to dream of bikers on mars.

wooden spoons on boiling pots

I make eyes at your peephole because I know you and you know me (I know you’ve made eyes at my peephole before) and we love each other in a completely new and novel way that’s at once casual and platonic like friendship but with more of a heft like a sponge we can squeeze together with the hope that it will refill once this hangover is complete.

But at the end of the day, eventually, I make my way home. Having denatured this atom for as long as I can stand, I’m finally sitting down with it to cultivate a flame, rubbing two twigs together until something goes. Something will spark. Eventually. Here’s hoping.

And with this spark my life will feel more alive, complete despite the unreality of our situation. And then a greater picture comes into clarity; enough of one to finally relax in a daydream and not feel like it oppresses our every movement. Untangle, denature — or should I say re-nature? — I want to be here for you like a potted plant, like a ficus in the window, like a vine across a brick wall. That’s what these words are to me. Are they anything else?

Teeth, perhaps? A jagged row of teeth all too natural — maybe needing some veneers for the screen, but then again I’ve moved past screens, I think. They don’t have the hold on me now that they used to. A life lived creates situations that you have to be an adult for — like the flaming lips said, “I’m a man and not a boy and there are things I can’t avoid/ you have to face them when you’re not prepared to face them” — and I find myself woefully unprepared. Every time. Fine. Whatever. Growing up is coming to terms with all of this and trying to be better prepared for the next time.

And then trees rebud with the spring, reminding us that a “next time” is, in fact, possible, and I feel myself growing again like a weed. The water is running. The tap is growing hot. It takes a while for the hot water to make its appearance. It takes a while for a pot to boil even if you’ve watched it for bubbles from across the room… the boil is coming and when it comes it will roll and overflow the pot… when it comes it’s threatening to put out the fire that started all of it…

Let us put a wooden spoon at the top of it, then, and see what happens. Maybe the flame underneath needs to die. Maybe I need to be free of it. I need to be free of this over leveraged feeling. Too many hats. Too many notifications. I can’t open my phone without feeling it linger over me like a feeling of impending gas attack. But I can not open my phone and then I feel the anxiety dissipate across my brain, a heat death, an entropic demon releasing energy out of the room. Here I am still in the room with a low murmur as my heart thuds along, I can see you clearly in my head even if I can’t see your face. Can you see me? It doesn’t matter unless it does.

hypothetical self-portrait

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I think I’ve found a friend group I can age gracefully with. We will certainly see if this is true (and certainly you’ll catch heavy whiffs if it’s not on this blog) but if it’s true that it takes 4 years to feel at home in any place you live, like one of my good friends from freshman year of college once told me, then my second year here in Chicago has been a startling success. Bandito hijinks. Crossword blues. The long cold winter is winding to a close. I’ll be here two years in October. Still some ways out, I suppose.

Birds chirp outside my window, it’s spring again!, but the garbage collectors skipped today and there’s a maelstrom of horse flies in my windows trying to break through the glass like they’ve already broken through the screen but these idiots can’t seem to find their way out through the way they came (smh!) and so they’re all buzzing and knocking about inside the glass like tiny vampires. Please come, garbage people. I need you. You’re my only hope. And it’s supposed to be nice out today. Let’s go get mimosas and find a nice patio somewhere in the city. I can tell you all about it,—

I want to grind up the world, I say while sipping my drink until brain freeze, put it in my pocket like a small spur of laundry’d paper towel. As the world’s been reduced to a flat surface, this idea — grinding up the world — seems likely to have become a relatively simple and innocuous task.

Something bugs me, though. I’m wearing a calico colored suit on this patio and everyone’s looking at me? No, no, not that. It’s that I didn’t dream a single dream last night. At least not any of my own. My legs are sore from walking so many miles in my sleep. Auditioning dreams until dawn I returned home empty handed. I just can’t imagine this thing I do matters very much. I find myself frightened off by the number of things I could be but in all that fright, I tend to forget I can only be this thing that I am and then I flip out and lean my head on the drywall and doze.

Botanical busy drywall. What a hole I could put through you. Is there life inside of you or only insulation? Would vines be released out if I punched you in? Or are your insides as dry as I could expect from any American wall? I don’t see what the point is. Of any of this. This way we’ve constructed a world for ourselves… What is the point of any of this? What does it want from us? I grind up the world and snort its ashes and what?

To dream of bikers on mars?

Cancerous proposition! The dream of colonizing mars should go up to the attic along with all the other old toys.

First of all: could you scarcely imagine the human rights violations that would go on in a Martian colony? Even if the idea of oldhead leatherclad motorcycle gangs roaring across the Martian steppe is blossoming in my head like the handpainted cover of a ‘50s pulp sci-fi magazine, one that I would gladly pick up for $5 at a used book store, the reality of “space exploration” will only ever be a sedative to keep our current system of capitalist production and consumption a tad bit more palatable for us as both of them continue to become more and more untenable, both for you and I as individuals living underneath an unceasing drive for profit, and for the planet’s climate as a whole, rapidly deteriorating under the strain of our production… Why worry about climate change when we can just one day move to a new world? They say. You could drive a Tesla-brand chopper on the red planet? Wouldn’t you like that?

Second of all: I hope Elon Musk slips and falls down a long set of stairs.