cave to talk to another man. That man is Nenen’s mirror: nothing happens to Nenen that his mirror does not repeat, because every night the two of them share everything. The Nenen in the cave contains all the jokes and the stories that Nenen tells, but also his mind’s quirks and desires, the pianos he plays to impress. Nenen knows that each of his actions are simultaneously his own and his mirror’s. He carries himself with the dignity of doing everything for someone else, and his self awareness keeps him from succumbing a single moment to the base evils he lives around.

The only happy man in an unhappy town, Nenen whistles while he walks, and children covered in soot throw rocks at him, yelling to shut up, while a feral dog rolls over to die. To Nenen, the derision and denigration do not matter, only that derision and denigration to his mirror. In the mirror, every sleight is inverted.

A product of traitors, yet un-treacherous, the town whispers of him behind his back. Was his form given by the desires of his community? Some unconscious craving for respectability they all share? Or did this image of a happy life grow spontaneously?

An elder concludes:
“It is pointless trying to decide if Nenen is better than us, because Nenen was raised the same. As a child, he fought the other kids, spat on his parents, flayed wild animals, hunted the streets for the weak and the vulnerable in hope he could take advantage.”

It is only after finding his mirror that Nenen began to smile. His desires found form. The townspeople see Nenen and do not imagine what is possible, because they have never had a mirror; they have never had a friend. They see a freak.

For Hephum, a great man, the thoughts in his head are strangers.

Hephum in His Youth
In his youth, Hephum walks out of his way to pass the rich bar pretending to be a poor bar. On its windows the bar hangs a sign for local, cheap beer. Hephum peers into the window, eyes darting to inconsistencies: the bouncer checks IDs in a suit; the bartender is conspicuously hot, the laughter conspicuously melodic. A young man in jeans leans back on his hips and does not notice when a new group of people walks in.

At each scene, Hephum imagines 1000 things about the people: conversations which could have happened, arguments, fights, laughter, sex. But no thought sticks around: images mix for a moment then dart away, seeking other minds.

Two Close Friends
Two close friends share stories of their respective office places. “And then she called me Stephanie again even though she KNOWS I go by Steph. So finally I responded, ‘Who?’, and she never messed it up again.”

They talk for awhile….
“Look everybody is friends at work; we eat lunch as friends; we get drinks as friends. And so when two people aren’t liked at work they know that because they are excluded.”

“Oh for me — we’re not friends at work until I see that you’re useful.”

The friends talk and talk. For the friends, the words are strangers. At each moment, they imagine 1000 things to say: how that meeting was totally unfair, jokes, stories, pressures. But no words stick around: sentences blend for a moment, and then they float away, seek other ears.

Hephum
Hephum thinks “I hate basketball, because I don’t know how to tie my shoes”. In the rain, thoughts cross his mind: empires are created, fights are fought, orgies are fucked. All without any project undertaken. Hepuhm is wise because he abandons everything; every thought is a stranger. It comes so suddenly and disappears so quickly.

People come to Hephum because they are strangers to him and he is a stranger to himself.

Two coworkers come to Hephum for his advice on a conniving, plotting bitch. He responds: “Talk until the words don’t mean anything. Dream your dreams until they are as common as grass. Keep talking, talk so fast and so loud until you can’t hear yourselves.”

100 years later, a cult grows out of Hephum. The cult grows into a religion and its practitioners live in the town named after Hephum. Everyone is happy. Everybody is a stranger. When they pass another on the street their eyes meet for an instant before darting to another. But in that instant dreams are made into grass: everywhere, plentiful. Love is exchanged, revenge fulfilled, harsh whispers of passion. And then it is all abandoned and forgotten for the next thing, for the next thing to abandon.

There is no good and evil, only good and bad. Laughter is good but it can be evil. Stupidity is evil but it can be good. A visitor comes to Holista for its famed stories of good; the anti tourist furrows his brow at the ever-shared stories of derision. In Holista they give quaint tours of the medieval quarter and warning tours of the Tenderloin.

In Holista a man speaks loudly for no reason other than to hear his own voice. The group laughs for no reason other than to hear their own laughter. On the other side of their apartment window a bum wraps his legs in cardboard boxes.

Melancholic music plays constantly in Holista—not because the people are melancholic, just the opposite. The music is melancholic to take from melancholy its music. Citizens are quiet—they do not laugh too hard. Their soft spoken words contain their laughter like a groove its bass. The wisened old ones tell the story of Greg the Talker whose propensity for words matched his untimely demise, at the hands of another man whose silence was too literal to neighbor Greg’s loudness.

Beyond 200 windows and 200 doorways in Holista lives Sam, who no one, having met him, can forget. Not because, like other memorable individuals, Sam possesses extraordinary wit, or leaves an impression of future greatness. Sam remains in your memory word by word— in the textured sameness of his descriptions, or in the smile with which he greets familiar faces.

Sam the extraordinary ordinary man kicks rocks. Rarely do his eyes recognize a thing, and then only for its faults. He walks away from a party who laughed too easily; they did nothing bad but his instinct warns they might be evil. As he walks past the bum in the cardboard perks up:
“Hey can you spare any change?”
“Yeah man i’ll give you all the money in my wallet”.
Sam’s eyes drift to the building across the street and he mumbles.
“I feel somehow dirty. Does $10 redeem me?… forgive me father for i have sinned… it’s been however many years since i was a teenager. I’m not a good person but i cannot fight my instincts. why should fun disgust me? nobody wronged me, but here is all the cash i have in my wallet.”
“Thank you”. The bum smiles.

Sam’s friends remember him for nothing in particular. He walks having scarcely said goodbye, hearing melancholic music in his head. The music tells stories of sadness. Its melody imagines melancholy, and takes from Sam’s melancholy its imagination.
Sam smiles.

Lie to me, baby. Laugh at me, pretend that you are hearing this for the first time. I know who I am in my head, but I wonder who you know me as, in yours. This is the noblest lie– we put each other through elaborate rituals to convince ourselves of who we are. We lie to each other because we love each other. Those flowers aren’t physics; there’s no law that says what it means when I bring them to you. But you and I both know that I do it because I love you. The flowers are a lie; the flowers are fake. I lie because I love you.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time a man worked under an overbearing boss. The boss comes day by day demanding this and that. “Change the colors, too gauche!” “now don’t you think that trope is tired? Get it out!”. And every time the man responds, “Yes.” “It’s gone” “You’ll never see it again”. Then every day when the boss leaves the room, the man throws his notes in the trash and carries on. The colors stay the some, the tropes hit right on the head. And when the work is finished, and it’s a tremendous success, the two shake hands with genuine respect and go their separate ways.

They work that way because they love each other. The boss walks away feeling like a Manager. The man walks with the scarcest ingredient of good art: the feeling that he is breaking the rules and getting away with it. They lie to each other to reassure themselves of their respective roles. And then finally, with the chattering parts of their minds satisfied, the two can begin the process of really working.

A Philosopher King

A Philosopher King time travels to 2023 to diagnose our present ills. “What”, he ponders, “is the point of a relationship in 2023? What is the point of a friendship?” He writes down his findings:

“… In the past things were scarce. But the resources are figured out. You have street food with more nutrients than a peasant would eat all week. There’s no need for division of labor, no need to do it to survive. So what’s the point? It’s not pragmatic! Keep a couple acquaintances for chit chat, some one night stands to keep yourself sane– it’s far more efficient. What’s the point?“

…

What’s the point, Philosopher King? What’s the point of it? You’re missing one crucial thing: I want to be lied to. Humans aren’t rational, and meaning isn’t interchangeable. Sex isn’t sex with that voice on top of your head, chatting off. Everybody wants a threesome of bodies, nobody wants a threesome of minds.

There’s a little voice inside your head that acts as a little simulator. You can’t make it go away on your own. It chatters on all day, “What do people think?” “Do I seem boring right now?” “DO I seem boring?”

You can quiet that voice for me. That’s why I need you to lie to me; that’s why I lie to you. It’s not really me that you lie to– not me, me. It’s that voice in my head that angers and envies and grabs. Lie to him, baby. Lie to me.

Lie to me because you love me.

“a god damned rest day, but you got no rest! The fans keep you cool because your heart beats too fast. And when you walk down the street and you click and you scroll, you scream: I’m not in control! I’m not in control! I’m a fool…”

You took my money, you. I’m going to kill you, you. I had a couple of drinks and I’m sobering up, and I want you to know: I’m a shark, and I’ll bite you.

I’ll write you into a demon and put your face on a billboard. I’ll write you into a demon so that everyone knows, for all of life and eternity: your face is a chore! And they’ll know you alright, they’ll spit on your likeness; they’ll curse you in dreams, and then they’ll drop you just like it never was… when the trend is over and there’s something better to say, to chit chat the day away.

But if you ever come back, they’ll say “Hey I know you! Aren’t you that clown, no– that demon! I saw on youtube?”

That’s just a thought. Your life’s still a bore. you walk down the street because there’s not much else to live for. you can find meaning still! have another glass! do a little dance and say something silly for the class! They’ll laugh for a bit, they’ll say “Who the fuck even are you?” But the nice thing is that your game will live on in the room.

You’d like to be the devil! That’s the best role in the script. But you’re the type of guy to see success and say “How come she gets it?” Why don’t you get a turn? Why didn’t they pick you? SHUT the fuck up, it’s not planned, it’s just truth. Nobody decided who is where or what is when. They happened, they actioned– and that is the end.

So why don’t you tip another beer back? You’ll be happy for awhile. At the very least you’ll push off this hate for awhile. You might lean back in your seat and you’ll smile, because everyone is interesting when your mind is silent.

why would you drink a thimble of orange juice instead of a cup? why would you drink a single beer instead of five? why would you stand at the edge of a bridge on a rainy day not to jump?

there’s a guy who every time somebody says how are you doing says “well i am doing!” with a gritty croak from the back of his throat. he went camping one time and he didn’t know how to start the campfire or how to cook anything on the fire. in the middle of it somebody says “i just need to get this fire going! and this fire going! okay!” and he says back “im not even standing close to the fire and i feel like i’m getting roasted” and everybody laughed.

people cross the streets in both directions but they spread right through each other. the same doesn’t happen with water, the water will hit its opponent head on.

what is wrong with me? my nose hurts for no reason, and i went for a walk to clear my head but the outdoors is gray, and there’s nobody out there who wants to talk to me. who wants. who wants? people have desires and want specific things at specific times, and know clearly whether they’ve gotten them or not. that is normal.

i was at a campfire and didn’t know how to roast a marshmallow so i could not stop thinking about marshmallows. i’d see a marshmallow on every stick, and eventually when you think about something like that it starts to exist. then i had to roast a marshmallow and i layed it on its side against a coal and as it caught fire i reached out and grabbed it. a burnt marshmallow and a burnt hand. angry, too. god damn it!

i saved up a bit of money and moved somewhere where it costs $.50 a day to survive. to sit there for awhile. how the hell am i not good at anything? i write all the damn time. i play music i sing. even my day job i suck ass at, how am i not any good? i should be good. i’m a fucking idiot

there’s an amateur soccer league where nobody joins unless they’ve been in the major leagues. so while technically they are all amateurs because they don’t do this for a living, if some mcgee with a beer belly shows up he’s going to get slammed. a mcgee can’t have any fun, because the mcgee is getting his face slammed into the dirt so regularly he recalls the taste better than dinner.

if worst comes to worst, i’ll buy a disgusting bright yellow jacket, and wear that everywhere

it’s all torture. somebody is torturing me, it’s some kind of a sick joke. i hope he’s having fun at least. he’s watching the tv screen in silence– he’s not the type to emote out loud at the screen. but when the show ends something is missing, and he wants it back. he needs it, so he turns it back on.

two minutes, no fans. no blessings, no curses. a demon is grabbing me. god damn it!