9/28/2006

Still life

I sip from the half-stale beer over the desk and maybe leaf through a comic book or two nearby. I’ve been trying to pick up a specific song out of a few hundreds but I’m not really sure of what I want to listen. I think maybe some Opera for a change but all those CDs are back at my father’s, then AC/DC cuts right in with Money Talks and it makes me smile. “So it does,” I whisper to myself then take another drink. I smile again and find oddly surprising (but mildly disturbing) that the group’s been growing on me for the last couple of days or so when I specifically told my friends back in High School that I would never listen to AC/DC, ever.
But then, I told I wouldn’t be caught dead doing a lot of stuff back in High School, and what do you know.

I overheard this girl back in work today complaining she was feeling too old and she’s just what, twenty? It bothered me a little because I’m twenty-six and I feel I’m still younger than I should be.

D**** told me this thing once and it was many years ago. We were listening to Starship on the radio, on this then-favorite rock station, and it prompted us to paste this big sheet of paper with We built this city on rock’n’roll on it, over the wall in the den for no specific reason whatsoever other than, we thought it would look pretty cool and it actually did for that first year. Anyway.
“Freedom and range come with age,” he said, or something to that effect.
I asked him later that evening at the supermarket we’d gone to looking for toilet paper and some milk, if he was really certain of what he’d said. He looked at me and just shook his head, nodding in agreement.


It’s well past eleven p.m. now, eight years later, and the streets are quiet outside; you can just hear the wind changing gears as October looms closer in the distance but life itself continues to ebb into gray and I can almost hear D**** whispering, “It’s a riptide, boy…”