Limitations: An annoying itch, a tsunami.
Neither her or I know why we choose to sleep under our bed at night. Technically, we’re suppose to sleep in the bathtub, but its full of mildew and I lost my last scrubby brush. I also have a phobia that involves loose hairs. Every time the bombs explode I shake her. She tells me to knock it off, but I’m afraid her heart will stop from the noise and I want to jostle it. Remind it, that the world has not ended. It is still red, beating, and employed full-time.
In the night, large fires burn where our neighbors used to play, in between explosions people throw their books down from stories above. They don’t want to be found out, the ones in tweed coats, leather patches, and complicated ideas have already been taken away. We drink wine with copies of Slaughter House Five and The Leaves of Grass duck taped to our bellies just in case tonight’s the night. We figure, they won’t take it from our cold dead hands because of the saying. I swallowed a flash drive with Shakespeare’s entire collection on it last night before I went to bed. If there is anything fun about what is going on it’s that our actions might be finally contributing to the greater good. Well, that and the fact that I left A Midsummer Night’s Dream on my desktop.
During the day we write letters to future generations and then file them in a fire proof box. Those kids are going to want to know why they don’t have a pot to piss in; me and her, feel personally responsible. We remind them, we honestly thought the earth was deeper, and though, we did have millions of pictures from space that proved the bottom was quite real, its hard to take that into consideration when you’re just one person. One that is half the size of even the smallest machine, and one that has a bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, no less, I promise, it doesn’t mean what you think. The horizon I see when I look out the window is barely even New Jersey. Beyond that, it goes on for thousands and thousands of miles, and I find it impossible for me, at any one moment in time, to account for it all. When I try, I start to sweat and then instinctually I take a shower. I’m sorry, if you don’t know what that means. In many of my letters, I like to remind these, our raggedy children of tomorrow, that in the capitalistic society that we lived in, gasoline was a commodity, and water wasn’t even a commodity and commodities are by definition, well according to Wikipedia “some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, such as petroleum, notebook paper, or milk.[1] In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereos, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stereo is [perceived to be], the more it will cost.” So yes, mistakes were made. Gasoline and copper should have been called Gods and not commodities. Water should have been called a word we never took the time to come up with.
What I never tell them, because I can’t help myself imagining them reading these letters huddled around camp fires in the middle of winter wearing worn impractical designer clothes from generations before, is that much of their dilemma is on my shoulders. When the fighting started and people with homemade guns and steel strapped to their chests, began to cross the border in the thousands. I couldn’t help watching. They held their empty paint buckets out at arms length, and insisted on being assisted. The first time I saw a murder; I nearly snapped. I wept over the dead body for an hour. Blood like fingerpaint, on my hands. A gas station attendant named Ron. His wallet was was brown and cheap.I pulled at the velcro and found some change. Bent into a crevice were photos of his wife and three kids arranged by age. All in clothing that suggested a sincere struggle. I drove to my home and turned the water on. My wife said something predictable like, hey, we need that. I shook my head and showed her Ron’s kids. She acknowledged they looked disheveled, but tried to stop me as I began compulsively flushing my own toilet. I lit my stove and let it burn all afternoon. I used my own last tank to drive to a secluded gas station, wrapped red handkerchiefs tightly around the handles of the pumps and drove away. Like a man with a dollar burning a hole in his pocket, I thought, foolishly, at the time, that we should just get it all over with. I had a pop up tent and a book about the history of boy-scouts. Later, when it was all gone, and I had a minute to give the book a closer inspection, it was clearly more biography of the original founders than the instructional guide for building fires and tying knots that I had had such high hopes for. So, just so you know, it hasn’t been a cake walk for me either. I’m sorry. I have no idea what your life is like, my hope is that you have one.
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