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Mirrorscape |
| Written by cody brinkman | |
| Sunday, 30 December 2007 | |
1 “an introduction” No more crowds of people and no more bright landscapes. There was a time when I looked at people, and thought about people, and heard what people said. I thought about it all, I had my mental notebook jotting everything down. Watched people in their landscapes like I was looking at a picture. Separate. Sometimes I think it is a good thing to view things that way, apart from it all, and then every thing is like a poem or a song, or painting. Everywhere I have lived has looked like a thick and blotchy impressionist painting. All the colors and words, where such a bright and beautiful picture. I think it may be just as beautiful now if it was painted in grays, and no more crowds of people. 2 “on morals and tradition” I knew a girl once. A good Christian girl named Katherine. She was a very good Christian in terms that she did everything another good Christian told her to do, without hesitation. I admire those good Christian girls for their unwavering faith and comfort. I admire all of those whom believe so much and have faith in it, which are comfortable. I knew a guy once. A good atheistic guy. He was a very good atheist in terms of refusing to believe, period. I admire those good atheist guys for their unwavering apathy and comfort. I admire all of those who can believe in nothing and still manage to sleep at night. There was a tribe that tied up their victims during sacrificial rituals. The victim was then killed and their blood drank. The priests who performed this wore gold amulets with spider webs and human faces, as the spider traps its victims consume its juices. That’s a metaphor if I have ever heard one. 3 “Mary-O” I love metaphors. I love words, and lyrical tapestries. Beautiful sentences spoken by beautiful people. MaryO what is a face? What dose one look like? Mary O what is a voice? Do voices have to be so loud? Yes! They have to be loud! Spoken, whispered, shouted, they have to be loud! If you cannot speak don’t then! Just don’t talk to me. I’m tired of hearing everything else. I don’t believe any of you, I only believe myself. 4 “Life is no way to treat an animal…k.v” I once lived on an island of the coast of New England. It was a small apartment attached to another small apartment at the top of what was once a small textiles factory, and is now space rented out to artists. The bottom floor was a large open space where two artists rented space. One was a metal sculptor.The other was a painter. The metal sculptor was quite successful and the painter was out of work and rented the small apartment next to mine at the top of the old textiles factory. She worked at a small restaurant around the corner from where we lived. She painted large paintings, covering whole walls. They were very good, very elegant. She was a humanist. She spoke eloquently; she was a beautiful person who spoke eloquently. I was working at a cabinetry shop about three miles away, and I came home one day to see Anna, that was her first and apparently only name. Anna and I had a mutual friend named John Cauter, whom was at the apartment on this particular day. Anna and John were both on the rooftop, smoking a joint and drinking glasses of red wine. John was in bad sorts, as his good friend Steven Hollory had died that day, his truck was t-boned by a tractor-trailer. Steven Hollory was a writer, a novelist, and a good one too. I did not even know at the time,and wondered why John was acting so strange. I walked up to find him staring down across the street at a turned over trashcan. “It is what it is…” John was saying as I walked over to them. “But what the hell is is? What is what?” Anna sat and listened, as did I, and we sat up there until very late that night,listening to John talk about Steve. I could only listen, I couldn’t talk, nor would I. I don’t think anyone really wants to hear feedback after death, just let them talk. Later that night, when john had left Anna looked over at me and said “ living is hard, living when someone else dies is a *****.” I smiled even though it wasn’t funny and went to bed. 5 “good nature” I lived in New York City once. It was a commune house rented by about 8 people.Rent was low and that was good because my cash was low. I was writing for a very little know publication. And other than that small amount of money I made once in a while I was a professional lay-about. That was ok because three other people living there did literally nothing as some form of artistic rotting. I woke up at the latter part of the morning and ate a small breakfast. Then I walked down the street, made a left, walked another two blocks, then making a left or right decided which park I would visit that day. I would sit around the park for a few hours, drawing or reading. Then I would go home for a midday lunch. Around four when friends got off of work, I would plan the rest of my night. I thought I had a very easy and relaxed life. I wasn’t doing anything for the sake of doing nothing; I was wasting my education to defy the world I had earned it to “survive” in. I was dating a girl named Jeanne, from a rich family. She was wasting her opportunity to defy the world she had it to“survive” in. When she walked,talked, and looked with such grace. Such grace. She loved when I spoke so that she could provide a delicately dressed retort. And I loved when she did that.She was such a damn optimist. She found a silver lining to every damn cloud.But we aren’t disturbed by events, only our perception of events anyway. I remember passing by a homeless man begging for money to eat. She told him she wouldn’t give him money for he may simply buy booze with it. So she took him into the corner-store and bought him a deli sandwich. He ate it and before we left she left him money for booze. That’s beautiful. I left New York City in the spring of that year, I couldn’t say goodbye to Jeanne. 6 “old school” I held a gun in a mans face once. I almost shot him. He had robbed my bungalow a month prior. And I saw him again one day, I ran back inside got my gun and followed him. He walked far to the other side of the town I was living in, and into an old house. I went inside and went all the way up the stairs to the room he was renting. I burst in the door and waved my pistol. I looked down at the thin man. The room was sordid. There was a mattress a chair and a small table with one lit candle. The floor was covered in beer bottles and other trash.There was a broken radio in the corner. I had walked in on the man with a belt tied around his arm and a syringe pointing at his vein. The man was an old friend I had known from my hometown so far away. I turned around and walked away.Never spoke to him. 7 “of regret” I have a postcard from Monaco, France. I was supposed to send it to a girl named Christine, but I never knew what to say. I spent a summer in Monaco trying to write a book. I spent most of my time swimming at the beach and playing guitar unfortunately. I worked at a small bar two streets off the beach, and lived in an apartment above it. The reason I moved there was because I had met a good French writer named Jacque Le’estere in Philadelphia, and he suggested living in Monaco to write my story. He was a semi successful writer as far as writers go and lived there. As I wasn’t making real progress on my book, I began publishing short stories and poetry in a local publication that a friend of Jacque’s ran. I had very good friends in Algiers. I had a gray cat that I had found outside. I named him Jack. At the front of my apartment was a balcony where I had two chairs, a table, and couple of potted plants. I sat out there in the mornings and at night. I had money in the bank at home, as I had been saving a lot the entire previous winter. People in Algiers where the same as people everywhere I think. I think people are what people are no matter where those people live. People looking for a higher purpose, until they get a job promotion, or graduate a school, or find religion, when they get a higher purpose, they want something higher something even more worthy. I was no exception and regretfully left Algiers in late September of that year. 8 A friend of mine had a girlfriend. This girl had a party. There was a large group of bikers from a motorcycle club that were friends of the girl’s family. A man at the party fell into a fire of burning shingle wood, his body weight went fully onto his elbow. Two women from the party took the man to the local hospital. It took them a lot of yelling and fighting with the man to get him to settle down at the hospital. When the women finally left and where home,forty-five minutes later, the man was calling because he needed a ride because he singed himself out of the hospital. His arm was still charred and his bone was showing through the skin. 9 About six months after I moved out of my father’s house, I lived in a house in Scranton Pennsylvania. I lived there with two good friends one named Alex Leahry, and the other was Corey Seller. I worked on a masonry crew as a laborer. I made good money then and we had a good time. Our house was right in town and had four bedrooms. I played in a band with Corey and a couple other friends. It was a very good band. I painted a lot, and wrote a lot. I knew alot of people. I had my dog with a Jeep Liberty and me there. I had begun to feel tired.I felt like I had seen people in eastern Pennsylvania way too much. It began to feel like a place where I couldn’t fit into my own skin. As I have since said many times the people there where the definition of insane, “like goddamn rats in goddamn wheels, and there’s no goddamn cheese”. So I left Pennsylvania, and all those people I knew. I still speak to some of them. I left there and tried to go to school. 10 Once I lived on the outskirts of Oakland California. I hadn’t talked to any of my old friends or acquaintances for a while, over a year to be exact. I was working at an automobile parts factory for a little bit above minimum wages. I was a waste. I was tired of people and places and people and places. Two quotes from one man sums up my time spent here. “The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.” “You go up to a man, and you say, "How are things going, Joe?" and he says, "Oh fine, fine—couldn't bebetter." And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much...Kurt Vonnegut.” I had a girlfriend in Oakland, or she was what one might call a girlfriend. We had sex. I had friends in Oakland 10 “but it’s not that terrible” I have felt alone my whole life. I am alone at work. I was alone at school. I am alone in my house. When I am surrounded by friends and family I’m alone. It sounds terrible doesn’t it? And it is terrible sometimes. See, there are the times when everyone around you seems content, and everything around seems like it should make you feel the same way, and yet you feel separate. Then there are the times you know damn well how you should feel, and there is no one around to ask why you are the way you are. I forget who said it but they sure as hell were right “other people are hell” In fact what could be worse than to spend an eternity surrounded by other people who want to talk to you and know you. What so bad about it is that they don’t really care. There is some benefit they see for themselves for “caring” about you. They may need personal closure, or they may need a service. They may need you to get to someone else that has something they want, but no it’s never you they are after. Hell is a lake of fire? No. It’s just hot and sweaty, because of all the damn people. It’s not burning you, no, just makes you uncomfortable and sticky.Everyone is just breathing on each other, and talking to each other, and using each other, and giving and taking and ******* each other. That’s hell indeed. Oh wait! That’s exactly what it’s like here! Who would have thought! 11 “if so” If writing and art, and music, and poetry, and plays and movies mattered! Hah! No indeed they only distract us. 12 “Today I am…” Today I am old. Today I am tired. Today I want to go away. Today I feel done. My painting is that of whites, and grays, and blacks. I have lived. Oh, how I have lived. I’ve seen the death of my father, mother, one brother, two cousins, many friends, many enemies’, and my beloved dog. Today I will settle down at last, far up in the woods, away from towns and cities and villages. Today I will relax with a good book until tomorrow, and tomorrow I will go to sleep. Copyright 2007 cody brinkman |
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