1977-
I long so much for the day… For the freedom so many find in the light of day; but I can’t sleep comfortably at night.
I lay awake and shiver in the sticky bird-rising dawn. I would even howl at the moon on appropriate occasions, I suppose… But I fear the neighbors would call the cops.
Indecision… Too many nights without sleep have made me weak and crazy. I don’t want to sleep alone anymore. Am I justified in writing this? Tell me who justifies things and I will write to them, requesting further information, membership fees, self-returnable envelopes, pillows…
Why does my head feel like a box of See’s Candies, with the picture of that old lady on the lid? And furthermore, why do I seem to enjoy it?
Life in a candy box… There are so many things on the walls of wax paper; pictures, slogans, faces faces faces, haunting me day after day, confronting the walls of oblivion… It’s okay now though, they don’t really shock me anymore. More and more lately I hardly notice them at all… All but one image…
It’s a picture postcard I picked up in Tijuana, Mexico. The colors are black, white, red, green, yellow and blue; Primary colors, bright and childlike, with the dreamlike pastel patina of age. In spots the colors blend in that unreal way that only happens in old picture postcards and dreams, and maybe death…
There is a rolling green hillside dotted with absurd little flowers, above which is an expansive looking sky that seems about to be blotted out by big bulbous yellowish white clouds rising disturbingly on the horizon… Running along the hill are a bunch of soulless looking little Scottie dogs, one right behind the other… They grow larger and larger with a sort of not-quite-right perspective as they run by… The ones in the distance fade into an amorphous looking blot at the left side of the card. What can I say? Above this scene is a slogan in red and black that reads simply:
LIFE IS ONE DARN THING AFTER ANOTHER.
It’s really a bitch! The scariest thing about it is that it’s one of those innocuous looking things that just sort of sneaks up from behind you and turns your brain into soap bubbles.
I have all kinds of things in here, but somehow this little horror stands out… Sometimes I even think of it as the sole fixture on these walls. And I wonder what it would be like to bow down before that thing on grey mornings when fever hides waiting under the bed…
Maybe somewhere in this world there is a sleazy downtown skid row room with spider holes in the floor. The guy who designed that card, an old man now, sits on his tired old gray ass looking at the holes, looking right down into them. I dunno…
I wish I could just go to sleep and visit the world again tomorrow in the sun.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1977, 2009.
i wish i had written those first two lines
wax faces… yes! love the word play.
the answer lies in See’s candy…it must…life’s a bitch…but she makes good chocolate…
dammit…I sounded like fuckin forest gump….