Words to a song I made up in class the other day because I was bored

An archetype blue


All the ghosts tomorrow´s likely to
bring along to that desert island
with you
and that book you never
really took along with you

Chorus:
Bind your soul in leather,
hide your gold from bad weather:
An archetype blue,
a griffin´s feather.
Hide your soul from the weather,
then wrap your gold in leather:
An archetype blue,
your shadows blacker.

Standing outside before the rain
Then following you in rhyme
with all the pain
Climbing down an ivy wall,
hanging from a cliff to see you fall
but you never really took me along
with you
I want to run on the beach,
roll down in the sand
with you

(chorus)

A spire of copper in the storm,
along came a spider all alone:
Lightning cracked,
we never looked back.
Like a crash of rhinos,
we never looked back.

(chorus x2, then out.)

The rise and the fall and the denouement of the Persian Empire

I was there when Cyrus the Great laid down the foundation stone for the Persian Empire: It was about a year and a half after moving in, actually, when we had the skateboarding boy-king roaming across town with a spray can in his hand and the stylized drawing of a regal crown left in his wake. Regardless of my giving him hell back then for spray-painting the outside of the building, just beneath the window sill, he never really cared for anything and would laugh out loud while pointing it up out on the street: “There´s us up there, man”, he would say every time. “Forever or as long as they don´t re-do the exterior”.

Today, two, three years later and you´d still find me roaming past that thronging avenue if you ever tried: Every Tuesdays and Thursdays there around 8pm, late for the MBA though without a care in the world, walking real slow with the earphones on, naturally, radio tuned to some rock station or another, Liam Gallagher crooning to the words of Champagne Supernova despite my not liking Oasis at all but leaving it be just because, no special reason required for taking it all in, absorbing the night, becoming one with the very city, shivering once or twice, shrugging quite often, shuddering yet never really falling.

If you were here with me tonight, past that ever-present hooker with the thick thighs and the white mock-cowhide ankle-high boots, past the fancy gay nightclubs behind secret façades, past the police cars, past the old apartment buildings with their giant living room windows staring out like flat glass gargoyles, we would stop walking all of a sudden then turn out heads to the ugly building with the fading blue stripes and count maybe four, five floors up, up until the window where Cyrus the Great tattooed his regalia in white on the skin of the night in the big city two, three years ago, and I would mention, all very nonchalantly and laid back and cool and all that, that was the last place I ever got to see you, hoping on a taxi at about 2am on a Monday a lifetime ago.

In writing all this to you, down through the years now, I´ve come to sort of question whether you were ever there at all, and sometimes whether you actually existed in the real world and not only as a figment of my imagination... but then every Tuesdays and Thursdays there around 8pm, late for the MBA though without a care in the world, I´m walking down that thronging avenue real slowly, with the earphones on, naturally, radio tuned to some rock station or another, then I look up against the glare of the lamp posts, and if I squint my eyes hard enough it´s there, I can see it: They have never re-done the exterior, not really, and up against the wall just a few inches underneath the window that was once the bedroom I shared with the Cyrus the skateboarding boy-king, lies the white crown shinning like a diamond in concrete, making real all my yesterdays and nights.

Oasis keeps on singing through my earphones, the words coming through and synching in with the season:

“Wake up the dawn and ask her why /
A dreamer dreams, she never dies /
Wipe that tear away now from your eye /
Slowly walking down the hall /
Faster than a cannonball /
Where were you while we were getting high?

Where were you while we were getting high?


Where were you while we were getting high?



Where were you while we were getting high?”

Lunar eclipse

I.
By the time you even start reading this first paragraph three in the morning will have already become a staple through the cadence of a calendar shedding its sheets like a snake shedding its skin, and I´m bowing down not really in reverence for yourself but to pick up that very skin instead, then wearing it over my own.
In lieu of all this apparently-inherent fatalism borne out from Jörmungandr´s bowels, though, I´ve come to think of life in more practical terms and that´s the very subject of this week´s post to you. Also maybe to stop the you-though-from-a-figment-of-mine from grimacing: You never really liked the drama-queen in me regardless of all my efforts to convince you I was actually pushing for the messianic anyhow.

So I´ve obviously fast-forwarded whatever it was that ever became of last Friday´s wake up to the point I´m counting the half-empty glasses of vodka-and-pineapple on this small table in an outside area, maybe like a terrace, at this trendy bar with the Vietnamese motif-thing going, and wondering just how I´ve really wandered inside. I don´t have to look at the clock to guess the time, and neither do you: May the audience formally accept my dwelling into repetition and assume the usual two, three, four am´s on a Saturday morning.
“And regardless of how you ever feel about this idiotic pre-destination thing man it sort of boils down to just how you´ve been born anyway, and to whom, and that´s where it just gets binary if you really think of it,” I´m talking to **** by my side without really looking at him, slurring every word through an ice cube melting over my tongue. “You know, all those ones and zeros ones and zeros ones and zeros randomly repeating themselves over and over and over again? Well people like us, Poindexter, we were just born as ones, what can you do. Let all those zeros carry our luggage and drive our taxis, you know?”. He nods over his beer, says something to that effect and it´s like after every sentence we get to laugh tiny little peccadillos into the night.

Justifying one´s living of his or her life by crying out to one´s birthright is possibly the lowliest form of being and up until a few months ago I honestly believed I was just skimming the coasts of being a total asshole, now I just don´t care anymore: Whatever happens, I´m making the most of it and if it ever gets to the point you may no longer call me a boy scout, your golden boy, then who the f*ck cares? -- because everybody wants to rule the world anyway and now all I dream of owning, is owning everything.

There is a certain charm after all, a certain flair in a heroin-chic kind-of way, in becoming someone you´ve always said you´d never become: In more practical terms you may think of the ego as the perfect wave, and I know what you and I used to say of surfer-boys.
And once we leave the bar a few hours later I tell **** of this girl I´m having over the next day, and of all the black, black things I´ve been thinking of doing to her. I also get to try to predict what her reaction will be like, and every word she might say in either protest, or fear or disgust. The look on his face almost tells me to go a little lighter but the smile on his lips clearly point otherwise. We bid goodbye as usual, the dispute for who gets to be the devil´s own son still officially pending but deep down it´s clear to me I´m still pedestrian on this and that the player on the other side remains half a world ahead. But being born smart means I get to learn amazingly fast, and that only by watching.


II.
The next day this girl comes over anyhow and stays the night, at least up until the moment she leaps from the mattress on the ground, yelling at me, calling me crazy, asking me if I have no sense at all, and zips up her jeans in a hurry amidst tears.
I start giggling but not really because of her, but in fact because Saturday Night Live has a special about David Spade tonight and this very funny sketch with Chris Farley and Adam Sandler is on and is a lot more interesting than some twenty-year-old´s histrionics. More crying ensues from her part, to which I react with minor contempt by pointing out how does she even expect to get a taxi by this time in the night, and if she´s even considering how much it would cost anyway, given her living somewhere past where the subway lines reach.
She ends up giving in anyhow, as if there was ever a different way.


III.
Later that night I find myself thinking of you, and in picturing you in my mind I can see your face as you´re pointing at me accusingly, giving names to my sins, to all of them, asking me just what have I become, then calling me scum and a liar.

I can also see sunrises new if I only try, but they´re all dimming out into nights most dire...

4:36am: “This one´s for you!”

This kid P. calls me up at 4:36 into the wee, wee hours of Sunday. I´m sleeping but I take the call anyway and trade up the usual cursing for curiosity once I realize he´s calling from a nightclub, a bar, something like that, because the background music is near unbearable.
“This one´s for you!,” he screams over the receiver in a rather slurry voice, then a remixed version of Depeche Mode´s I can´t get enough kicks in for about half a minute, then the call dies.

I sit down on my bed, the room still dark and all, and smile.

Dance hall days

So D. comes back from Frankfurt, Amsterdam, wherever really, then tells over dinner of this alleged pile of CDs from the 1980s he brought along.
“So whaddaya mean, really,” I ask him between the wolfing of the bruschetta and the champagne. “Like, The very best of Wang Chung, volume three?”
He´s pretty much the only one to laugh from across the table.

A couple of hours afterwards Darkseid, who´s like this constipated angry god from back in the comics kidnaps Wonder Woman from Brainiac´s ship into his own on TV, only to discover she was a robot duplicate after all (thus always to transvestites, blow-up dolls, clones and robot duplicates...).
I take one last sip from the sort-of nutty, sweet port wine then turn off the DVD player and glimpse past the window outside only to see the very first droplets of rain in almost two months, then decide against going to this nightclub on my own anyhow, and off to the shower.