You collect yourself in the car. I never knew what that meant before.
I hate the Star Trek doors. I want to feel the weight of a door when I push on it. Pull it. A building shouldn’t devour you. I don’t want to go in its maw.
There’s something desperately wrong with everybody. Spectator or actor or stagehand or director — doesn’t matter. Everyone’s a mess. There’s a man in pajamas in a wheelchair on the curb smoking a cigarette. It’s twenty. You could grind him up and make a paste of pure corruption.
VCT. That means vinyl composition tile. Twelve inch squares. Hard. Cold. Everyone stares at it and walks. There’s nothing to see and that’s the point.
After a while it’s over. It’s late, but so what? What difference would it make what the time is in there? Birth and death and disintegration all mixed up in a stew. But we are humans and cling to the superstition of the clock despite the VCT earth and the smooth, endless sun in the vermiculite sky. Somewhere the moon is up and the sun is down and the day is over and that’s that.
You go down the long lonesome corridor and stare at the flecks in the floor and there’s nothing and nobody for the last fifty yards. You come up hard at a doorway. There’s a badge and some writing and it doesn’t matter what it says. The room has no people and the television is screwed to the wall in the last place it should be, in the corner at the ceiling, and it yells at no one. Not even me. You stare slackjawed for a moment as the corpse of some hoary joke is hurled before the audience of dead souls in an empty room.
Going down.
3 Responses
That's some stone cold writing there, GS. Stone cold.
Feels like the sixties, just like the photo, too.
I don't know whether this is existentialist or non-existentialist, but it's grim and hard and cold. I'm glad I don't tune in that channel.
That is why I am going surfing.