Blonde Girl With a New Tattoo

(somewhere in Canoga Park, California)

Blonde waitress asks, “Hey do you come here often?”

“No,” I say. “This is my first time.”

Conversation ends with an exchange of names and a handshake. The joint offers beer with breakfast and weekend jazz. These are crucial ingredients to a fulfilled life here in this harsh, unforgiving valley. The valley of the damned. Language barriers (English/Spanish) and many cars in lines attempting to get out of parking lots. The valley of lost and broken souls spans from each equator to the northern and southern poles. (The entire world is a valley of lost and broken souls).

Unforgiving blonde waitress with arms cradling plates and coffee mugs. She has to deal with the yahoos who take advantage of the $2 miller lites on special, to chase down scrambled eggs and french toast. She has a blurry tattoo on the back of her neck. Drunk tattoo artist maybe. I don’t look twice.

Because, I’m captivated by the swirl of creamer in my coffee cup. Is there a pattern? This chaotic swirl of white mixing with the clear black of the weak coffee, in a tan whirl pool. I mix things up with my coffee spoon. An ample comparison for a drunk young women who go out on lakeside docks with stoned friends, trespassing on private, though unarmed and vacant, property. They send naked pictures of each other to boys. They mix things up into tan profusion.

My thoughts drifted to the young women on the dock due to parts of an overheard conversation while eating dinner elsewhere last night. They have nothing to do with my current caffeinated meditations.

There is a painting of a rainy city block where people and their umbrellas take off into the sky. Watermarks of impressive precision. Some careful, trained hands created these streaks with the artistic certainty of the totally insane.

Cut off a chunk of your ear and mail it to your ex girlfriend.

Spend the final years of your life in an asylum staring at clocks and gardens.

Water flowers with your salty tears.

Imagine tree removal surfaces. When everything becomes a liability in such an interwoven clusterfuck of man, machine, and nature. In that order. Dystopian future is machine, man, then nature. The age of the cave man was nature, man, and what in the hell is machinery.

Blame me for the removal of your tree. I pissed on it because I didn’t want to waste the water of a flushing toilet just because I had too many vodka-tonics in big plastic double-lined cups while playing drums or bass or guitar inside the hot box of the wax-scrapping studio, where magic music manifested and wax widened wits.

Blonde waitress, will you come to my show? Will my shifting perspective put you off entirely?

It should. It damn well should. I’m impossible to follow and you have better things to do.

So thank you, my second mother, (from last night’s dinner) for giving me advice. You talked of tolerance. Of what it takes to bite my tongue and when to choose battles.

It hurts me to understand where you are coming from. Clearly, you do not speak up every time something bothers you. It gets tucked away somewhere hidden. Somewhere behind the tight, wry smile. Somewhere behind the cooking/cleaning habits. The habits of a dead world, buried in the 1950’s.Your blonde streaks do not hide the emotional disturbance clawing at the floorboards. You are not alone in your absent speech. Instead of allowing words to hurt, you take yourself to paradise in your mind and everything is more vibrant and beautiful… This makes you absent from the unpleasant present. An acknowledgment of the sadness of the world is there, like a fucking meteorite speeding toward earth, but it’s simpler and happier to just ignore. To cancel the weight of strong, intelligent thought.

This dinner party all fall victim to illogical thoughts in a mass delusion. The kind of thoughts that shared ignorance plus isolation creates. In this cavernous isolation, people speak out of their asses and tolerate each other’s nonsense with a yip and a yaw. They yell filth and rumor out of their over-privileged mouths. It sounds the same as vomiting to me.

They talk over me like their words are a train and I’m tied to the tracks, shackled and bound, with duct tape over my mouth. My words aren’t even acknowledged. I must wonder if I’ve even said anything. “Go back to your books, fucking democrat,” they say. And I wonder what what politics has to do with ethics. i.e.: death penalty, angelina jolie’s tits, terrorism/drone bombing. How is it so easy to completely ignore a well-known bias? i.e.: fox news, their reputable, down-home safe and sound news source because it spews obfuscation when issues are too complicated to understand after a tall vodka club and a chew. Spitting in a red solo cup.

I have crucial points to express. Please, dear lord, offer me your fucking ears. You may not like what I have to say. But, in your ultimate thoughtlessness, your immoral gibberish, have you ever known what your idiotic words do to me? To my heart? My sensibilities?

Beside justifying my personality to myself before it gets wiped clean, which is ultimately positive, most everything you say is nails against a chalkboard. Grating me in the worst possible way and I hate you for it. I can’t deny that. I must accept that. I die to tolerate your bullshit.

I can’t change you or the stupid, fucked-up-to-the-well-being-of-the-world things you do… although, god damn it, I wish I could… I only have my own perspective in the end. I only have my reaction to you. To your senseless, thoughtless garbage.

All I can do for now is avoid you. Why associate with something intolerable? Something that doesn’t listen carefully to what I have to say about my place in the world? What can I do about a person who talks over me without realizing it. Who understands nothing. Who believes in an entire world that does not exist. Who lives in a fantasy of pipe dreams and wasted water. Who watches television in rapture and plays video games like they mean something to the developing seed of their soul. Who sleeps in late without alarm and with no drive to think singular unique thoughts. Who feels comfortable in crowds of racist marching assholes.

They must be eradicated from my head, blonde darling.

Sorry for the rant. I see you scratching that tattoo on your neck like a nervous tic. Let’s change the topic. Is that new?


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