The following was written on 20 April 2009. Forced to take the bus to many disparate locations all around Los Angeles, I found myself a writer of sorts… again [for the shortest of seconds and all].
PART I
“Somehow it is peaceful… No one in the bus (except this person that, at last, I decided was a woman that got on the stop after me)… Like, for the most part, this bus was for me. Quiet, too. Then the people start slowly trickling on. I don’t feel drowned, though. The old woman in front of me smells like something very reminiscent that I cannot place my finger on. Pleasant but hauntingly reminiscent.
And I look up and she’s gone.
You see, if the past is any indication of the future, this may just be the calm before a flailing and defeatest storm. I must say that I feel different today… But after a while, people begin to learn things that they’d rather not learn and
therefore be ways that they’d rather not be. Guarded, you know? …so that the fall out doesn’t leave one as it has every other day… An open wound… Bleeding… Raw… Even before the bandaid can stick to the slick transparent
salmon pink surface that was once covered with its protective sheath… Commonly referred to as skin.
So, really, there is nothing to think. Beyond the logistics of it all… That I’ve taken care of as throughly as can be taken care of at this point… And I kind of like the surrender to the anonymous bus ride. You know, so that nothing specific can be in my brain and I can sort of just be for a second.
PART II
Its strange though, I can write these fleeting thoughts down… I do posses paper and pen and all. But I decide to use the notepad feature here. Probably a very small part of the blackberry using community use this feaure at all…
Don’t really know in what capacity to do so. I mean, I’m not even sure.
But I guess this works for me for now.
Its crazy, the bus has taken me to a part of town in which I don’t even really know where I am. Oh, I guess this is sort of Silverlake… Hipster city. Willamsburg, Brooklyn’s west coast counter part. East coast hipsters, I’d imagine, are more high strung.
Which is weird… I mean, maybe I’m the exception that proves the relative rule, but though I cannot say that I’ve never felt a desperation in NY, its only since I’ve been in CA that I’ve ever achieved a level of ‘high strung anxiety’ that I thought, due to my chemical makeup, very very unlikely to impossible for me.
But again, maybe that’s just me. And the time and place in which I exist. Too many drugs, not enough time/desire to cultivate my coping mechanisms for a ‘real world’ situation/crisis.
Like I’ve been left back 8 grades in the coping mechanism grammar school of life. I think its more instinctual… A bit, atleast, than learned. So, I’m confident that as much as I can catch up, it won’t take as long as it may seem.
On the loooong line outside of the traffic court. Scared. Trying to keep my cool. Not like an acid trip… I brought the Edie book for a reason… I guess I’ll read it now.
PART III
Step #1: Hill Street; no curveball… Yet.
PART IV
The home stretch baby. I hope….
I’ve come to appreciate hitch hiking culture with these long, wide streets and this heat and the impermiable still… Quiet… Save for a the few cars that periodically pass by. No doubt this town is a city… Strangely clean and widely
deserted however, I cannot think of it as anything but, The Stand somehow.
There’s a peace though… The peace that quiets the buzzing in my head. I mean, for a second… If all this extra external buzzing wasn’t already going on in my head and all.
Just that second of relative certainty I felt leaving the DMV this last time. Basking for a second underneath the bench looking down the long quiet road. And genuinely smiling for the first time in weeks. Though not ear-to-ear…
Ear-to-ear never again really… Unfortunately always cautiously so.”
And so it went… it was 105 degrees out that day… I ran around, flailingly, with a version of desperation that just might have just reminded me a bit of New York. I never really did feel the heat… but they tell me that it was hot out.
