Keeping Broken Things Separate

As I watch the sun set, I wonder....

I wonder what my future holds. I feel that I'm just standing around for a cannonball to fly by and smash into my head, splattering it like a thrown egg. Everything is going rock steady right now... right now. Just right now, which is all I'm going to live for. I'm going to stop planning, and stop worrying, and stop the fretting. There's not much of anything you can do with your life anyway. It's like too big to try to steer. It's like a massive oil tanker and trying to steer it with a small rudder. It takes time to do anything.

How do you get a license to drive a tanker anyway? Do you pick those up at your local DMV? I want to captain a taker, but not near Somalia. Those fuckers are too crazy with all that damn hijacking. But that's not my point. My point is that my life is like that tanker, cutting through a wide ocean without any land in sight clean around. I'm navigating, but fuck if I know where. I have no goals, no aims, other than to make it through another day.

Another day. And another, and another. And then you feel like you're standing in the middle of a wide open field, waiting for a cannonball to split my head like in an explosion of blood and gore. That's how I feel. Soon, something bad is going to happen to upset the apple cart. I've got that gut feeling. I just wonder what it will be?

Will it be my health? Will it be my home? What catastrophe awaits me around the corner? This is what is going on in my mind. I have nothing, no guiding star, no compass, nothing. For the first time in my life, I do not have a five year plan. I don't have a plan. It's almost scary beyond belief. Sitting in the middle of a Starbucks, I'm surprised that I don't go full on Skeksie, tear at my clothes, and run down the street screaming at myself.

Maybe that's how homeless people buy the farm. They think of their futures, and how drab and lifeless it is, how dead end it portends to be, and they wig out. Stop showering, stop changing their clothes, stop not shitting on themselves. They just loose it.

A full moon peeks above the tops of buildings as night falls fast. White clouds brush by in the heavens, no longer promising rain. My brother arrives and we catch up and I go out for a dinner run at a nearby Burger King. I walk through a row of restaurant/bars and with the weather being as nice as it is, the well dressed patrons are out on the sidewalks, smoking and carousing. I remember back when I was one of them. When I had the disposable income to sit in a bar all night and swipe my tab with a credit card, or use just plain cash.

I remember when life was better. Or was it? I was bitter inside even though I was laughing. I was a train wreck looking for a dead end track. I guess I found it...hit it, went through it, came out on the other side. I ain't dead yet. This chapter of my life is not over yet. I go back and forth. Defiant, conquered, defiant, destroyed. It just irks me to no end when I look at the empty glass that my life looks like.

I walk through the groups making merry on the sidewalk and I no longer envy them. In a way, I feel for them. They are in the same boat as I'm in, futureless, aimless, riding on the runaway freight train that is their employment, trusting that it doesn't jump track and lay them off, or fold altogether. They're riding the rails to retirement, and the nest egg, and the house in the suburbs and the new car.

They're aging just like me.

I realize that I am doing something with my life. I'm working on it from the ground up. I smashed it flat, rebooted it, and now I'm building it back up. A slow process, but I am. This time, though, I intend to do it my way. This is what I've promised myself as I carefully pack up my gear in Starbucks. One of the counter staff, a young girl, walks around with a cloth in her hand calling out that Starbucks will be closing in ten minutes. My brother stands up, folds close his laptop and shoves it into his bag. It is time to leave.

We walk the New York night, looking at the new skyscrapers rise from nothing, noting their progress, crossing traffic, bright headlights, bright storefronts. People, ubiquitous people, moving like shadows amid the brightness. Everything seems almost surreal tonight.

We get on the Shuttle and walk to the end of the car, finding it empty save for two homeless people stretched out across the seats. Man and woman, both smelling like a bag of armpits, strictly locker room stink. The woman has a shopping cart filled with shit. We wonder how did she get such a huge thing into the subway system? Sooner or later you'll have to take that heavy thing down stairs.

Well, we leave for the next car, and I think: I was there. I was there doing the same thing. I was there, riding the subways to get sleep.

Do I miss that past life that I had, making merry and smoking before bars? The not so carefree life with the job and the retirement plan? Do I miss all that? Like I miss sleeping on trains. Not at all.

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