Tonight

Sleep is the ultimate surrender, it’s my lover and my enemy. My greatest struggles are my greatest longings—that’s part of the game, therein lies the sense of reward. It’s the game I’m both winning and losing simultaneously forever. I guess it makes the most sense to reach the peak of mania at night, after dusk has departed with grace. Dusk is ever-changing, but now the sky is still and my time is just beginning. Endless movement, endless rumination. A train blazes past and as I’m walking my eyes never leave its sight, following as the blur paints across my focal canvas, these dragging brushstrokes march along and time is either extremely quick or entirely halted. The train has now faded away and my eyes recenter, but as I’ve barely had a chance to adjust now a series of cars pass by. There are no streetlights, just distant humming glows from porches. It’s so dark and when these brutally white headlights approach I am blinded for a moment, relying only on footing and shadowy apparitions composing a vague visage of the horizon ahead. Pure exhilaration is alive and well in the subtlety of tonight’s simple walk.

I walk circuitously. I used to not understand the point of walking aimlessly, I thought I always had to be headed somewhere. How depressing. Something clicked and when it did everything became, well, less depressing. My surroundings unfolded themselves, presenting a map of quiet hyperfixations bearing the mystique of colors, textures, shapes. All these elements of form, usually written off as their whole and never examined much more, were suddenly revealed to me in their parts. The train station bench has painted tiles with their careful ornate angles and curves, matte royal blues and soft yellows and tattooed around them are childish graffiti, gleamy silver sharpie. What do I see now that I didn’t see before? I could hardly explain, but I know that it’s not a contrived attempt to “romanticize the mundane,” that phenomenon that entraps pussies who decide they want to feel more connected to the “universe.” It’s not that, instead it’s really compulsive, it’s a disease, it’s not up to me. So I take my simple walks, long winding obtuse paths that are complete nonsense, completely devoid of destination, and sometimes I stop to sit for a second, bug-eyed with one foot here, one foot somewhere I couldn’t even begin to understand, and I probably look dumb. Blissfully dumb. Nearly a perfect feeling.

I know it may sound like a complete waste of time. I haven’t explored as much as I’ve wanted to, but I’ve seen many of the conventional “marvels” that NYC and San Francisco and LA have to offer. Bridges, museums, hotels and shit. But I’d choose that bench at the train station over all of it. Maybe because it’s all mine, maybe because I can just get up and go to it right now. I don’t know what it is, and maybe that’s exactly the point. That which is realest, most pure, is beyond everyone and everything. Most people are flailing around, so blind they believe they have a grasp on anything at all, some going so far as believing they have a grasp on the lives they “lead” (what a joke), and they are about as far removed as it gets from purity. At times I am desperate, I am weak, I am scared, I am ashamed—but I am never blind. No matter what creative concoction of prescription uppers, downers, hacky over the counter shit, canned espresso martinis or hundred proof shooters… I am never blind. Us true degenerates will always rise.