Broken. It’s that feelin’ of wellin’ up like so many irritants inside are tryin’ to rip your mouth open and scream the apocalypse. What would they scream? Hatred, death, somebody help me, a hug? Somethin’. It’s a convolution of shit that’s mostly incomprehensible and it’s easier to just sleep it off than to actually sittaown and deal with it.

I didn’t even know the dude. Really. Sure he hung out at my place, but he mostly said a lot of stupid shit for attention and all we ever did was make fun of him. He was too gooda soul to do anything but shrug it off in real life, though. Only ever saw him snap once at someone and it was rightfully so. Hard to be backwards in a backwards community, that was always a point of respect. But who am I to patronize ‘im? I didn’t even know him. Still affects me.

Somma us like to pretend we’re invincible. It’s really only ever to a point. I can watch ‘em die off in the distance all day long, but as soon as it comes within grasp, there’s a certain pressure attached to it. Can’t shrug it, can’t just say “fuck it, didn’t know him”. ‘Cause the truth is that we did know each other- hell he was aware of one of the biggest plights of my life, more so than any friend I’ve made in the last three years ever will be. But I still didn’t know him.

Existence gettin’ stamped out is no big deal in itself. Your neurons stop shootin’, the brain quits sending signals to the body, physical functions cease, you grow cold, you bloat, you decay. There is nothin’ fantastical about this. It’s the stamping out, that’s the real thing. An active memory turning into a stale re-run. That’s what gets me every time.

I still dream in Troy. It’s the most wonderful thing. It was such a vibrant, familiar part of formative life that there really is no going stale. All this death, it’s somethin’ similiar. These existences that crossed into mine- however briefly in some cases- were tied to my view of reality, and a bit of the world that was otherwise going to continue on for a long while is crumbled up, and tossed out.

This reality of mine, of yours, it’s all there is. And it exists only as long as those who partake in it stand within it as well. But one by one, it will disintegrate out of memory. And after this place is over-run by the next one, nobody will recollect it.

It’s really a bizarre concept to blame these consequences, this welling of emotion, on somebody I didn’t really “know”, but whom I knew. And it prolly wasn’t even proper to do so today. Somethin’ of a lie really.

‘Cause today was a mishmash of wrongs, not just the one. You get to a certain point- all these things you don’t wanna be doing, but that you feel you “have to” do for people you tell yourself you care about but really, you don’t. Obscure childlike crushes and high school-ish jealously? A class whose politics and idiocy has shockingly spilled over and encompassed your every free moment and you don’t even LIKE the point of it? It’s like being forced to paint a really shitty picture with half a brush.

I realized today that there’s was no why for all of this. The “how”- the too distraught with life to even speak to an old-friend I never see in person these days, the mental collapse shortly thereafter, being within five seconds of grabbing my shit and leaving town, the wasting of two hours on a beautiful afternoon doing shit for a doomed project and another four in some half-cognitive sleep-like state trying to forget the whole affair- is just foolish. I find myself in the “golden age” of my life, doing this. This.

Broken. That’s what it came down to. It wasn’t workin’, so I stopped the bleeding. Maybe there’s consequences for all this, academic/social ones for this micro-reality I call school. But maintaining sanity and peace-of-mind is larger than that, and sacrificing either for anything so unsubstantial is an utter waste of life.

Eight. Eight bits of my reality severed and tossed out with uniform speed. That’s the thing with all this death… Makes you wanna live. Sounds a little cliche, sure- but when I look ’round and see these walls, these politics, these uncaring minds…

I can’t help but wonder what I could find elsewhere.

Have to go to nowhere. Why? ‘Cause it’s dark an’ I can. Specks up there in the black hangin’ above the cold air with a crescent night-light. There’s a sense of warmth right now- love, even. For anything an’ everything. Lotta people don’t get that on their own, but I’m not a lotta people. And it’s not satiated by other folk, but by an aimless wander into the dark. Me, a bright yellow strip, some post, the specks above, and a bit of gas.

Useda have to answer to somebody when I did this. Sneak it ’round, pretend I was over-worked. Nah. Maybe it began with after-hours, I dunno. Iron Creek. Freeman. Lake Creek. Home. Then it became a contemplation of her… And then just a ride into the sunset, or a dead-of-night excuse to listen to something beautiful in the middle of awe.

Some folks call it nowhere, like they’d rather be somewhere. I don’t understand that. It took a good 15 minutes, but I finally got out here to nowhere, outside lookin’ in. Golden ants. Buncha dots herded around an even bigger dot, way out here on a part of our big dot that everyone forgot. Most of ‘em down there have no desire to wander up and look down. Even fewer would be grinning like an idiot while they did it. I’m not most of ‘em, though.

Iron Creek. Freeman. Lake Creek. Home. That’s where it used to be. The specks in the sky were innumerable back there. You look at ‘em and you can’t really think of your spot in it all, just that there’s so many. So many things you haven’t explored. And it’s wonderful.

Houses, lotta them dark. A few lit, mostly dim. Families inside, prolly calmly watching somethin’ together. Seven years ago maybe- a truck, a CD of bands I’d never heard the likes of then, and the ability to use a credit card, but they’re still like mirrors, those houses. I see a kid in military fatigues hanging out in the back, standing on the wet grass looking up at the stars with some airsoft and a camera in his hands, askin’ “what’s next?” and talkin’ about life with the most unlikeliest of best friends. That’s really how I came to be out here, in nowhere.

But in the journey here, there was a road that played out like this one looks: kinda patchy and dark an’ lots of potential for a furry innocent creature to completely ruin the trip. I wasn’t looking at the sky- well, maybe at first I was, ’cause that’s where I saw it all going. Layin’ there with Of The Room and letting it wash over… But my eyes got tripped down. That’s when that loop became an after-hours release for the head. Autumn to Ashes. Nothing peaceful. Lotta people do horrible things to ‘em selves in those times, out there in the dark starin’ at the road with nothin’ for you but some headlights, and I coulda. But I didn’t. Music, it seems, was self-flagellating enough.

Sparowes. Red ones. I don’t really even care for the album but this song fits the mood. A plodding sense of wonder at 45 miles an hour, yeah. I miss her. I really do. All that miserableness passed- not as long ago as I woulda hoped and it’s still a lil’ bit of a ghost wound, but I can live with that. There’s a coupla white bags sittin’ there in the side now, but there’s still snow outside. Maybe it wasn’t dark and it was a few months earlier in the season, but insteada my sustenance for the week sittin’ there it was an adorable thing trying to get out the door with her seatbelt on. Mosta those memories- the stalkin’, the crack-addled convos, the floor sittin’- get overshadowed by the latter halfa the road, but they’re still there. Thankfully.

It got past all that eventually, drivin’ about in the dark. Or maybe it never really changed and I just got used to it, saw the beauty in solitude. Iron Creek. Freeman. Lake Creek. Home. There’s no golden ant-farm out in the distance, no endless valley before you; just trees, imposing mountains- the occasional rabbit with down syndrome- and a few random dark residents (save that crazy big property at the bottom of Freeman and everyone’s favorite Rankin plot). I’m not saying what it is now is bad, just that the old road felt more welcoming, like a piece of family. You know where you can and can’t go, what has guns and what’s an empty frame built by rural whores, and so on. It’s like sittin’ in the dark after the shows over and starin’ at the last coupla burning embers in the fire at the side of the living room. You’re never lost there.

It all starts to look the same when the geography is made of vanilla. I certainly wasn’t trying, but I got lost. Gigglin’ at it. Like I said, most people wanna be “somewhere”, but I’m content to explore nowhere. I don’t recognize these hills, this pavement or these turns an’ it’s a little unnerving since I wasn’t trying to get here, but nothin’ to get desperate over. Happenstances like this are worth pursuing, and maybe my greatest fault is turnin’ around like so. Used to do that outta fear, but tonight… Nah. A grinning nod. I’ll come back, ’cause I don’t know the whole path, maybe never will, but one night I’ll take it as far as possible just ’cause I can. But I got things to contemplate, and a monster-high to work off. Next time, lad.

I still revisit the old roads, wander down ‘em and try to see ‘em anew. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Mostly an excercise in nostalgia, which can be maddeningly sad. I ‘member drivin’ up that driveway to hang out in a pack-rat living room, ‘member when that kid lived in their trailer closer to the road with a batshit crazy sister, ‘member sleddin’ down that hill with a formerly straight-A and sober friend, ‘member the jaw-droppingly gorgeous (older) girl that lived down that hill an’ sat quietly on the bus for years. Strange is wishing these things would go on, stay there and never bugger off into the recesses of my mind. But what’s life if it just stays the same? Would these memories mean anythin’ without time and distance between them and I?

So I turns around. Steps with Christmas as a Christmas gift bangs outta the speakers like it did after Dead Winter day and a few days before the first of many disappointing run-ins with a certain midget. But I’ve had my turn of grinnin’ like a kid at the moon and stars with Laura from the speakers, Sparowes, Esmerine. I coulda kept goin’- maybe I should have (and I certainly wish I had now, but that’s the come-down talkin’ I think)- but I’d had my share and I wasn’t feelin’ greedy. I’ll explore that road in good time. I got the sense that there’s plenty left.

I derive inspiration from this. Don’t needa companion for it- another presence and especially a talking one would ruin it. As it is, the only ruiner is that out here- next to a big golden ant-farm- you can’t stop an’ chill, look up at the skies like that kid in the fatigues in his backyard, ’cause somebody will bother you with misguided philanthropy. Yeah, I’m fine, no, I don’t need assistance; get back in your 4×4 diesel and keep ignorin’ those stars up there in the cold night sky, those things that make some-a us understand how beautifully small we are and how wonderfully long the road out ahead is.

…You know, I useda sit here like this, in the glow with them stereo-phones playin’ something calming, talkin’ into this box with inspiration for revolution and ire, or just contemplation, like here an’ now. It’s a wonderful return to a road I kinda forget sometimes- one that has all sortsa off-ramps to other ones. One of those ramps was a handful of poor words that I stomped into a retreat, then a few months later those words weren’t so poor, an’ I started to listen to ‘em. Already talked about that road, though.

Thing is, all of ‘em are intertwined like that. Lotta folks call it nowhere out here, above the dots and in the black, lookin’ backwards and upwards all at once. But I can’t help smilin’ at all this. It’s somewhere to me.