Errors and Fallacies

The morning surprised me. I was still asleep when I woke up, dropped into a falling panic before my eyes had time to open. Where was I? Shit. There had to be something that could cure this. Where did I put my pills? Did I have pills? Why did I feel this way?

As I stumbled up the stairs, I realized that I needed a cigarette as well. It would be a rough one, so it seemed. Many days had started this way and warmed up nicely, but I was stuck in a fiend for something to take it all away. For so many years, coping with breathing meant finding a way to slow the breathing down, and that usually meant taking something. There was nothing to take.

The cold of sleep made my body feel stiff. Outside, I shivered with a tiny flame lighting a cigarette, the whole enterprise serving to hammer my fragile rigid corpse into flux, and not serving well. Coffee would improve my lot. I put the cigarette out only one third of the way into it, and fled inside. Now the air felt warmer, by contrast, and I breathed a deep breath. It slowed the panic.

I crept into the bathroom on my toes. I gently moved the seat lid up, then proceeded to make a jangling jingling din with my piss. If I flushed the toilet, I'd only make more noise. This was no way to live. How had I managed this? I knew the answer and my own frustration mocked me. Perhaps I was dehydrated. Jason always told me, “drink lots of water.” His helpful face annoyed me by being so right. Coffee was easier to drink than this water. The only good water from the tap is in New York City. Too much mind control in this water.

My socks felt less soft, but not dirty. They were warmish at least. How could people live out here? Why would any of my ancestors, my ancestors' ancestors, etc. have moved away from the equator? Damned fools they were. It was surely over a woman. That's the only reasonable explanation, and in my dissoving waking strop, I demanded reasonable explanations for my self-made hell. I chose to blame those that lived thousands of years ago, and the rest of them up to me. Then again, I left Miami, and I did so by behaving like a wrecking ball inside my own sanctuary. “Fucking fool,” I called myself.

I put on music, and let the gods give me pseudorandom divination in their selections. Gently, they gave me the lovely gypsy choruses of Man Man. Those men knew, perhaps better than myself, what this cosmic comic show was all about. They were psychadelic cabaret, and they played to the early morning, in the dark, before the sun, as I sought to get my bearings. I was ill-equipped. At least my underwear were relatively clean.

It made me feel better to know that I was reacting naturally to living my life in my generation. “Naturally” being a generous term, since my mental cuisinart had wrestled with the A-Bomb and its place in the natural order of things until it was brought to my attention that everything under the sun is natural, or it wouldn't exist. Natural doesn't mean conducive to survival. Death is natural, as natural as birth.  Winter is natural.  It just depends how far you are from the equator how unreasonable it can get.