Retrogenesis

Thu, 31 May 2007 06:36:24 GMT

Three years lost and wandering then I am slap/bang! awake; the fog and the fug just dissipate without warning and leave me staring at this weird new world, eyes unaccustomed to the bright white light. Just what the hell does one do?

I have enlisted in the Special Projects Division. One-year tour with an option to renew if the numbers come in. Our mission is difficult: to make the world a better place while killing as few people as possible. Think it's easy? What was your approach, recycling? Buying a hybrid? Volunteering at the food bank? You know the one--a block away, small enclosed space that stinks to high heaven when the harvest moon is ripe. Gritty old walls painted Institutional Green for the sake of preserving the peace. Mildew and rot and stale vomit tangle with the olfactory offensive of recent bleachings. Your mission--a vacant activity; a shallow mimicry of Real Work that dulls your sense through repetition repetition repetition and fills the void in the pit of your stomach with a warm little feeling of a Job Well Done.

Me? Haven't felt anything for years. Hid in the belly of the Beast and performed shallow magics for my 30 pounds sterling. I liked them at first. They spoke a jargon I didn't know and had these nifty methods of divination. But it was a poor science they performed--giving answers first and asking questions second. Outperformed by a Magic 8-Ball which seems to only ever give one response: Reply hazy, try again. But I took the blue pill: 10 mg of Productivity, some gelatin, some dye. And it killed away the confusion and the static and the mess in my head and let me float in a lake of liquid-clear thought and tight-lipped determination. In brief, it just took the fun out of every damn thing.

And now what? A world of maybes? Special Projects?

She's maybe 1.5 Jack-'n'-Cokes into a bleak and tearful world when she mournfully cries out in Cantonese I think--my God! I don't speak Cantonese. I think--my God! I'm drunk. And she yells because she's lonely and she yells because she's tired and she yells because she's bored because everything is just so boring just so fucking boring why is everything so fucking boring? And she nuzzles against my arm at first for structural support at second for warmth and I-don't-know's on third but I wash up alone closing out every bar between here and there facing down fuck-me pumps with fuck-you stares and all along but unaware I'm gasping as the world is biting back from bitter black phantasms and yes indeed this world does spin. 3AM in a very dark place I'm smoking and staring at a ceiling which wobbles out of synch with my breathing and so faintly do I hear the door closing across the way the cheap match grating across the spent strike the soft silken inhale and I imagine the orange coal bobbing a coded message and the bizarre delicacy with which she grips/draws/inhales/holds/exhales a jet of vile Parliament smoke and ooooooohhhh this is a prequel to tomorrow's little boot-to-the-head of a rude awakening.

Good help is just so hard to find. I'm canceling my 2 o'clock for a meeting with one (1) Miss D'Opportunity; Mia Culpepper working ipso facto pro bono publico. I hate to be the negative one, but....

Nigel F. Kennedy

Retrogenesis