Intermission

Addicted

I emerge from a three-day nightmare of fever and aching flesh. I am still reeling from it, I think. I've been staring at the computer screen, looking at words, listening to the murmur and nonsense noise of the TV, wave after wave of words and sounds crashing, breaking, swelling. I am exhausted. There is so much noise around me.

Riding a fever-wave for too long will destroy you. The swelling heat of it, the ache of it. I spent three days staring at the wall, trying to ignore the noise around me. Schizophrenics are helpless, surrounded by the noise; autistic children, too, are battered by the noise around them.

(I am addicted to the noise.)

I would like silence. A few seconds of silence. Not the silence of sleep. Not the silence of an empty room; rooms are too full of time and memory, the tick-tock march of clocks. Maybe the silence of a forest is what I need. Maybe the silence of water.

Sleep

I have a complicated relationship with sleep. I want it; I want it to want me, but it so rarely does. I don't trust sleep, not for a second; pity, then, the irony that to sleep, one must close one's eyes. Prey should never surrender so willingly to such a dangerous creature. I fight it daily, and have the purple bruises under my eyes to prove it. I wake up, always thrashing, desperate to remain in the predatory teeth of such a monster. And there are the times, the sweet succulent flesh ripping times, when I offer myself up to its carnivore mouth and it opens hungrily. Those moments I am fully in love with sleep, and lacking desperation, I slide down the throat of it.

Clutter

I like to read what I would call high-end pop culture writing. This is writing that attempts - often delightfully, usually foolishly – to find great meaning in static. Writing that will equate, say, the Jonas Brothers with the Marx brothers, finding some parallel to the Kennedy clan, and from there a Camelot allusion or three. It's all very busy, which I think is the best word to describe it – busy. Sometimes I aspire to this style of writing – I too can reference Jessica Simpson and Simone de Beauvoir in the same paragraph, to chuckles and nods all around! - but it's all so very fleeting. Where is the worth in it? It's all just more noise. TV noise, word noise, picture noise. It's all just more noise.

Lucidity

I am scared that if I turn off the TV, I will find out that the static is in me. No – I know that when I turn off the TV, I will be reminded that the static is me. I have taken to smoking more and more. The nicotine soothes my nerves and quiets the static – when I smoke, the static is almost like waves breaking, and that is a noise I can trust. I can’t trust the static - that noise between radio stations, the hint and swell of human voices. Though the voices, when they settle and a station is tuned, sing only the desperate, whispered come-ons of pop stars.

Who listens to the radio anyway? In the static it doesn’t matter. These words are more of too many, and you weren’t even listening.

Turn on the TV. Take a moment to flip through the channels. It’s okay. This is just another channel. This is me writing ad copy to fill the empty spaces between sitcoms. This is me writing sitcoms to fill the empty spaces between ads. This is static, this is your intermission.

Sleep Part Two

I have taken my pills, the ones that quiet me. I take a lot of pills. Some are colorful. Wonderful little things, magical little things. It is very nice to be Alice sometimes, and not to struggle against the swelling and the shrinking around me.

We medicate ourselves against imaginary diseases. I medicate myself against the tyranny of consciousness. I take one pill for my brain, another for my uterus, and several more for the fun of it. The fun pill is green and round like a little glass pillow. It floats in my palm like a dinghy, and I float on it down the river. At the end of the river is a waterfall. I stretch my throat out taut and swallow the waterfall. The waterfall is a dream. The dream is what I am.

I can still hear the white noise. It is not quiet down the rabbit hole, but Alice assures me it is a lovely place to be, regardless.

This is the end, beautiful friend…this is the end, my only friend…the end of our elaborate plans…

This is it, my friends. I have spent too many evenings staring at this screen. I’ve given you some pretty words, but does it count when the words are coaxed out of me, painfully? Word for word, I’ve been swallowing razor blades. This is not magic. This is studying the entrails. This is several metaphors too many.

Is there anything more boring than writing about not writing? It’s masturbation, and I don’t get my kicks watching other people get off. There is supposed to be something delightfully meta about it, writing about not writing as writing and breaking the fourth wall and the labyrinth and Borges and all kinds of fancy deconstructionist theory and ivory tower philosophy, and on and on. My favorite word sums all this up: Fuck.

It’s all noise and static. There is no meaning to be found in this.

Ask yourself: Why are you reading this? What were you hoping to find? I’ve already told you about the Body. I’ve already told you about the Heart, and about Love. I gave you three different ways of looking at love, in fact. Pretty fucking generous, I think. Now and then I mention Art - how refined of me! I’ve given you mourning and I’ve given you suicide and I’ve given you my bloody arms. I’ve given you dreams and quotations and I’ve given you delight.

What more, then? What is left, except for the noise and the static?

If I knew what you wanted from me, I wonder if the words would find me.

This is the end, beautiful friends.