SONG OF THE DAY: Nowhere Fast

Bored and lonely last night so I did what any idiot looking to feel as solitary as possible would do – I rode the bus around for no reason. Mid-going nowhere fast trip though I decided to go look at magazines at the still a book store in the fancy normal people who have money shopping district, thinking “oh hey I’ll buy a Juxtapoz or maybe a train magazine, and then scribble haiku on pages or some dumb shit so I can justify the purchase aka waste of money” but I didn’t feel like riding the bus and walked instead, sitting on park benches whenever one appeared to test the lounge factor and blend into the questionable scenes adding my own question marks of “how do we read this guy?” for others passing by. Eventually, after much goofing off and taking pictures of an abandoned drug store in a dying strip mall, and also lamenting the bulldozed remnants and giant hole where previous old buildings I’d taken pictures of were now lost to progress, including a copy shop where I printed a bunch of zines over the years, I made my way across the street to the fancy normal people who have money shopping district and the book store, to piss in their bathroom, and also think about buying magazines.

Magazines are expensive, so I did not buy any magazines. I am so used to things trickling into my life second-hand or in bulk purchases of old shit either in real life junk markets or the internet junk markets that I forgot new shit, even dumb shit like magazines which is entirely geared towards you spending money in order to “discover” new ways to spend other money, well I forgot that new shit costs more than my broke ass comprehends.

After being bored by new magazines, and Parcheesi blocked walking down multiple aisles by well-tended white men and their princely heirs to their privilege, I made my way back to the bus stop, by the McDonalds, where we sat on the bus for a while while old men smoked cigarettes and the driver ran over to Mickey D’s. Eventually back unto Main Street, it was quarter to nine, so I got off to hit up the Afghani market for a delicious ayran for the rest of the walk home, having successfully eaten up most of the evening, alone, wandering, could disappear and nobody would notice for at least two days. But they didn’t even have mint ayran, only regular. “Fuck it,” I thought, and went ahead and got it, and it was the not main dude at the register but the second-to-main dude, and the main dude charges me flat chill price of regular but this dude hadn’t before, but tonight he did, so though they didn’t have mint ayran I at least wasn’t white-charged at the Afghani market.

I walked the rest of the way home, and this city is boring and maybe not even a city to be honest, and I passed all the places of people living, both the projects rebranded as “friendship court” and the pastel or earth tone hearty plank sided homes of gentrification within rock throwing distance of the projects, and thought about all the lives inside those places, and the comfort and lack of comfort, and how some of us have an upward trajectory or downward spiral and many of us simply have neither, just fluctuations slightly above or below whatever the fuck we were born into in the first place. The lack of support I have from family or even solid friends who are there other than when they need my support feels like a thousand pound kettlebell tied to my ankles, both of them at once, tightly, trying to swim out of deep murk. Seeing people, just random ass pairs of people – my age black couple pushing a stroller, affluent white folks headed to the downtown mall, old Indian couple – all walking together got me thinking on that fact how loneliness is unhealthy, but also how you can’t fix it on your own because duh you are alone, and when not wanting to be alone you always find the worst possible fucking humans who vampirize your life and energies. But then while I was thinking that I had already made the steps home, so I went inside and cut on two or three dollar store Chinese lanterns and sat there, thinking “well, that was a day” without even the motivation to write a poem, even a dumb simple poem as means of maintaining practice.