Water, good. From the tap white with activity. I went into the dark shell of the family room. Rob was there, sitting. His eyes fought the air a few feet in front of him.
He awakened, focused a bit, with still the glow in his pupils, a fading half-open mouth and too wide of a grin. Faithfully happy. What's new? he responds.
Not much. Bathroom's cool. About everything is at this stage of the trip. Of the trip! -- feeling old like Morrison. How you?
Rob's grin vaguely twitched near the edge of his mouth, hung on a mood swing. Waiting for dog to die.
Once again the unsaid. Dog, old and white, with hair in buffeted tufts back through his vaguely wormlike, mange-mottled body - outside, head down on paws, staring life through a thin blank face. Dog boredom. Standing horse syndrome, the stare of the near catatonically stupid or bored. Same end result.
Try Honest Al's existential toothpaste!
Dog to die? He is one of the suburban chronics, he will live forever.
Bah to your ancient tradition. The dog of the sky, the dream of the hopefully fearful. We got past this twenty years ago.
So is dog hope?
perhaps
dog is dead, then. not so? or do we relish dog (here) as he is an example of life plodding ahead, insurgent determination to exist, to further erode the universe to dust, even if its primary function will be to exist, to consolidate its noise to signal, to resolve itself, and then, three days later, to resurrect in glory as a new set of infinite possibilities? or do we hate him for not having to live the neurotic filament of existence, caught between tight echoing walls of an existential play we can't control?
Maybe we should go out and kill him with a power saw. Mom would be pretty upset, but we can clean up. Or we can shoot him.
Kick out an eye, smash to death breaking his skull like a collapsing shell of slowerpot with the potent end of the bar sinking into the soft dry earth, it squirting more than billowing around the steel rod...
do we hate him? or envy?
Do more acid and kill him. Envy no, no; madness from the daily mad of arterial confinement and impotent rage energizing me in a brutal frustrated release to fuck.him.dead.
You're meaning entirely go Kurtz here.
I can see the headline: One More Modern Story of the Angstful and Disturbed, Variations on Wealthy-So-We'll-Kill-Our-Parents-And-Freebase and Nihilism? Myself, Although Basically Stolen From Camus
I doubt it would happen. We have this hope of dog, and he's always here, and he always will be, waiting. Dog has been here as long as I have.
He will endure. Intelligence is not a survival trait. We've survived this far. What goes on outside?
Two heavy fingers under the curtain, pulling it aside, strongly: a serious motion. Neighbors. Let's walk.
203
Past the door, down the street. Two beers for the walk, pounding through wet grass from the night before and the rains a day before, let stand under the overcast and wet with sporadic, fitful splatterings and the swarming moisture of the air.
In the store with My eyes pulled open I pay for a Dr Pepper and reflexively steal a package of Zingers.
In the street where He finishes His beer, Rob throws the bottle a clear cut over the dumpster filled with the rotting remnants of dead gerbils, soggy uneaten buns from restaurant parties, broken electronics, flyers for two-night getaway vacations to someplace green and blue, a fluorescence of imagination, empty bottles of hypochrondriac vaccinations, shell casings, blood tests, smashed light bulbs, empty champagne bottles, pornographic videos from the mule yards of Mexico, ...He grins and listens for it to pop into a burst of shards in the alley beyond. He shrugs; it is the symptom.
I sleep and I Dream. I am here Jimmy o yes to respond to the call of the empty conch sense up in the air. I am here. I am in a small supermarket dreaming of sex. I rest my foot on the freezer shank. A man hands Me a flyer in the street with a cross on the cover; I look down to see my foot resting on a package of o yes o yes Belgian microwave --