I Try to Make You Indignant

I know what I need to do tonight. The tv is dead to me and I can’t turn it on. It’s been on and on, this beauty of a flat screen, this ode to my desire to posses that which is bigger and better and thinner and lighter and crisper and cleaner.

But I can’t turn it on. I can’t select a program. I can’t select a movie, not from the hundreds.

I can’t.

I know what I need to do tonight.

I need to get out. And it’s been ages.

…In the bathtub, in the candle light, in the bath salts (ty for that gift MG), with a beer on the rim, the second beer of the night, and god, your head gets light easily, it’s been so long, and you still aren’t getting all the air you’re used to, so the head, it goes light, in a good way, with the bath salts and the candle flicker and you take stock: How well have I come through this?

And the body, for those half assed workouts, for your refusal to save yourself from your vanity, for the sit-ups you perform coughing and slowly, for all your stupid work, for all that meaty useless work, it’s there, most of it, most of the lines you’ve drawn with repletion, this particular move, over and over, with something gripped in the hand, pressed by the heels, uplifted against the ankles, this monument to nothing traditional, not to battle or more simple survival, not even to athletics, this unfinished thing that you continually try to build, develop, into…what?

Whatever it is, it’s there, in the candle, in the water, that hot water, the bath salts.

You’ve treated yourself ok.
The surface, how you value it, for whatever reason, for better or for worse.

You roll in the water.

Your head light because your lungs are not all healed.

A good light.

You know what you need to do.

You need to take this thing that is you, your body, that mind behind it, that light head, back into the night, away from your defunct obsession with internet chess, your sickness induced obsession with sitcoms and Mtv, your fixation on blogs, on finding some perfect and new website that will make your real existence unnecessary.

You know what you need, on a night like this, so far removed from a night like this, you need that other false world.

We move from illusion to illusion.

We get tired of one and embrace another.

This is just another love story.

Alone, I think of how I’m really starting to love myself.
Alone, I think of how I’m starting to get addicted to the idea of being alone.
Who would have guessed that addiction follows comfort? I thought addiction came after some immediate and overwhelming high.

But no, ask yourself about the girl or the boy you really can’t release from your heart though she is far out of your life; that wasn’t based on one night of passion, one passing of eyes, that was based on comfort, on some slow coupling, a sort of arranged marriage of the soul, the kind that always works out best.

Alone, I get used to myself and start to really like it.
But then, as I did with any other lover, I get a little fed up. A little bored.

I don’t mind myself in the hot water, in the tub.
The candlelight and no other and I see in it what I have and have not lost. More importantly, what I am, of the flesh, and this is satisfying enough, but only if I go.

I love you, but I’m restless. That kind of thing.

I know what I need to do.
Vodka tonic.
Some bar.
This night.

Tired from the pills that made me sleep but not until it was too late.
Tired from the alarm clock that came on too early.

The class that lasted too long.
The socializing in the halls.
The gym that gives you some semblance of the body you think you need as bare minimum to be comfortable with yourself.

You are so unprepared for love it is absurd.
You’re a case study.
You should rent yourself to eager to learn psychologists.
You should rent yourself to somebody.

But it will be ok.

You're shaking with fatigue but even shaking is a reminder that you can't be still.
You're tired of being tired and if your confused its only the beer and the hot water gone warm and the vodkas you will drink and all that lovely light.

Your hair is bad, but your eyes, they're clear. And your intentions, they're muddled, but in the end, your heart is ok.

And you've got your green sweater; you've got your fake leather jacket.
You've got your shoes and the keys to your car and the cd in the player and the clear night, this shivering cold.
You don't have to feel it except for a little, that bit beneath your skin. You can shake it, you can shake anything. The strength that follows weakness. The greater dark that shatters in the rising sun. One or the other of those moments, but it's all transition.

Ridiculously unperfect. Me. You. One of us or both.

You know what to do, on a night like tonight, with a bad hair cut and a face you’re almost used to, your face, that face you grew up with and into, and body that you tried to control, with nutrition and exercise, that body, in fact, that you have sort of controlled, that is closest to what you want it to be, at least in this light, at least at this time of night, than anything else you’ve tried to make be.

And I know what you’ll want to write, you deep thinkers, you pseudo Zen masters, and it all sounds good and we can all say it—any of us can sound healthy if we think long enough about how we want to sound—but in the end, you’re not so far removed, and you’re not so close to comfortable, and you’re just like me.

We’re not copies. But you’re like me.

And it really doesn’t matter much if we’ve figured out how to stay in or how to go out.
It’s the same dilemma and it will show up again tomorrow or next week.

These and other questions.

And so on.