45s on 33 – #82: “It’s Hot Tonight”

Fiction is boring, all of it but unfortunately due to environmental birth conditions, my psychic nose has been rubbed in the shit of rural noir. I’d like to capitalize (in capitalistic sense) and pretend that this Railroad Time guy and me and Rey-Rey got into whiskey-soaked bare-knuckled cockfight of a brawl in those deep black time tunnels underneath Buckingham County, but it didn’t happen like that. My real life has been physical enough, has been painful enough, has been struggle enough, that pretending to fight real fights seems backwards, as mostly I’ve tried to pretend real fights and real mistakes and real traumas never happened.

Summer is coming on, that thick southern humidity style summer where an already oppressive physical existence becomes even more oppressive, and something has to give, something has to break. “It’s hot tonight,” in your brain as you self-medicate or baptize your frustrations in fisticuffs or just manifest a daily destiny of self-destruction in small steps of alcohol and drug abuse, poor diet, and wrecked relationships. If you are lucky (we all are), it begins to perpetuate itself, for your own life but also those born from your genetic stock, so that eventually there’s multiple generations of accumulated traumas to sort through and try and survive as best you can, with happiness and success seemingly impossible goals on the far side of an existence full of psychic land mines everywhere you step. That’s Buckingham County, and that’s Southside Virginia, and that’s the life I’ve known, so I could give a fuck about fiction.

I say all this because I’ve dedicated my remaining hopes to magics, energetics, and supreme mathematics, I guess a sort of optimistic nihilism where you hope beyond logical hope that there’s a larger universal magnetic force holding everything into a good path. I believe this, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. People believe false shit all the fucking time.

But as Rey-Rey and me stood there mad dogging this Railroad Time character in the dark, mostly Rey-Rey mad-dogging as he was the more physical of our pair, and Railroad Time dedicated the proper amount of alpha eyeballs at him because of this, there was a flash of a moment where Railroad Time looked at me. It was hard to focus on his eyes, alpha beta beast politics at play, but also the darkness of the time tunnels, but also he was a solar flare of a being. But there was a flash where his eyes focused at mine, a fraction of a split second, with expansive denominator, but I could see who he was, completely naked soul exposed if for just a sliver. (I am thankful I am attuned to the mind set to see such things in that psychic shield slip on his part.)

Railroad Time was a good person, I could see this, but the world was not. It is a struggle to maintain that goodness when all the world does is beat on your with its wretched ways and wicked desires. The world wants to recognize your goodness and exploit it. And not everybody is born good (though not many are born “bad” either) – many are just born blank slate that soak up whatever environment they are thrust into.

But I could see in that flash of Railroad Time’s focused eyes, he was good, but the world had beat on him, which caused the walls to go up thick, often times furious. The goodness was still in there, but for self-preservation it had to be guarded behind psychic barbed wire and broken glass, a safety realm of put-offishness. It wasn’t a real fist, as when your life is nothing but real struggle and real fights and a real piece of shit from birth, you don’t jump straight to that fictional noir zone. A real life of hardscrabble does not willingly soak itself in whiskey and bare its knuckles with joy. You try to keep it sheathed inside, remain good. You don’t willingly jump into meeting the world’s wretched innate wickedness. But this world can be a hell, and it gets hot, and it gets hard to maintain. But if you don’t – if Railroad Time didn’t, if I didn’t, Rey-Rey, the runaways, if all of us didn’t at least try, we’d be slicing each other open at the heart just like the manmade world above us (literally and figuratively speaking) would like to read about.