University Mental Hygiene Clinic. Peace soft prints. Water-colors. Comfort plants. Celebrity and Fitness magazines. Difficult rising from the waiting-room chair: drunk, drunk. Tired.
The affable Shrink plump, welcoming.
Talk released words to chill, conditioned air.
“And what makes me me in my head?” I blurted. “I’ve seen things that, you know, I want them to be mine.”
“And if they’ll be yours?” asked The Shrink.
“I’ll break and rearrange them, fashion epics of desire, write copy that moves people to WANT. My thesis complete, perhaps the shallow true inside will… emerge.”
The Shrink prescribed pink pills and blue ones.
Suggested I resolve the me inside me. Present a persona to the world. Let go of destroying my life.
I had been under the impression, for many years, that such folk as the me inside me could not or would not allow themselves to change.
Forward three years — Future it! Future it! — Summer before Plantman. Writing copy for The Ad Agency. Adulthood full-time. Two black suits in the closet and two gray. Health Insurance. New doctor, same pills. Pink ones and blue ones. Up all night despite them. Or because of. Them.
The Sun rose daily, as it tends to, or else rain. Saturdays of rest, revive. Watched same cartoons I’d memorized in days of
Young.
Lines, situations recalled like rhymes:
“What’s up, doc? Hey Bub, you need a house to go with that doorknob! Yabbadabadoo.”
Culture Nation stabbed my space. Perhaps my obsessions…and the whole…System of Ruthless…out of whack. Culture cult. Of culture. Tiny plastic souls. Vacuum packed and sealed. Every Man in paperback. Plunge, plunge. Head-first into gold-leaf mounds, artifacts. Barefoot skip through cash cow pastures.
Personal currency unstable. Useless. Credit situation overdrawn, I was a man possessed. Owed fifty-thousand dreams, plus interest, to demon student-lenders.
Asked myself, “How important IS Life to The Nation?”
Told myself, “Not about their grotesque cultures amusements fantasies machines created marketed. Pitchmen for commodity dream celebrity. No real real, no product.”
Not reading Great Books, possessing them. Stacked and organized by title, author, publisher subject. Fiction (novels, poems, tales) and non-fiction (everything else: There’s water, then there’s non-water).
“Is it dead? Society. Is it dead?” I asked myself.
Never dead. Transmogrified. Infinite hierarchies. Data accumulates. Never cease. Where to put it all? Tree of Knowledge Incorporated (TKI), Pyramid 2.0 database. Big Boys and Judges move levers. Million lines of code between us. Fictions: Heroic Narratives composed by PR Poets; Earnest Celebrities; Programmers; The Law.
Mental Note: “Staggering, The System. It’s a racket.”
Illusion of words inside.
Told myself, “No stopping you it’s hopeless. Nevertheless. Don’t confuse weird shit like, ‘framed diploma, University Seal,’ with what (or where) Life is.”
Network stinks of Judges, Authorities, the Ones who conquer, designate, divide, sell, stash in the freezer for ‘just in case.’
Fragments project meaning when the fictions aren’t yours.
Missing Girl imagined by thousands. Network of collaboration. A house-fly sees with many thousand eyes.
“Just my opinion,” I concluded.
Really, I was I to do what I would do with Life.
No?
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