I forgot the ball was tonight. 

The Seventy-Fifth Annual Charity Ball is held across the street from the courthouse. Ripe with rich ladies and dauntless men. Where I was supposed to meet my date tonight. 

Instead, I watch the sky. Under the moon with my patio so close to me. Small trinket lights that line my square-footage add a pleasant view up ninety degrees towards the sky. 

The window inside of my apartment glows with a rich orange tint, unfocused. It displays this glowing ball that shoots through my living room and into the Florida panes. Never reaching the final destination of shaded dirt piles behind my complex. 

I've heard that they would bury bodies underneath the dirt piles after the war. I’ve heard that they would put many into one grave. That the stench would aerate for miles and the townsfolk of yesterday couldn't stand the smell of it. 

‘They’ are unknown to me. I’ve lived my life ignorantly these past twenty years. Granted, I am still young, I know very little of what happened so long ago. If I were to guess, ‘They’ are some militia responsible for the digging of these unknown tombs. 

My date jabbed me in the stomach, on our second date, mind you. The one I was supposed to court tonight. I’d been in the hospital up until yesterday with a sore wound and some bubbling infection growing up the lining of my gut. 

She’d ordered the soup and salad. And then asked for my money. 

I started my car with a shaking wrist and a bundle of napkins wrapped around my lap. Not doing much to pressurize the bleed. The ride was rough. I saw the light a few times, causing me to drift the car to the right of the median. Looking down was hard. I remember seeing the dark red globs of organ and stained tissue along my seatbelt. 

When I’d finally arrived at the hospital, I told the emergency room clerk that I’d fallen onto an umbrella. “It’s been a miserable day, m’lady.”

I saw the pictures the doctor had taken with the giant radiation machine. It looked twisted. In a literal and figurative sense. That a woman could stick a blade so awkwardly into my stomach lining was truly a feat yet seen before, by me. 

I couldn’t taste the wine I’d poured before I left. My hands numb to the warm sink water. Threw my keys onto the counter and sunk into my couch. Life today hasn’t gone according to how I thought it would this morning. I stared at the television. 

Then I stared at myself in the mirror. 

The blood loss had affected my whole body. My skin was ghastly white. My eyes, dark gray. The lipstick I had put on in the morning was cracked and peeling. My nice shirt from J.C. Penney's was stained in thick red blood. Underneath the holes in the shirt fabric was the outline of white plaster-cast, bandage, and tourniquet.

I threw a few aspirin down and re-entered my apartment common. The sky yesterday, believe it or not, was just as magnificent as it is tonight. The sun had seemed to have set later, leaving the fading blue and yellow trails across the sky. With small and wonder-like nimbuses shooting from the sun itself. 

My couch was stained in my blood and the television network ended early for labor-day weekend. Some broadcasts on the radios still ran, so I tuned in for my night's remainder. I looked around my place. Admiring the layout I had done years back. Watching myself in the mirrored closet doors. 

Thinking briefly about what it would look like if she had been here too. 

Friday, the day of the ball. 

I think I lifted my bandage from my stomach in my sleep. The couch was covered in my blood this morning, so much so, that it looked like she’d come through in the evening. 

I had some dream last night. We picked out things to wear for tonight. 

She arrived in my dream. Around noon and apologized for the whole stabbing incident. We had the wine, and I could taste it this time.

She showed me the dress she would be wearing. It was beautiful. Pearl accessories and matching shoes. 

She gazed at my wound as I nodded in appeasement. 

“What are you wearing tonight, my darling?”

She asks me. 

I had told her that she had ruined my only pair of slacks and my only good-looking dress shirt. But I didn’t want to miss it, so I’d be wearing it.

She left the common and started rummaging around in my cabinets. I’d figured she’d gone to fetch a sewing kit.

She returned with a knife in her’s.    

    

 Down, down, down does this dream land sink you underneath.

Unveiled; The real truth of how long this street to nowhere goes. 

Impacted view. Not mediated by a rational thought.

My apologies.

Wild lands of street light medians and strangely stoic and quiet homes lining the road-edge. The brick laden road-edge with people walking from the bin back to front door. Personal caves that no one dares to enter. In fear of being shot, or called a creep for the remaining years. Inside the darkness consumes the light and provides a cool environment. It is free from the scorching sun, the biting bugs and the close-quartered combat of living in a metropolitan city. So when the groceries arrive on Monday from the store, these people slither from the Lazy Boy and brace the sun for a second. Then they slam the door. Closed door. Closed door to neighbor and those who choose to solicit on Sundays. It isn’t the fabled southern quote being spoken – “We don’t like your kind around here.” It is vastly more isolated and depraved – “I don’t like being kind and I’d rather not see the sun until I'm dragged out of my house.”

These are strange people who look at you through windows and through little slits in the bathroom ventilation chamber. 

Just around the corner, in expectation of kind friendly neighbors, you have rats who suck the life from the world and scurry back to the burrow. Saint Petersburg is stranger.

I spent Thursday killing ants with my fingers. Pretending that the little brainless things were people I hated. Thinking, sociopathically, that they would have a bad day. Just like me. 

I see the hole in the cement wall, about four yards across the two lane street. Its black inside and my eyes so asphyxiated upon it. Looking it up and down as it's a flesh wound upon someone's poor body. 

The foreman breaks my view as he begins to pour liquid cement inside of it. It fills the hole up. Like some sort of surgery. 

I'm so far down this train tunnel of madness and anger, that I can’t help to think that this metaphor bestowed before me is some great symbolism that equals a “You cannot repair the damage done with more of what made it.” sentiment. 

It breaks my heart because at the end of the day and lengthy somber thoughts, I don’t want to be the man so pressed and squeezed at the thought of the real danger of gentrification. It doesn’t seem like that. I’d even go as far to agree that the place has always been this giant shit-hole in need of fixing. 

I think the whole anti-gentrification movement is lame. 

Its all a fucking show. 

But the place is being torn down and shredded into this centric loophole of nonsense. These places that are too expensive to shop in and these restaurants with plastic burgers and metal straws on the menus. It isn’t fair to the kids who never found it cool. It isn’t fair to the people too poor to even look at the damn place. 

I can’t put up with waiting by the phone every night. My eyes are leveled with the dial, the top of the very phone-post. It makes me anxious waiting for you, waiting for nothing. 

You just sort of get rid of the important victories and mettle on the small fails like falling out of love. 

You sort of forget the indecent times you’ve been out of money and smokes and you just start to hate having all of it again. The only focus is on the fact that the damn thing won’t ring. 

You have the world sometimes. You really do. You watch it like a large rollercoaster scaling towards the sky. You watch the excitement and cheer of life and love drive itself so high with enormous stakes of dying and crashing down and burning in large fire; It’s the gambler in all of us. 

I’d dig through old boxes upon my return. I’d look at the pictures of us from when we were nineteen and homeless. Rolling across the country in ecstasy in lime-light — in weird dark thundering skies rolled across the western United States. My eyes have not yet adjusted from the dark hotel stay — to be graced with the richness of all spectrum in the bright Texan landscape. 

Who knew, This thing, this marriage that had lasted months could have so much of a toll on me. Wildness. 

I think about the stains of paint on the sides of homes. The unfinished homes from the fifties with the olden people who reside in them. 

I drive every night to bury the beast that comes out. The nervous anxious beast that convinces me that it isn’t going to be okay. The nervous beast that reminds me of my bad speech patterns and the alikeness I have to my father. Strange one. But I kill him with cigarettes and wind.

At the end of it, I know that I am just killing me. 

I speed down streets and I look at the homes I'll never own. I think of passengers and people who would never accompany me. They are different every day.

I pass over the bridges that hug small island inlets and watch the pink skies turn black every single night to ease the burning pain that I have in regards to my short five year adult life. I think about the times when I watched the same sunset out in dreamy california, pretending the nights would never end away from that place. But they ended up ending quicker than I had imagined and that wasn’t enough life for me at the moment. The moment in time when I had lived freely with this great expectation that life would be limitless, like a faucet in a busy restaurant. —-  That I would be gifted these big pools of water through perseverance and hard work; “But it just doesn’t work that way in the end, buddy.”

And I’d hear stories from the men on planes and the men telling my money at the fill stations complaining about the farms they’d bought and the families they’d hate to raise, waiting for these eternal answers that weren’t necessarily so apparent to men att(continue). Naive and young at twenty with four thousand dollars saved and no longer a wife to sit with me. The one that I married out of love.

One

There you are, alone, in the department store. Long after your parents had left you on a whim of being young and forgetful, the white reflectant tiled flooring combined with the densely packed shelving leaves you claustrophobic at such a young age. 

You hear the hum starting to brace your head. You hear the ominous static, high pitched, and impending sounds that brace you in these strange moments. 

Things around you begin to look so much differently than they usually do, panic. 

And just the other day the oak boards along a neighbors house looked like the blackened garb-ed woman. The one that might’ve eaten you alive. 

She’s gone to me. She’s nothing. A stain on my dating profile or resume, whatever you’d call it. 

I dreamed of running home. Every night. Whether that be from a window of a ship, or my dark and cramped little apartments. Watching this bustling big and disgusting place run like a machine and run so explosively that you just couldn’t ignore it in the evening. Meeting these grand and eccentric new people who were so much larger than life that it annoyed you to a point of craze and stupidity to join them in the chase of being some young and successful little fucking kid running around in the giant wasteland of the west coast. Smoking cigarettes in the industrial districts under light cones of street lamps and walking round’ the night with leather coats and drinks. Checking the boxes on the restaurants you’d tried and smelling the grease burning in the midsummers night sky, under full moon and smog clouds. Living off the light’s of Los Angeles, Encinitas, and Greater San Diego. Employed. By God did the place feel like heaven, every single day, and I'll never forget how badly I wanted out. 

There was a street in Escondido that I had frequented. A long parcel of tan sand-land with a small hearty little town that lived in the middle of it. Small Mexican ice-cream joints, Carnitas Al Pastor pop-up stands, occasional concession stands. 

• I drove through during nightfall, right about when the landscape started to turn yellow and amber-like. 

I thought about myself driving the vintage little sports car, some Austin Healey Sport. Thinking to myself about the things Hollywood has done to my head. 

Pretending to be some movie star cowboy riding down the street with full wind. Full mast. 

I waited for the clock like a dog at the door. For five years to be the new man I’d dreamed of being, I’d have to wait. The artist that wrapped at the door when I’d begin any new endeavor out of sheer boredom, or when any punk kid would boast about the five chord song he’d been an expert at writing. The ideas ran my life, the great and spectacular ideas of being the last leg of my blood and how I’d make it work.

But the white of paper burns my eyes to relieve the tragedy of my life. Damn near the only way I can encapsulate the beginning of such a miserable time. A beautiful time. Beautiful in the sense that I’ve finally found some pockets of my imagination that could have enjoyed some of it. 

She had countered what I had said in the interview today with some bleak weird twisty smile that threw my entire mood off. I, in the middle of an interview, now sit spiraled against the panel of questions yet asked. I notice her broken teeth and her frayed and dead blonde hair. How ugly she is and how soon she looks to death. I finished strong but the revolving faces of the corporate machine I desperately want into are so unbelievably haunting. I can feel the hydraulic press above my head. So dead. 

I want alcohol at these moments. Ruining the professionality of it all by giving a nice glimpse into what I’d be doing after I clocked out. 

Maybe show off some pornography I’d go and indulge myself into five-six hours later. 

Turn the thing into a fucking nightmare.

The job that’ll turn everything around. I’d hope.

I think about that. Stable life living in a pasture around all the things that could be supported by a job. Of course that pasture for me is some rank studio apartment. The pride in making joe in the morning and turning the key to my car. The “Get up and Get it.” Sort of thing.

What the old fat guys used to think, before, well you know. 

I think about the yellow lights that would contrast every place that I’d ever lived. No more white bright shining lights that melt your skin and blast you awake in the morning. Yellow cool somber lights that stick out naturally during a summer evening. 

I think of the smell of fresh home cooked meals I’d prepare for my lovely other in the cocked and squished ornately decorated studio apartment. 

Licking the pasta from my fingers after a taste test. Pouring a beer to the rim. With no overflow. My desk is situated somewhere along one of the free walls that my bed doesn’t ride, stacked high are these bundles of my work. Paper stacked and tied like christmas presents. All fueled by the small job and small life. Finally free from the desert of self fulfillment, onto this new oasis of independence that I have wanted from the world. No order. No big man watching me. 

I can’t help but to blast down these streets like dirt, they are dirt to me.

The streets are not dirt. The streets are bricks and have some charm to them, with bumps and cracks going east to west. Adding a pallet of dullish red to the already forest green marsh that seems to gather all attention from your eyes.  

This nowhere ville where the Rembrant painted skies contrast the bum paradise of lotto. The Rembrant painted skies at the evening time that nobody has seemed to order, factoring the fact that I've noticed them every single day since my return, are this unwell addition to my now permanent stay. 

Sickened from shellfish had on Sunday, now a slurry of pain to my lower abdomen while on patrol today. Sickened because there is no out, no little light at the end of the tunnel. I have just begun such a deep spiral down to wherever the hell my mind left off since the last habitation of Saint Petersburg. 

And wow does this state really kick you around and jerk you into so many different directions.

Unemployment

Is

…

So Terrible. You wake up. Make the fucking coffee. Smoke. Look at the sky. Check the mail. Beg for the job. Nap. Then just repeat it all. Everyday. In hopes that someones got something for you. 

I have contempt for this place and unruly anger at the fat and big people that have equally done nothing and everything to destroy such a wonderful place to live. Turning everything light gray and light blue. Rolling around in mud like the pigs. 

Who the hell do you think you are.

Having it so easy?

I pretend to shoot my fingers like guns at the fat people and at the hospitals that refuse to hire me.

There’s a marginal gap between useless and more useless. The square bodied women and the round bellied men, all wearing this cropped clothing to show off the irregularities of their form. Unscathed by the ugliness and so utterly perplexed by cheap infrastructure. I want to shake these people awake so that they will see all of the world correctly. They walk so lifelessly around the most beautiful place.

They don’t understand this vision I have of the masquerade, the weird raw beauty that goes beyond blue collar stereotypes, or even any stereotype at all.

I want to wear suits at night-time and act like it's the fifties with twists of gothic horror and mystery that sits underneath the streets I parade upon. Basking in the olden blue light that hums and hisses at you, spilling my drinks in the cavern of darkness that surrounds the brick built bar. Jaunting and talking so literally about the old world medias. Spinning around the street lights like a mad-man in love and bouncing in between them. Filing down the sidewalks to mossy undergrowth and metal fire-escapes that ride the two story brownstones. 

They've just had it easy. Or I am the asshole who says so. 

I ride the corner around the ‘North Street’ or whatever the fuck it is called again. 

Maybe one of these days I'll have it my way around this town. When my construction crew or my team of angry lawyers rips the blankets off of the families that destroyed it all. I'll get my stupid job and run the joint. I’ll rebuild it the way I wanted it. I’ll defy this unnatural progression with more of it. I'll set up snipers who’ll dime the carpetbaggers running down from the north.  

 

this will be my heaven.