Power Surge

Okay, want hear about me? The characters in this book are fictional. Any relationship between them and anybody dead or alive is a fucking coincidence. This is about me and no one else. A power surge brimming with words, that’s me. Power surges and blackouts, corresponding to nothing but several different days. Stress several, that’s me. Brownouts in crucial moments leading to foggy social transgressions, all me.

I’m about to embark on a journey under the seas. I am going to dive, stay down for a while, swim around and surface when I can no longer hold my breath. You see, I’ve been spending the past few days/months/years (take your pick) trying to dock into some kind of port. Fuck that. Time to dive and resurface somewhere else. Wherever the hell you are when you resurface is what determines whether or not you will submerge again. You like it, you stay. You don’t, take a deep breath. I am a swimmer, not a boat. Boats dock, swimmers surface. Please don’t bring up submarines. They fuck up my metaphor.

It’s 2:30 AM, I am not tired and I need merciful sleep. So what do I do? I pour myself a caffeine soaked rum and Pepsi. It’s also rum soaked, so things won’t be too intolerable.

Ever tried to create a character? It’s impossible. I don’t know how authors do it. How can you create a human being for someone else’s imagination by scribbling words onto a piece of paper? Believe you me I know what innocence looks like. I know what rage and faith look like. But how to slip them out of my mind and onto a piece of paper is beyond me. Maybe I’ll just write about all the people I know, mix them all up, and wind up with something nice and unbelievable.

This rum and Pepsi is going down way, way too fast. Must not be enough rum in it. I distinctly remember pouring three glugs. Maybe I counted wrong. I never was good at math.

What am I good at? If not math, than what? Not spelling. Math and spelling, my two biggest downfalls. How the hell did I ever get past elementary school?

I play third base pretty well. I can throw a football pretty far, but I’m not too good at basketball. I guess this means I’m sort of athletic. To a slight degree, that’s my image. If someone just had to pin me down, that’s probably the sector of society they drop me in—the jocks. I’m not a jock, though.

I like to write. I want to write is what I should say. What I want to write, though, I don’t know. I’ve tried a lot of things: poems, stories, what else is there? Fiction, nonfiction, I’ve tried it all. This is fiction. But the only things I can possibly write about have actually happened. The names are the same only the faces have been changed to protect the pseudo-innocent. I’ve been known to be arrogant, between crippling spells of shyness, that is. When I accelerate I always check the rearview mirror. Maybe to see what I’m leaving in the dust, maybe not. Maybe it’s so I won’t see where I’m going. That’s a pretty stupid thing to do. Maybe I want to hurt myself. Death wishes are subtle commands. Are they cries for help, or they just inevitable conclusions after stretches of stagnation followed by blistering acceleration? I choose the latter, if for nothing else than to protect my fragile, but ever towering, ego.

Rum and Pepsi: gone.

I think way too much, that always hurts. I ponder pain. Not physical pain—my physical wounds heal abnormally fast. The mental wounds take a lot of nursing. That’s where I’m fragile and almost—but not quite—brittle. I drink a lot. I don’t ever get falling down drunk, but I will admit to tipping the bottle occasionally, when time provides. I have a lot of time, that’s the problem. Everyone I hang with is either just as bad or way worse. A lot of them smoke weed, which, I’ll admit to having done once in a while once upon a time. But no more. It slows me down, induces laziness and antisocial behavior. It dehumanizes, and am already dehumanized enough, thanks to game shows and video games, which, ironically made me quite animated when I was stoned.

Back to booze. When I go to O’Brady’s, I know most of the folks in there and they’re all doing the same thing I am.

I’ve now been writing for 15 minutes.

I can go anywhere in the area, any night of the week, and not have to worry about being alone. I know what to talk about with most of the frequent faces. That’s the key to me—knowing what to talk about. I don’t induce conversation, I nurture dialogue. I feel out with the other person wants to say and I help them say it, I make them say it. I don’t coax, I just listen. I love to listen and learn.

I like it better when they want to hear me. Who doesn’t? Maybe that’s why I get so frustrated sometimes. It doesn’t seem like many people are willing to listen to me. It’s beginning to hurt thinking about this, so now I am going to change the subject.

What the fuck subject was I on? Holy shit, give me a tangent and I make a god damn tributary system out of it.

Crying is strange, foreign. I think I have a backlog of tears that will come out someday.

Children. They will certainly change me. I want to be a father. Someday, but not necessarily immediately. Being a father has got to be intense. There so much love to offer a role like that. I have so much inside just waiting to be claimed by the right girl and our offspring. They can clean me out, take it all. I’ve stockpiled so much, I know where to get it and how to make it last. The past has taught me that. My past.

The past. We draw life from our roots in the past. I heard that somewhere once. We all have the past. Some of us are likely to of several to choose from. Me, I got but one, and I kinda like it. I can’t say much about it, only that I wouldn’t be what I am now without it. And if anyone can’t say that, they got some serious personality disorders. It’s simple and true. If you think about it enough, and apply it to yourself in a somewhat sophisticated manner, then you might just learn where you’re going. Notice I said learn. Learn, as if the answer is there, just waiting to be found. Learn—not plot, not project. I’m not talking about destiny. I’m just saying that your past gives you a future. It’s always the prelude to the present. Without a past, or actually, without accepting a past, your shapeless, vulnerable, ready to be molded by anything. This is not a good scenario, my friends. The past shapes, gives definitive form. It brings with it character and balance. If you ex out your past, what are you? A lot of people ex out their past willingly. They’re not helping themselves; they’re robbing themselves of the chance to bask in their very own history, to learn about where they’re going to be, to prevent anything else from shaping them.

Don’t mix experience into what I’m saying. Experience is not the past. The past is the great wind that carries you. Experience is just the shit you have when you land. Maybe, just maybe, you use the experience to steer your sail, but most people, including and especially me, are too stupid to know how to do that properly. That’s wisdom, and I don’t have much of that so I’m not even going to mention it.

Forget I even brought it up.

I’m getting tired, but I know sleep will not come anytime soon. What usually happens is I get tired, turn out the light, put down the pen and pad and lay there. Lay there and think about baseball. I try to retrieve a sharp mental picture of fielding a one-hop liner at third or zipping in a fastball out of the stretch position on the pitcher’s mound. Or even, dare I say, swinging away with all my might on a 3-0 count. I’ll just lay there, awake, trying to sleep. Time ceases, and when time ceases, daylight edges in. I’ll slowly doze off about a half an hour after the birds begin tweeting. Then I’ll wake up and fall asleep at bizarre intervals. With the most peaceful sleep coming later and later into the morning.

Once, a long time ago, I tried to fall asleep before midnight. It almost worked. A girl I met that day came to my door and woke me up, we went outside for a walk and I didn’t get back to bed until four o’clock in the morning. I’ve been accelerating ever since and I may be out of control, but I do have brakes and I know they’re working because I can hit them and feel their pull, but I’m just testing them because I like the feeling of acceleration. Acceleration—not speed. Acceleration is when you feel the pull of momentum. You are the movement. Cruise control sucks because you get numb driving at one speed for a long time. You lose perspective; it will dull your senses. Acceleration keeps you on your toes.

This block of thought has nothing to do with my driving, and even if it did, this is fiction, remember? I’m trying to create characters. I’m shaping voices, voices without a past. But it’s all me. Every pixel is all me. And just think: there is no way possible for you to know that for sure. Do you know me? Do you try? Have you ever heard of me? Is this what goes on inside of my head? Obviously, it is, because it had to come from somewhere? Why did I put a “?” there? I had no intention of doing that, it happened like a reflex. Anyway, if it is me, and these are my thoughts, which side me did it come from? Why can’t I create these things when I’m brooding and quiet, ready to be loved? Why can’t I? What different things do we create in different states of mind? What kind of balance over character does mood actually have? How do you know that if I talked to someone at this moment, that I wouldn’t whisper and sooth? I guess I’m admitting to feeling a certain amount of aggression right now. So what? Arrogance? So what. What’s wrong with that? Why can I not accept the simple rationalization of feelings? Why do I feel guilty about sweeping mood swings? Why do I venture from pitter pat cautiousness to thundering restlessness with nothing to trigger it and no time to transfer or rationalize the feelings that are supposed to come in between? Do I feel anything in the between points? Do I swing too fast? I do like to accelerate. It gets me places.

Who do I think I am as I sail into a somewhat glorious conclusion?