On Mogul
“Talent can take you places but it is skill that keeps you there.”
~ my friend Torrey, on writing
I had a stroke of genius — it happens — and thought about waking the doctor up at 2 a.m. and tell him I have that dry eye syndrome I saw on television and I need a script.
The conversation goes like this:
“Hey Doc, it’s me. I have that, uh, dry eye syndrome. Yes, my eyes hurt. No, I have not been drinking too much coffee again. What? I need a script? Yeah, whatever, just call it in and uh, while you’re at it, can ya pick me up a pack of smokes on your way to the OR?”
Life should be that comical.
I wouldn’t mind the side effects of the prescription anyhow: heart palpitations, kidney disease, possible stroke, urinary retention, migraines, constipation, stomach pain, blurred vision (oxymoron), short term memory loss, confusion, dementia, risk of diabetic coma, and eventually… death.
I can risk that to get rid of a dry eye or two.
I sat in the mall today. I despise the mall. Forced to go, I step inside, heart beating fast, instant chest pain (great) and onset of perpetual migraine, so I grab a cappuccino. Walking, walking, and thinking if one more motherfucker nudges into me, that is it. I am tearing into the next toy store I pass to grab a lethal child’s toy.
One by one, take ’em out, like a nut-job in a bell tower. Sit in the middle of this excuse for a living room where we can socialize and hide behind a plastic palm tree. Wait for a bratty piss-pot to come running by, stick my foot out and watch the parents halfheartedly console the spoiled replica of themselves they spawned.
If there is a hell, it is the mall, so please, don’t even think of telling me to go there.
Figured I should probably eat, my legs hurt, wandering around, wondering what the fuck I was doing in this place and how much I would rather be in a bookstore or at home watching Tony Montana shove his face into a pile of snow.
Instead, I took a seat in the Garden Cafe and looked around. Felt I was the only one without pennies on my eyes.
Lil’ girls with G-strings pokin’ out of their low-cut sad excuse wanna-be-somebody they never will be showing off to boys who only wanna get in their pants.
As if that would be a difficult task.
Cell phones, iPads, iPods, tablets, Nooks, Kindles, everything portable imaginable, and I thought I was cool when I had the Bionic Woman, and her arm opened up and you saw wires and shit in there.
Saw a woman sitting alone in a booth with a laptop on the table. I thought, Man, you should be at a cafe. What in the fuck are you doing in a mall? I felt like walking up to her, handing over a tattered book of poetry like a Get Out of Jail Free card, but I didn’t.
The mall is a denial from the misery felt by those who still think that the world is flat.
There was an angel there today. Was just a man — olive-skinned, radiating supernovas swirling like sunspots. I watched him there smiling. Brown leather sandals, a nylon cord sneaking inside his shirt, and I wondered what was on the other end of it. I saw hieroglyphic tattoos poking out of the edges of his shirtsleeves.
Curls of carbon silk reflected light shining from his retinas, cerulean, and I looked around and felt like screaming, “Am I the only one seeing this shit?”
Nobody stirred, people kept right on stuffing their faces with eventual heart attacks, talking and yapping with fake smiles, lipstick-stained-teeth grinning skeletons already dead to themselves.
This man though, the angel, he sat on a hill, and I was a child. My chin upturned listening as he told stories to droves of people. He was cotton-robed, his raiment. The whole scene, transparent. Lucid dreams and waves. Sketches of memories past.
He was one word ---> Imagine.
Compelled to talk to him, every bit of strength I had — which wasn’t much, trust me — kept me from doing just that. Pisses me off now. I saw him there and knew it. He looked right into my eyes and said:
“Ssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…”
I heard that inside my skull.
Then he looked away from me and continued talking to the ghosts seated next to him.
The cursor blinked. I stared at it. Maybe it wasn’t my eyes after all. An hour had passed and I had not written a single paragraph. I stared though… at this one sentence:
There are plenty of talented nobodies in the world who are too lazy to do jack shit with their lives.
I held my palms to my cheeks, cracked my knuckles, put on some tunes and began to write.
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