the Stones play in the background as "paint it black" washes over my mind, coloring it in technicolor shades. i feel the spirits of abbie hoffman and alan ginsberg whispering revolutionary thoughts in my brain as i give my spirit over to a decade that it never knew in this grey life. with a flick and a flash the glinting zippo lights the handrolled gauloises, and smoke clouds the room and my thoughts. i watch it curl and hang in the air and sink back as the track changes and i find myself in a purple haze, letting myself float away and live without thoughts, riding the currents of the music. It's one of those mundane days, one of those in between times that makes you want to walk among traffic to aleviate the boredom. i sit in a stupor till the cigarettes run out and i am forced to move, statuelike, shaking the dust and gravel from my form and lumbering through the fading light. where did it all go wrong, what sequence of events led me to this place, a foreign and hostile land. i once had friends, companions who stood by my side, but as i stare blankly, it vaguely registers to me that they have drifted to parts unknown and places that i cannot follow. a marionette, i snapped the strings that moved me, finally collapsing, broken, but free.
I begin to mark time by the fading sunlight, an azure colored sky hidden by darkness. depression requires emotion and i find myself too exhausted even for that, as ghosts whisper me to sleep, sirens who desire me to join them in the sunless lands. though for now, i resist, i feel myself stepping closer and closer to the sunset of humanity and my life. this is man's twilight hour, the gods having long departed for avalon. we sit as mere shadows of what we once were. we are no longer man, but simply the memory of the earth that was. resistance and conformity have become synonamous as the colors swirl together, producing a dirty brown. Was there ever a time before this? a time when things were different? sometimes i get shadows of phantoms of memories, and for a moment i dream, no longer myself but someone all together more real. are we the dreams of the dead? shadows of shades of corpses? the horror movie has ceased to frighten, it's terrors nothing compared to the ultimate nightmare of mundacity, and the world that welcomes it and holds high its banner.
i once found the american dream somewhere on highway 380 outside of brownsville. I was cruising along at 90 through fields of wheat with the texas sun at my back. i drove towards a wall of clouds that lay in front of me, as if daring me to try to race the rain contained within them. It was about then that i hit the american dream. I went crunch under the tires and i watched it flop around on the road behind me, before growing still and smaller as i sped on. "funny," i remarked to myself. "i thought it used to be bigger." then moving on, i punched the engine to speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, having no interest in watching old gods die.
