I love you. I love you. I love you all the time. In my dreams, you’re with me. In my dreams… You’re with me forever, forever, forever, and it melts away. Your dead body. Your dead body, it melts away.
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It’s in the past, but the gist of it is we didn’t get along much. I was happier, then. She always wanted more. More. More. I told her I couldn’t give that to her. She didn’t understand. She called me a liar. She said why don’t you do this. I told her I can’t live on anybody else’s terms but my own. She said I’d rather die than be with you another second. I never saw her again.
I smoked a joint at five.
I listened to the radio at five-fifteen.
I put the radio in the garbage can at five-fifteen (still running).
There were leftover hot dogs in the fridge.
I ate three of them and called Margaret.
We should go to a movie or something.
We should talk.
(I got her answering machine.)
Pick up.
Please.
We should.
We need to talk.
I smoked a joint at six. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought about committing suicide. If I used pills, what pills would I use. If I jumped off a building, what building would I jump off. If I cut my throat… I couldn’t cut my throat. I couldn’t cut my throat because I’m scared it would hurt. I’m scared what it would look like all the blood. I’m scared that my parents would never talk to me again. Margaret, and Margaret, she would surely judge me.
Note: It is at this point that the past tense becomes present.
There is so much hate in this world. There is so much love in this world. There is nothing else. Human beings should feel nothing else. Case in point, I walk in the street and who do I see but Garrett my old roommate (fucking asshole) he’s with his girlfriend whose name I don’t know but she looks fine, she talks fine, she conforms to standards of beauty and female discipline established by, by, by the media of course, the media that taught us not everything but many things we need to know about life and how to judge other people’s lives, the media that taught us so generously taught us hate and love and sex and semen and death and blood without asking much back just that we keep eating, keep consuming, keep worshipping and make sure to buy lots of things, clothes and such, and DVDs, or not buy lots of things and call it non-conformity, oh but what’s the point of all this thinking? Life sucks and it doesn’t make sense and we don’t know what’s going to happen when we die. End of story. I’m happy with myself. I’m happy with my job, wife, and kids. I don’t need to ask questions.
But she looks fine, Garrett’s girlfriend, and I think about tying her up in my kitchen and making her watch me cut slices of meat on the cutting board. Red meat, mostly, maybe some level of mold and decay present. How can you make somebody watch something? I’d probably tape her eyelids open. (But then her eyes might dry out.) I don’t care about that. Let them dry out, and after they’ve dried out, I’ll take them out with my bare fingers and fry them in a saucepan with some, with some chili sauce! I won’t eat them. It'll just be a waste.
Hypothetically, the garbage man sifts through my garbage and finds the eyeballs and calls the police and they come to my door, but what’s this? I’m already dead. I hung myself from a ceiling rafter! They cry, they’re so upset, and her corpse, get this, her corpse is rotting in the kitchen the whole time! They see me and they’re crying and the whole time the real tragedy is in the kitchen!
Fucking dumb pigs. I go to a movie and smoke a joint before. This is my last joint, so from this point on there will be no more pointless references to marijuana and the consumption of marijuana. But this is also the last paragraph, so…? The movie, anyway, is about people that kill other people for fun. It’s really funny and easy to understand and everybody in the audience claps and laughs and cheers when there’s blood onscreen. I think I recognize a few star cameos. But I’m also pretty stoned so maybe not. When the movie’s over, I see a girl standing by herself next to the snack counter. I decide – and this is the first real decision I’ve made in my entire life – to talk to her. She’s hesitant at first but gets more relaxed and I find out her name’s Margaret. I tell her I used to know someone named Margaret, but I don’t know her anymore because she made me feel sad. Margaret (the new one) half smiles and asks if I liked the movie. I tell her it was good but the book was so much better, have you read the book, it’s really so much more detailed and thematically rich. She says she hasn’t but plans on going to the bookstore right now to get it, and, well, would I like to come? I tell her no.
