Piss drunk
When breadcrumbs are around, stale and dry in pieces that usually roll to the floor and get stuck between my toes when there's early morning post-blanket footsweat acting as an adherent, I never see them roll together and form bread. I and I (no other company) always watch bread turn to crumbs because there's this innate skill in my genes, or my habits (or one making the other), for watching things decay and not noticing a second of it until the whole form, the whole scene, the whole object, landscape, moment, event is totally beyond repair. I walk past bread on a plastic, lightly prong-bottomed board for weeks on end and it's no more astonishing or noticeable than wallpaper (never fails to slip under everybody's radar, that wallpaper...) until the moment when something in me awakens by bumping it or being so devoid of food that it once again becomes worth a grain of my consciousness, and that bread has become a fossil. A monument that crumbles under a light touch from curious hand or preparing knife. This extends to everything- I could wake up with an itinerary that only asks that I remember to watch a sunset, and I'll walk miles to the nearest secluded spot and squint at the Sun at some 7:30 PM downward-spiraling position until I squint to skip the unnecessary foreplay, wanting to open my lids for the main fuck of the gas ball and the horizon, and feel this slap to my mind's face just in time to come back to my senses and watch the cap of the Sun, now no more than a nipple's tip of orange ill-defined haze, completely vanish from sight. Half of the sky stays on fire, while God turns the spectrum dial down from orange, to pink, to navy blue, to something that's probably as blue as what those fish with the lights see in their subhuman zones and colder than I'd like to admit. Nature's one thing, but nature that you think is laughing at you for pulling your already-zipped jacket tighter is like the eyes of the quietest person on a city bus- it's either a compliment from something that identifies with you (the trees must talk to the wind and the lightless chill, and surely the trees let it know that it's nippy out for them, too, no?), or some gaze from an unconcerned beast of judgment. And if the night air could judge, it'd find me a pansy worth a barfight while I tug the cords by my neck tighter and waltz through ragweed tufts and muddy patches away from the West and the aborted attempt at staring at significance that's all my doing. Maybe I didn't cause the Sunset, but if I can't even know if it happened or not, then the Sunset's on Schroedinger's terms and could've been anything while I slipped internally into this airy place where I don't feel my skin anymore because I forget about it, and don't feel the moment anymore because my train tracks roll backwards to everything I could've said for the past week and a half. Creating victories that didn't happen. Consoling people who weren't defended by me or their consorts and protectors. Missing the Sunset, first and foremost, over everything.
One of the only flashbacks that my tracks pull toward every time harder than dogs at squirrel-seeking velocity is the only girl who ever really spoke of the sky memorably. Only memorable because it was so bothersome. On a walk home from the bus way back in kiddyhood, not all the way to hair pulling and piggy back rides and tattling, but at least back to having a self-image from somebody else's self or some collective sign pointing at interspersed diagrams of popularity, age, trends, and with a route mapped by your current sexual and flirtatious prowess saying "here's where you are, here's what you do, you do it this loudly with this much of your gut sucked in and this much chest puffed out and these many glances at each girl who could like you with this much attention to their reactions while wearing these shoes and sneering and rolling eyes at this type of sincere talk" (latitude and longitude for a post-pubescent lack of graciousness), she talks to either her little sister or a very similarly out-of-touch girl who came home with her constantly (could be- outcasts need each other like medication, and probably are just that whether or not we.... I mean THEY know it) and yells very deliberately straight into my earshot "YOU KNOW, only 1 in 4 people has ever looked at the sky in a significant way." Whoever gathered that statistic is wrong and a monster, and the people like her who munched it up and opened their mouths up to show you what they digested from it are really cursed, because there's nothing I can imagine that would be harder on you when you look at the sky than believing that you were doing it correctly. That just can't be healthy. Which I know, because she blew that thought over to me like a dandelion seed into my young, fertile, and impressionable soil and it stuck so hard that I haven't been able to pull the resulting weeds out enough yet to catch a sunset. I guess I'm afraid I won't see anything but what 3 in 4 people do. The statisticians win again. I am the insignificantly gazing white male sometimes-voter tax-despiser-non-evader-occasional-drinker-always-kind of-thinker Midwestern child of comfort and adult of struggle with secondhand furniture like a recycled badge of pride. I am in the 100%er club. Let me guess that you are too.
I have dreams that God and Jesus are my designated drivers. They tell me they never judge, but everybody says that and I don't know who made them so special, and I'd swear there's disappointment in their eyes even if their tones are always pure and accepting. Jesus always so soft, always so much the stereotype of himself in sand-worn tunic and a perfect six-pack that I can't figure out the origins of (only in the dreams where he's hung up on a X on the wall like bloody laundry drying in the winds of love while I suck down SoCo and he begs me to lick his blood from him and be drunker and cleaner than ever before- but when I get my mind and body properly lubricated for social interaction I still feel like Atlas, supporting a world for no wage or reward whatsoever, living life until it gets the best of me and never in a billion for me, and so when I think of just giving him what he wants and sucking the spear wound in his chest completely dry like a juice pack on a table in a desert found by a lost traveler, it makes me sicker than ethanol ever could to dream of my IMMORTAL SOUL blubbering on into me and then boomeranging back out again to everyone else like my mouth does after normal, non-Messianic booze). He says "Mastin, al hap jembartil mok ent hamon Adonist, Adon most arpal shem hathoth bel am samisten porson-al bin fertest unepin tim al jakar" which I'm positive means nothing but it's more serious than life or death whether or not I know a lick of whatever language he was supposed to have spoken, which I know this isn't. It can't even be any language that anyone who's awake speaks- it's such a strong dream tongue that I wait for the scattish flow of it to come from my own lips but I'm too afraid to talk so I just wipe my mouth and sigh and then cough from the blast of poisonous air at the back of my throat that travels on the sigh's waves. Bless him, bless him, and please, whoever's blessing him, take him away from me. I want to sleep alone and drink alone without waiting to see him sitting in a chair and loving me and offering help. It hurts the most.
Wake up! Shake up those lazy bones and dust off eye boogers! Curse the booming alarm, shrieking like submerging submarine alarms or duck-and-cover nuclear holocaust digital bells tolling in my head, now an echo chamber perfectly calibrated along the edges of the unholy brain cell graveyard I created the night before to form waves of oscillating Timex torment. Wrong button, try again, hit the snooze and that's no good because this unwelcome surprise coming back from the dead in five minutes saying "HEY! THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED! MORE OF ME!" while I'm in the adjacent bathroom will just piss me off more than anything. The thing's electronic Stalin, and jars me so hard that the Christ-child's brief appearances in my shameful night visions are shot out of my ears like steam from an angry cartoon anthropomorphic critter. The train whistle almost goes off over my head to vent some more fury, and believe me I see that whistle in my emotional iconography a hundred times more often than I ever see a lightbulb go off in the same spot. My feet ache worse than my head, and there's no reason for it that comes from toil, or dance, or kicking anything- it's just that something has to hurt, and who knows where the dart's going to fly when you don't have enough motor coordination to determine your body's fate? It's a gamble, and some people gamble habitually. I gamble with liver surgery and pain. Tossing liquid dice. Russian vodka roulette. But this isn't my life, because if there's a day in the life then the crash and burn in a pile of medicine is only the last chapter, maybe even the epilogue to the day. My life begins after I finish hating the alarm. Probably at the very moment I begin to hate it come every morning, but that just can't be on the record. It can't. I have a reputation to upkeep with myself and I am not putting it in mental memorial triplicate that I begin the day in an anti-sonic self-inflicted rage. Brush yesterday off of my teeth, wash yesterday out of my pores and there's no lather thick enough to undo this feeling that whatever's on the outside is still seeping within my guts like a septic tank that had shotguns blasting through it.
BARF BARF BARF BARF BARF re-brush.
One of the only flashbacks that my tracks pull toward every time harder than dogs at squirrel-seeking velocity is the only girl who ever really spoke of the sky memorably. Only memorable because it was so bothersome. On a walk home from the bus way back in kiddyhood, not all the way to hair pulling and piggy back rides and tattling, but at least back to having a self-image from somebody else's self or some collective sign pointing at interspersed diagrams of popularity, age, trends, and with a route mapped by your current sexual and flirtatious prowess saying "here's where you are, here's what you do, you do it this loudly with this much of your gut sucked in and this much chest puffed out and these many glances at each girl who could like you with this much attention to their reactions while wearing these shoes and sneering and rolling eyes at this type of sincere talk" (latitude and longitude for a post-pubescent lack of graciousness), she talks to either her little sister or a very similarly out-of-touch girl who came home with her constantly (could be- outcasts need each other like medication, and probably are just that whether or not we.... I mean THEY know it) and yells very deliberately straight into my earshot "YOU KNOW, only 1 in 4 people has ever looked at the sky in a significant way." Whoever gathered that statistic is wrong and a monster, and the people like her who munched it up and opened their mouths up to show you what they digested from it are really cursed, because there's nothing I can imagine that would be harder on you when you look at the sky than believing that you were doing it correctly. That just can't be healthy. Which I know, because she blew that thought over to me like a dandelion seed into my young, fertile, and impressionable soil and it stuck so hard that I haven't been able to pull the resulting weeds out enough yet to catch a sunset. I guess I'm afraid I won't see anything but what 3 in 4 people do. The statisticians win again. I am the insignificantly gazing white male sometimes-voter tax-despiser-non-evader-occasional-drinker-always-kind of-thinker Midwestern child of comfort and adult of struggle with secondhand furniture like a recycled badge of pride. I am in the 100%er club. Let me guess that you are too.
I have dreams that God and Jesus are my designated drivers. They tell me they never judge, but everybody says that and I don't know who made them so special, and I'd swear there's disappointment in their eyes even if their tones are always pure and accepting. Jesus always so soft, always so much the stereotype of himself in sand-worn tunic and a perfect six-pack that I can't figure out the origins of (only in the dreams where he's hung up on a X on the wall like bloody laundry drying in the winds of love while I suck down SoCo and he begs me to lick his blood from him and be drunker and cleaner than ever before- but when I get my mind and body properly lubricated for social interaction I still feel like Atlas, supporting a world for no wage or reward whatsoever, living life until it gets the best of me and never in a billion for me, and so when I think of just giving him what he wants and sucking the spear wound in his chest completely dry like a juice pack on a table in a desert found by a lost traveler, it makes me sicker than ethanol ever could to dream of my IMMORTAL SOUL blubbering on into me and then boomeranging back out again to everyone else like my mouth does after normal, non-Messianic booze). He says "Mastin, al hap jembartil mok ent hamon Adonist, Adon most arpal shem hathoth bel am samisten porson-al bin fertest unepin tim al jakar" which I'm positive means nothing but it's more serious than life or death whether or not I know a lick of whatever language he was supposed to have spoken, which I know this isn't. It can't even be any language that anyone who's awake speaks- it's such a strong dream tongue that I wait for the scattish flow of it to come from my own lips but I'm too afraid to talk so I just wipe my mouth and sigh and then cough from the blast of poisonous air at the back of my throat that travels on the sigh's waves. Bless him, bless him, and please, whoever's blessing him, take him away from me. I want to sleep alone and drink alone without waiting to see him sitting in a chair and loving me and offering help. It hurts the most.
Wake up! Shake up those lazy bones and dust off eye boogers! Curse the booming alarm, shrieking like submerging submarine alarms or duck-and-cover nuclear holocaust digital bells tolling in my head, now an echo chamber perfectly calibrated along the edges of the unholy brain cell graveyard I created the night before to form waves of oscillating Timex torment. Wrong button, try again, hit the snooze and that's no good because this unwelcome surprise coming back from the dead in five minutes saying "HEY! THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED! MORE OF ME!" while I'm in the adjacent bathroom will just piss me off more than anything. The thing's electronic Stalin, and jars me so hard that the Christ-child's brief appearances in my shameful night visions are shot out of my ears like steam from an angry cartoon anthropomorphic critter. The train whistle almost goes off over my head to vent some more fury, and believe me I see that whistle in my emotional iconography a hundred times more often than I ever see a lightbulb go off in the same spot. My feet ache worse than my head, and there's no reason for it that comes from toil, or dance, or kicking anything- it's just that something has to hurt, and who knows where the dart's going to fly when you don't have enough motor coordination to determine your body's fate? It's a gamble, and some people gamble habitually. I gamble with liver surgery and pain. Tossing liquid dice. Russian vodka roulette. But this isn't my life, because if there's a day in the life then the crash and burn in a pile of medicine is only the last chapter, maybe even the epilogue to the day. My life begins after I finish hating the alarm. Probably at the very moment I begin to hate it come every morning, but that just can't be on the record. It can't. I have a reputation to upkeep with myself and I am not putting it in mental memorial triplicate that I begin the day in an anti-sonic self-inflicted rage. Brush yesterday off of my teeth, wash yesterday out of my pores and there's no lather thick enough to undo this feeling that whatever's on the outside is still seeping within my guts like a septic tank that had shotguns blasting through it.
BARF BARF BARF BARF BARF re-brush.
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Author's Note
The improvised beginning of a book I've been running through permutations of in my head.
Other stories by Nicholas Hranilovich
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The writing is excellent. The only thing I wasn't nuts about was the long opening dissertation on bread, but that's likely because I'm pressed for time and so used to reading and writing flash right now. Let's see what others say. There's certainly a great voice in this piece. Nice.
manic genius
wow *