Hissing Cockroach

“Piss on you!”  Shirley screamed at me.  She’s the evil old lady that lives below me, just to set the record straight.  “Piss on you!”  I was stunned, laughing my ass off.  I had asked her not to have her construction people park in my spot.  They did it three days in a row and each time I reminded her to stay out of my parking spot.  Look, it’s a minor issue I know, but as I told her, I have never parked in her spot and there was a designated spot for visitors literally two spots down.  Two spots down, what the fuck you evil hag!?  She scuttled back into her condo like a hissing cockroach cursing me under her breath.  It rained all day today.  Rain is a strange experience in San Diego.  When it rains in Southern California it’s as if it has always rained.  The sky was always gray, the air was always cold.  It is always drizzling.  Cold winds slither around me.  The sounds of traffic, the hum of air conditioners and machinery, or the buzz of fluorescent light bulbs is always in my ears.  All things taste bland, smell sour or rotten or dead.  I find myself staring into nothing, thinking about nothing.  Zen-like as the world fades away into a TV screen filled with static.  I busy myself with trivial tasks.  My condo is now immaculate.  I spent five hundred bucks at costco and now I could live, comfortably, through a nuclear winter without ever going outside.  I sit and watch raindrops race down the windows dreaming of the end of the world, nuclear war, deserts and mutants, and weapons made from the debris of a lost civilization.

I’ve been in a weird state lately.  My birthday this year triggered something, it was the rifle shot that started an avalanche.  My living room has become a bridge that spans a chasm between two worlds.  I’ve been wrestling ideas – tiring work.  My conclusions have all been as drab as an armful of dead leaves.  My fingernails soiled from digging for answers in the damp autumn earth.  I sit here buried alive with absurdity trying to think myself out of the coffin, unable to argue against the cosmic purposelessness of life itself.  At times my life seems guided by unseen forces that wield my fate with a presence more felt than seen.  I am moving into increasingly incomprehensible directions.  The great frigid weight of a hunger that spans decades is rising up in me again.  I want blood, I want freedom.  Each night crashes over me like a black plutonian wave, I am blinded, being led to certain destruction.  A rage that speaks to me in a cacophony of voices stolen from the dead, summons my own dark gods.  I walk through the bars and alleyways, every man a brother, all of us unified only in the sudden inexplicable sense of our own doom.  I watch the pint glasses being washed, dried, and then put back into service behind the bar – an inescapable cycle of decay.

San Diego itself seems a necropolis today, a city of the dead.  I laugh as I watch one pull a Styrofoam cup out of a public trash can then drink from it.  Another slowly staggers across the street with the aid of a walker.  A fat one looks about to explode, bulging with a slimy gaseous putrescence.  We all love to laugh about it, the insidious tedium, the pointless desperation in a place more virtual than real.  Joking about the drama in a vast virtual hallucination patrolled by the darkest secrets of our wandering lives.  The truth is that the sole industry of this place is carnage, scarred and mangled corpses its only product.  The horror of another day smothered out by alcohol and politics and sex and tv.  The ceaseless night buzzing over head like a surgeons lamp as I lay anesthetized on the table.  I feel like I’ve been trying to claw my way out of this dirty bathroom stall all this time and finally realizing that the only escape is down the toilet.  Maybe the computer’s subtle control exerted over me by stopping at every red light eventually drove me insane so that the only path seemed to be just to fucking floor it and hope for the best.

I talked with some friends about this recently and many of them are feeling the same thing.  Get out.  Get out now.  We are all feeling trapped, they in their world, me in mine.  I am a bird of prey locked in a golden cage.  I return to my apartment, kick off my shoes.  A days worth of change thrown into the tall jar next to my front door.  Yesterday, today, tomorrow.  Every day, for a lifetime.  This is the modern price of a human life, a handful of pocket change.  This is what the bums want, your soul.  Speaking of bums, I ran into one of my neighbors in the local bar last night.  He said that he watches and remembers everything that happens in the complex.  He’s the “oldest”, been there the longest, and he doesn’t forget anything.  He reminds me of the times the cops have come and kicked in my front door for one reason or another.  He refreshes my memory on every girlfriend I’ve ever had, somehow making me miss them.  He talks about the crazy people that live in the building; he says that I am the most secretive.  I am the most secluded, the most antisocial.  He says there’s rumors that I travel overseas for the government, that I’m a Navy SEAL, that I’m a killer.  He says that despite all this that I’m an amazing listener.  He actually thinks I give a shit. Wrong.  In fact, while he is talking, I’m thinking; ‘How can I give less of shit?’  That’s why I look interested.  I finally tell him that he’s fucking crazy and to stay the fuck away from me.  Drunken troubles with the law are only a fraction of my alienation from society.  I am paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, even at times to my own detriment.  This is a nightmare world that I cannot wake up from.   But I am a soldier, and it’s a soldier’s job to survive.  I will survive.

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