Home transmissions from a softer world

The chill was carried in on the wind as the sun fell away.

Grip the wheel with one hand, swallow massive gulps of diet cherry soda with the other. It's a chemical toxin, you know. They say aspartame does terrible things to your body - fake plastic sugar with a fake plastic taste. I think that's a Radiohead tune. But you've heard something about this kind of stuff turning your brain into a sponge. Mabye that's why you feel like you've been getting dumber as the years go by.

There's a fear, here. Anything truly beautiful isn't going to exist for long.

You can't take it and wrap it around you.....hold it close and try to keep it from going away. It's going to burn out, and fast.

That's the real fear, whenever you find something truly beautiful. It's the sort of think that knocks you flat on your ass, like you've just hit a brick wall - all of the bullshit that you thought was your life becomes irrelevant for a little while.

Wrap yourself in this moment for just a little while longer and remember that every second is precious, because something beautiful - it burns out fast.

Float down the street and listen to the waves of sound. Percieve the surrounding sprawl of a disgusting city through useless optic nerves. The world doesn't deserve something like this. You don't deserve something like this.

Nothing anyone ever did warranted a gift like this.

Long drive, and you're sitting in the parking lot trying to let this sound resolve. You need to know where it's going to go, got to ride the drone all the way home.

Ride the drone all the way home.

Find something nice and quiet, it's a sunny day now - you're sitting off somewhere, vaguely staring at the pages of the book in front of you. Not really reading, just holding a book. Somehow, you got the idea somewhere that you'd look more productive and less like some kind of human rabble if you were sitting by yourself with a book, as opposed to just sitting. It's a decoy, and possibly some kind of clever ploy to attract vapid hipster girls.

It works well enough, which is to say that it works - and generally ends up being more trouble than the whole thing is really worth.

Three years ago, he died of mesothelioma. The statute of limitations ran out on the whole thing not too long ago. Too late to file a lawsuit, no matter how much the bastards might have deserved it. Mesothelioma is a form of lung cancer where tumors grow in your lungs. Obviously, that's every form of lung cancer.

These grow so big that they crush your other internal organs. That's how you die, everything else gets crowded out by the cancer.

Obsessive thoughts work in the same way - they grow so big that there's not enough room in the brain for anything else. All your other thoughts get crowded out and crushed. Inhale a cigarette and make up a new song to the internal rythym of your sneakers crashing down on the pavement as you walk. It's the only song that's ever exiested - melodic and complex and spiritual and simple, all at once. Ten thousand years of human pain and lust, screaming pulses. All to the beat of your simple shoes.

It's good to see her, as she drives by - stops, waves....gets your attention. You want her more than anything in the world, especially right now. She probably knows it, and you're not sure how it makes her feel. You talk until the stopped cars behind her get irate that they're stopped.

It's a cold and foggy night, and it feels good to get in her car. You've been walking for a long time in one direction and were starting to dread the walk back.

She speaks to you, your words in her mouth....

"I just feel ...lost...recently. Really down, no motivation - no confidence. I'm starting to feel like this whole thing isn't for me, like I can't make it. It's starting to really get me down."

That very thought is what you were walking to escape in the first place, when you thought it was your own.

Suddenly it's hers, and yours, and everyone elses'.

Somewhere, it's a softer world. There's a parallel universe where this interplay is going on and it probably ends with lots of cathartic and violent sex.


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