bourgeois discontent

Woke this morning vastly earlier than usual.  Indeed, I was up today at the same time that on other days I am just lying down. 

The cab driver finally returned yesterday and confirmed what I had not dared to hope—that he had been coming here but always when I was somewhere else.  As his absence increases, so increases my certainty that he has finally recognized the absurdity of his attraction for me.  Then he comes again, and I am almost convinced that his eager zeal has indeed been long pending, the result of a slowly steeped and strong desire.  It baffles me.  And he put me on my back this time; the burning in my strained muscles is a warm reminder. 

He’d said the place was hot when he arrived, but I hadn’t noticed.  After he left I had to crank the heat and I put on a sweatshirt and hat, too.  Though I’d only gotten up at noon, by eleven-thirty last night I was back in bed and swaddled thickly, snoring with a National Geographic laying open in my hands.  I dreamt of confusion about the time, of places I could have known and I dreamt of experiences I haven’t had.  I woke often in the night feeling my exquisite weakness without escape into the depths of unconscious sleep.  And at 6:54 AM, as hints of impending light revealed the sky, and as the landlord-grandson sprinkled salt outside on the icy walk, I gave up my night’s endeavor to escape, and made this coffee. 

Fleeting thoughts of making improvments to my slowly shredding physique, thoughts of massifying my spindly arms with push-ups, or trimming my stretching abdomen with sit-ups—these thoughts pass swiftly through the space of my consciousness.  Memories of a younger body, which I must have once had, linger somewhat longer.  And everything creeps along inexorably.  Sometimes the Grand Procession is so slow it is dull.  Let the lifetimes come and go, the thousands of existences that have been and are yet to come, let’s get them over with and move on.  All the societies and the cultures traipsing tediously through their predictable courses, let’s just get them done!  Steal all the oil and burn it all up and let’s move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.  Why can’t we just shed the facades and the artrifices that bind us to this glacial pace?  Let the pretenses go.  Let the growling sex-fiends fuck.  Let the imperialist warmongers murder.  Let the saints love.  Let the blond landlord-grandsons all do their chores and go to school and make their fortunes and get old and die and come back and do it all again, a thousand times again.  And let’s get on to whatever happens next… 

There is something.  Next.  Isn’t there?