Armageddon days

I.
Dear L-X-X,
What can I say?
K. is getting married after what, ten years? I think you´d remember him, guy roomed with me, you talked to him once, about some Javascript code thing back in the day. Via ICQ instant messaging, of all things.

K. is getting married after what, ten years, and it sure feels life´s one long movie and we´re finally getting to the climax. I went out drinking with _______ again the other night, we´re the Best Men. We were talking of all things considered, how incredibly cool it is to send off a pal like that into life´s long night with a beacon in his hand.

There are things we´ll go through life without ever telling anyone, but there was this one time we were all at home and I was flipping over the dictionary, to randomly find the one word that would supposedly go on to christen our mascot or something. It was the idiotic idea of the week, obviously soon to be forgotten with the rest of them all.
The word I found was, Lamplighter.

I´m not entirely sure what´s the meaning of this, but as I´ve just said, there are things we´ll go through life without ever telling anyone, not even ourselves I guess. Still, it´s kind of nice to actually know some of us are able to find their way into the night and through these Armageddon days, instead of plain´old bitching about it like this old drama-queen bit of mine.


II.
As for me, well, I´d been having a lousy week, hell, a lousy month. You´d have no idea: All the same old mistakes coming straight back at me like some old, time-tested Dickensian ghost and you know how I feel about Charles Dickens, right? A Tale of Two Cities aside, I can´t f*cking stand Charles Dickens, so by the time I got to Friday afternoon and this guy I know forwarded an e-mail he´d received from Madison Square Garden, saying Bruce Springsteen´s playing NYC in November, and had asked me “So why don´t you go?”—I actually hit Reply and started typing all the reasons as to why I couldn´t make it. I mean, freaking obvious, right?

But as it turned out, I couldn´t find one single reason.

So I pretty much stopped thinking, opened a second browser window, picked up my credit card, and five minutes later there I was going to my boss (!) to tell him I needed a week off in November because, Springsteen playin´ the Garden, y´know, and I just happened to have the tickets...


III.
So it comes to pass that 2009 is evaporating, sublimating, goddamn disintegrating, and with it all the cool things and the perks of being in my twenties. Somewhere deep down in hell I´m sure the Prince of Lies is laughing his ass off once his screenwriters handle him the script´s latest pages.
It matters not, see, because Lamplighters aside, we´re all doomed to fail anyhow. That´s how I´ve come to think of life: All our choices will inevitably boil down to bad decision springing free old ghosts and the older we get the more we get to hurt ourselves.

So if you really think about it, and I do, there´s only one way as to how to deal with these Armageddon days we´re living—and it´s by throwing a few curve balls, it´s by denting the memetics of the mundane.
It´s about, I´ve just decided, thinking up “Aww hell” and recalling to mind what I told myself this year´s motto would be: WWMCD?

MC wants to go to a Springsteen concert ever since he was a little kid and read some comic book in which Captain America duked out against the Superpatriot at the parking lot of a Springsteen concert, and the Superpatriot was beating the tar out of Cap (everyone knows the Superpatriot can bench like 10 tons while Cap´s like a glorified Batman) but stopped because oh, he didn´t want to miss the show.

It takes me back, you know.
And it will take me forward too, it will take me right through these madcap Armageddon days, with the usual cocky smirk on my face.

And Wegthor Be Still as Bright...

I.
I´m sitting in a restaurant with my parents back in my hometown and my father is yelling at me as usual: Regardless of whatever it is he´s started with this time around, he´s ending it with the traditional, And you can´t go on living your life like that, you´re about to turn thirty years old. His words bridge the great divide of lamb servings and green scatterings between us, then sublimate like the distant droning of a bee wading through a Styrofoam box, and mingle with the white noise surrounding our table.

I´m having a hard time concentrating.

The sleeping pills I got from my mother last evening haven´t lost their effect entirely so I´m still experiencing a bit of zoning out every half a minute or so. My father´s words are lost to the restaurant´s din but I´m not even making an effort to pay any attention because I´m staring at this drop-dead gorgeous blue-eyed blonde two tables from ours, whom I´m certain I´ve gone to High School with like more than a decade ago.

I know this guy who´d swear on a box of Stolichnayas he got into a drunken threesome with her back in College. He´d had the blessing of attending the same College as she did, see, in the same middle-of-nowhere town where I suppose there were no better things to do than get into drunken threesomes with people you went to High School with.

Not that there´s anything wrong with that, I mean.
Me, I coasted through College by skipping class and going to the old arcades downtown.


II.
And my knees haven´t healed yet. F*ck.
I´m looking at this trophy blonde sitting at a nearby table at the restaurant and even though I´m supposed to be thinking of getting into drunken threesomes with her, I can´t really stop thinking of Jax-Ur for chrissakes. Jax-Ur. Jesus f*cking Christ. Guy was this old Superman villain from back in the sixties and just like the rest of his brain-dead Phantom Zone ilk, he was some sort of a moron himself if you really think about it: Set his rockets to space and blew up Wegthor instead.

Wegthor was one of Krypton´s two or three moons (I forget). So he killed a lot of people and ended up exiled into the Phantom Zone. Which is like, the perfect place for peeping toms to watch over drop-dead blue-eyed blondes going into drunken threesomes with your pals, if you think about it.

But my knees haven´t healed yet and I just want to go back with all the running in the evenings after work. I´d trade up a lifetime of drunken threesomes with that blonde plus a stack of Silver Age Superman comics-- for one last running up the street beneath a cold June thunderboomer, leaping over trash bags and oh by the time you get those endorphins going into mad drunken threesomes with you and all the caffeine in your blood...


III.
Story of my life, though: Set my rockets to space and blew up my patellae instead.
And Wegthor Be Still as Bright.