Goodnight, Friend
When I am feeling restless and jittery I do the following breathing exercise. Push all the air out of your lungs, every last bit. Inhale deeply for four seconds, diaphragmally, in such a way that your stomach (not your chest) rises with the breath. Hold it for seven seconds. Count while you do this: one, two, three… build a rhythm. Then exhale for eight seconds, staying on beat. When you hit “eight” you should have no air left in your lungs, as when you started the exercise. Then repeat for as long as you want, but no less than five times. No gaps between each stage of the exercise; keep a steady beat. Imagine you are an aspiring urban music professional in the inner city, and someone is rapping over your breath for their demo tape. This technique allowed me to sit down and write instead of rummaging through my cupboards for snack food even though I am not hungry, drinking a bottle of beer even though I am not thirsty, sleeping though wide awake, jerking off though as far from horny as I get.
My mind is preoccupied with the big questions. Will I ever find love? What will it look like when I am utterly, transcendently fulfilled? Is there room in my life for hockey games or beers after work? Will there be a “work” or will days blend into evenings in a continuum of bliss?
A sequence of rhetorical questions is a sign of poor writing, one of my professors once said. Writers answer their own questions, and anything else is either speculation or sensationalism. I don’t believe this but I agree the technique is tired.
A tough week and weekend. The creaks of styrofoam take-out boxes rip through my apartment at night as I bathe in the computer screen’s glow. Silly Flash games and jazz music and the old bottle of cheap whiskey [sic], like every other middle-class lonesome spirit who ever had a bad week. Each noise, rustle, and cough is meant as a communication with people on the other side of these walls, calling out for some empathy from the dwellers of this shitbox building. A dishwasher moans upstairs. An Indian man next door strode through his front door to find a box of his belongings at the entrance with a note from his girlfriend saying to please move out. I heard raised voices in the hall, not quite screaming. There were accusations that trailed off into dead ends, the voices smooth and restrained as if the conclusion were inevitable and mutual. Two days later she moved out instead. A schoolmarmish woman who looks older than she probably is. Margaret, a schoolmarmish name. She asked for help with a few boxes. In one of them was an old Macintosh computer, a Quadra, resting on some floppy disks. Margaret gave me a lamp she couldn’t take with her. “It’s his,” she joked.
The other day as I locked my door, the superintendent emerged from that apartment with a pair of wirecutters in his hand, and I saw the place was empty.
Asian students, single moms with three kids living in a 3 1/2-bedroom unit, teenagers reeking of marijuana on their way to Battlenet 24 to play networked Counter Strike until their eyes bleed…. I am in here with them all in blissful cohabitation. The air is thick enough to be worn as a blanket. Urgency is everywhere but it’s all outside, in the street.
There are times when I long to be the sort of person who keeps a menagerie in his home, a thousand pets and plants and treasures. None of it should have meaning or express a sentiment. Not an ecosystem; a curated thing. It would light up anyone’s eyes. Dogs and koalas and an old, wise owl. Serpentine leaves dangling from strange ledges. Dusty sunbeams touching branches that sway perpetually under tiny gusts, seeming to make a noise as you watched them. The snakes would crawl into my lap and around my thigh, their motivations only to strangle me and eat the body. “Oh, Lancaster,” I’d laugh as the boa curved around the back of my neck. “That’s enough, now!” I’d do kissyfaces with a tapir named Mosey. A parrot would land on my arm and say a few curse words, and I’d give her a piece of green apple. At night I’d hit a single light switch that would dim everything, signalling to the animals that it was bedtime. I’d go around to each one and say “goodnight, friend” and each would sleep without a worry.
Or a plain barn with a hundred geese and guinea fowl following me around as I sift handfuls of cracked corn into little piles in the mud. Close the barn door and hear the squawks. The birds could sit and eat quietly because there’s enough food for all of them, but they don’t, because feeding time carries rituals of territoriality, of pecking-order iteration. It is a form of play. I want to enjoy meals as they do, with glee and primal primality. As a human being I’ve never fought over a single crumb, and thus do not know what fear is, choosing instead to fill the fear-urge with dirty, invalid spectres of economic uncertainty, of losing my job or never finding a soul mate, the standard spooks and bugbears of the big cities. At least nobody punches me in the jaw while I eat a cheese sandwich.
Have you ever been around a hungry dog and made a motion towards the biscuits? Even the insinuation of biscuitry opens a stopper in the dog’s brain, and in flow the reagents of joy. The sight of that biscuit imbues a grave danger, a fight-or-flight reaction. Perhaps I’ll cultivate territoriality in my feeding habits, shoving my coworkers out of the way as they reach for my Tupperware containers in the microwave. I will eat boiled corn kernels and claw at the bottoms of jars with gnarled fingers. Then I will steal theirs and run off to a corner with it.
Tonight I ate leftover stir-fried chicken doused in hot sauce and did not taste it. It was a bad week and from now on I’m going to eat all my food aggressively, naked and noisy, in good hungry company.
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