1337philosophxorz

I awoke to the sudden application of faint whisper, the type of whisper that is like a sledgehammer to the temple, that I am “Doing it wrong!” Looking around my bedroom there was nothing that could have stirred me from my slumber but now I was awake and nothing could be done about that.

The cell phone informed me that is was around eight in the evening and my stomach informed me that breakfast was twelve hours ago. Consuming a hastily cooked meal of ratatouille I fleetingly glanced at at the remnants of a once proud liqueur display and found myself making eye contact with Morgan. Could it be he that told me of my gaucheness? Despite that fate was in his ancestry I had my doubts but left my right eyebrow to remain suspicious.

Groping through desk drawers for matches I examined the status of my friends through the bled light of the ether. One was eating a muffin, another had not let out an ethereal vibration for at least a week and I am beginning to assume that he has either become involved with a woman or is dead, and the other go-to was doing not much of anything but suffers from occasional bouts of symposiaphobia and planned a nice night in with a book.

Contemplating this I stuck my match and allowed my face to be naturally lit before consumed by a cloud of smoke. It was only 10:30. Despite this I ventured towards the piers of Halifax where broken men belong. Am I broken? I can sense no break. They may.

Before dropping into the harbour I pushed my self through the cacophonic melody of Friday night. Is there live music? Decent D.J.? Available Women? Men? Men and Women? The leitmotif that I have observed in almost every edge of the western world.

My goal for the evening was to make it to Tribeca just before Sackville drops into the harbour. I am always fond of the mythological New York and this bar delivers a small sliver of that. One day I hope to meet a Dotty Parker and a have chat over exactly four martinis. Merely fantasy but I hope she keeps her glasses on. The real reason I keep returning is because of music. Which is not typical fanfare allows me to put on my red shoes and dance arrhythmically – after a few restoratives.

My chronic arrhythmia is deeply in tune with city. Tribeca was occupied by a full staff that were relaxed, one of the regulars, a few crickets too bored to even chirp. This is not woeful because I would be able to get a quiet drink in before the complete saturation tequila vapour and pheromones. Eye of the hurricane. After the Heineken fused with blood the wind will pick up and you can Marry Poppins with your umbrella. The only way to fly.

The wind began to howl.

On the third beer I needed to fumigate my lungs. The conversation outside had turned to that pesky Canadian habit of offering to buy cigarettes off people. There were divided opinions on the matter and kept to myself finding it be like an amusing but banal radio talk show. The cigarette began to fizzle out and I laced up the red shoes and moved on in.

Dance floors always shimmer like the surface of the sun. It seems chaotic but it is by which we can see each other. Beauty is not in the intense mass of limbic foam but in the movement of the eye.

My pulsing didn’t seem to attract much attention but I am used to this because I am unsure how to dance without a partner and my knee had some minor damage done to it recently. The beer had taken the pain away and saved it for about four in the morning – when I could really use it. This is when something happened that has not happened in a while. A girl gave me a come hither stare accompanied by a beckoning finger.

I was immensely flattered as the only female I would call a friend is deeply sapphic and in a very monogamous relationship. I started to dance with here and she seemed drunker than me but not completely out of it. The dance became increasingly intense. Suddenly there were lips upon mine and I was gently dragging my slight overbite over her lower-lip. There was strange sensation of Jägermiester. Pride’s sails at full bellows. I did not take the warning.

We slowly moved off to the side of the dance floor to make out in earnest while dancing. Two events made me realize things had turned to the strange. The first was that she licked the side of my cheek – this may be strange but I have known women that do this without severe intoxication and always found it a to make it me feel like some sort of lion cub almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Simba. Reality came down like a Hydrogen Bomb just before I could think about how to extract myself in polite way.

Free from imagined sexual repression she processed to dry hump my bad knee. The room got darker as my eyes focused to the bright light of the Valkyrie. The shrieking goddesses consumed every cubic inch of my headspace and lit my alcohol infused blood.

I was not very drunk or just a little tipsy but there was no way to think straight and quickly. Just a fusion of different sopranos shrieking in my ears and a thump of a second heart in my leg.

I managed to get her to switch legs but then she lent back and nearly tumbled over causing me to hug her just to keep her from taking an spill. She took this another way. Some grabbing and fumbling I managed to look into her eyes in way that my friends call the ‘soul stare’ and find uncomfortable.

This is just me looking into someone to see if the hamster is still running. The poor creature had died of alcohol poising or, as someone else has pointed out, bit of date rape at the bar. There was very little grey and white matter going with any earnest processing and what was left had a particular idea of how the evening should end despite physical impossibility.

The biggest problem was that I had no idea whom this woman was or whom her friends may be. I could barely keep her standing and had lost any semblance of control of the situation – if I ever had it. Oddly, I kept up the facade of dance because I could not think of better plan. All that was in my mind was constant shrieking. I looked around shrugging a bit which everyone seemed to ignore.

Things were getting out of hand and fast. Suddenly, seemingly out of poof of smoke and a kazahn, another women appeared. She wore the type of disapproving look that you normally associate with some sort of judge and she seemed to stand there for a few minutes for my time dilated perspective.

After those few minutes of confusion and arm flailing she, the magical woman, leaned into my ear and said “I’m her friend and we are going to take her home.” Apparently she was one of the pride. The change in number without visual evidence confused me. She was standing alone. How could she become a we so fast? Had pentagrams been drawn? Ninjas from the roof? Was she Queen Victoria? Had time, space, and meaning collapsed?

Even with all those half thoughts swirling in my mind I responded “Thank God.” This seemed to leave a bit of quizzical expression on her – amongst the scorn of course. This is about when the dancer fell over again. I caught her for the last time and two of her other friends, the rest of the pride I assumed, filed out of the crowd and there was a transfer. Also I think her blouse may have fallen down a bit leaving her exposing her bra because I have this faint impression of someone correcting shirt straps. This woman had ceased to be sexual object a while a go and become a strange problem so I wasn’t really looking.

I backed against a wall a put all my weight on the right leg. The screaming shut up in my head and I could think again. The scene next to me was not pretty. The dancer wanted to keep dancing and there was strange malaise of an argument. The argument ended with her passing out on her feet. Her two friends started carrying her like one of the fresher corpses from no man’s land after a World War One battle.

I felt more than one dirty look upon me but I didn’t care. I through that little bit of vanity and pride on the dance floor to be trampled and returned to bar for a beer to get the taste of Jäger out of my mouth and to look for place to sit and let the beer clear out the pain in my leg so I could eventually walk up the Sackville drop home.

I started to finish this new beer quickly. Some new people appeared around me and one sorry-son-a-bitch looked a lot like me. This was noticed by the group and one quickly asked for my label. “Gui Raymond” I managed to croak out. Surprise crept over the crowd and I thought I may have said something else. Turns out that the sorry-son-of-a-bitch had the similar name and this was deeply interesting to the drunk but not to me.

What was interesting was that last call was about a quarter of an hour away. My beer finished and my second heart was still beating. I excused myself from the group and went to the bar to close out my tab with just one last restorative and sat down in one of the expatriated car seats nearer to the exit.

I found the woman that collects the cover charge there doing that thing you do when you are bored to tears. Fiddling with her blackberry. I chatted with her as a bit of distraction. The short version of the conversation was that she is off to med school and wondering about what the next few years had in store. I told her some of the more amusing stories from a group of doctors that I used to run around with and mused over the fact that self-circumcision is much more common in the ER than anyone expects.

Last call rang and I went outside to smoke and allow some time for the full effect of my medicine. Chatting with the more amusing came naturally. I wrote something in my notebook.

Looking at it now it is just an old joke.

Physicist: My paper is done unless it’s observed.

Why would I want to write that lame joke down at such a point? Mind my mind was trying to pull something from the darker corners but at this point I was no longer tipsy but drunk.

The pride of lionesses had reappeared and were giving me something that I perceived as a funny look while I was chatting with someone else.

The look reminded me a confused crow but I stopped reading passages of forgotten lore when I left classics.

Dragging my shambling corpse up that fucking hill is not my favourite activity even when I am in good condition. That night was no exception but there was something of idea bubbling around. ‘Nolle prosequi’ repeated over and over.

Being a bit of useless prat it should be of no surprise that upon stepping my bedroom I got sure footing on the dustcover of some hardcover I was reading and did a great backwards fall into the nothingness. I found that laughter had filled the room.

I was smiling. I didn’t and don’t know why. I just had the thought that this generation is somehow quantum in its constitution. Existing in strange probability fields that once observed you became static but how you got there was a mystery. The fear doesn’t seem to be about social standing but that one’s ontology may shift to what they think. That you would become what others saw. So many years the people cried that they were not an object but are they failing as a subject? Is this what has become of the world? To stop moving is to finally be.

Gen X was supposed to be apathetic and overeducated. Is this new generation just afraid to care or to show it? The dancer lioness had so much sexuality bottled up that it just came out as an explosion. A once unique man found his doppelgänger. The pride of lionesses found both a lecherous scumbag and chatty guy about pointless subjects. And a future med student got a peek into the crazy life of residency.

People seem to worry about how they will be judged by the jury of strangers except when dangerously drunk. And I have never met a person that did something completely surprising when tanked. Only something that was within them anyway which the old buffer was stopping. Has this generation of Canadians had its constitution drafted by those that know best? Who buys this shit? Who would want to encourage it by not acting out? Have the sixties protests been completely slaughtered by the Wall street yuppies of the eighties? Is everyone that worried about failure that no one even wants to try? And why aren’t the streets full of nauseous people except when then buffer is gone the gaze is goggled? I knew Sartre was full of shit.

“I don’t know but I need to find out.” I said aloud to the apartment. It creaked with approval. Striking a match the room took on a nice amber hue for the few seconds but with a wave of the hand it returned to darkness except for a floating bright red bulb.

My hiatus from the world had been too long. This thing I was returning to is new and different. I wasn’t throwing back in with the thing but I was walking like drunk over cigarette packets around the place. Freaking out because someone may find me attractive. Like some gecko who spies a cat but with a particular brain condition that makes him run towards the cat. I float through the present with a strange surreal zeal. Maybe I am broken but maybe at least, hopefully, interestingly so.

I closed the night by exhaling a long column of vaporized coffin nail straight up into the air. Butted out and lay down – knowing full well that my knee alarm would go off in a couple of hours. I slid my eyelids gently over the old corneas and was about to sleep when I heard “You’re doing it wrong”. I threw a pillow in no particular direction and yelled “Fuck off.”