Today is a good day to go out and break some bottles under a railroad overpass and smoke a pack of menthol cigarettes with a friend. Wet and drizzly, just a little nameless day between Christmas and New Year’s. You could put notes in the bottles and deliver them to the tracks, air mail. When the train runs over the paper, “This note will never go anywhere” gets swept along for a second before dissolving in a puddle. Light another Newport and contemplate your sure to be cool-ass future, once you decide what you want to do. You feel angst, so you write, “I feel angst” on the side of a lit cigarette and drop it in a Heineken bottle full of bum spit, then wing it sidearm into the abutment across the tracks. Smashing into another message, “Everyone knows this is Nowhere” painted in fluorescent pink and fading. “The two thoughts smash together, one burning the other enduring, but certain to disappear eventually. The abutment has nothing but time. I guess you could call that a meeting of the minds.
You’re not that kid anymore, if you ever were, more time having been spent craving melancholy than actually coly-ing any melons. Still, you were dangerous right? Totally.
Clickety clack turning pedals over the tracks, no trains in the distance, no trains today. You could stop to put your ear to the rail, wait for one to get close then stand with your arms outstretched to either side as close as you dare, staring at the onrush of sulfur-dioxide tanks and benzine containers with illegible tags blurring by painted somewhere in Gary, Indiana or Jacksonville, FL. If there were any trains, you could do that.
Ride along until the twilight, then lay your head down in a pasture underneath some sky you will never look at the same way ever again, maybe that’s the Hale-Bopp comet or maybe there’s just something on your glasses. With no dissenting opinions present you declare it the Hale-Bopp comet. “Behold the comet!” you proclaim to a bunch of cows clustered around your grassy nest. The cows believe you. They look at you in fearful awe. They might think you disembarked from the sky and landed in their field, wrapped in flannel and Quallofil like some paper mache baby jesus delivered unto their manger. No, you’re not that. You are just today’s disembodied thought stuck in a 1997 cul desac, trying to remember if that was Montana or Colorado. Probably Nevada.
Juancho
Walt’s comment, after I read this to him just now, was, “Not feeling too upbeat.” So I’d say you communicated quite clearly, huh? 😉
Just playing with words really. That’s what came out.
What came out was pretty much the perfect description of this “certain kind of day” which I’m having today, too. It brought back my recollection that my childhood days between Christmas and New Year were the most relaxing because of the complete letting go of the outcome of the day. The excitement/worry/angst of Christmas over, and the future not yet in sight.
That may have been the best 4 paragraphs you ever wrote IMO.
Run with this feeling.
Good stuff.
There are still trains, trust me.
Glad you have comets in your eyes. I like that idea. Or at least on your glasses which amounts to approximately the same thing.