Being Sick (Which I'm Not)

What is it about being sick that so strongly affects your consciousness? Sexual desires disappear. No amount of money could satisfy you. Food becomes downright repulsive. Everything becomes covered with a greenish tint of death that drains the appeal from one’s usual sensual pleasures. Nothing can satisfy, nothing tantalizes. The only hope is for an end, be it the sweet but temporary release of sleep or a more permanent finale.

What happens when we die? Is it an end? A true end seems difficult to envision, as I can remember no true beginning. I don’t feel eloquent enough to talk about this right now, so maybe some crappy poetic prose.

Seven spans across the diametric repose of one insincere young go-getter who dreams of better days. Seven times a day he must re-remember the advice of cagey inspirational speakers with no hope for turning this particular sentence into anything the least bit valuable, coherent, or interesting. Fuck. FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK I have tapped a dry hole. Words come out and words go up and words I type just one by one and there is no end in sight, no end to the potential for writing words. But it is empty. There is nothing nutritional, nothing worth reading from these words. They are empty plasma. They are water soup. They are buildings without structure and lives without aim. They would just as soon cannibalize each other as form beautiful images or mimic transcendent concepts. Fuck. My vomit is more colorful that these useless words. Do you know what it feels like to be empty inside? Plant lamp clock feet. That’s how it feels. Communication has failed, there is no hope but war.

When I was six years old my father took me out back and he said to me, “Son,” he said, “there ain’t no money in writing and their ain’t no money in dreams. It’s prostitution or the coal mine for you, black lung or the herpes.” I never forgot what my father said. I put these words on his tombstone, though he doesn’t know it because he’s still alive. One day he’ll die and then he’ll find out and he will be upset. But he’ll understand. He always understands.

My goodness, what an unfortunate story. I must be a real hard-luck case, you’re thinking. Well, you’re wrong. I was very lucky. But I sold my luck in a Reno pawnshop to pay for the gun I used to rob the shopkeeper so I could get back the watch I pawned to pay for smack. And I’d do it again.