The Fires Of Enstrangment.

Where oh where to begin? Well it's getting hot now. Winter seems like a dream compared to the lucid sweat box I come home to after work. I'd rather bury my head in the open cavity of a pig carcass then sit around and melt on my livingroom couch. At least the cat would have something to lick up throughout the afternoon, if most of me dosnt drip down through the floorboard cracks. It's 7 pm and bright as Hells Hollywood outside. I spent at least an hour in the shower trying to freeze myself back to life...

Do you remember when you were young and sunday evenings seemed like "I Am Legend"? Or at least they did to me. The day was busy enough. Church in the morning, long social afternoons going to dinner parties, dinners at friends of the family, games with my sibilings. But once the dusk had really setteled in, The Twilight Zone began. A heavy, boring dim seemed to fall on all my loved ones as my parents pulled out big church books or went to take a "nap". My older brothers and sisters would scatter off to their rooms and lock themselves into their dens. Anyone my age or younger was still trying to stay active, but by the most horrible means possible. Puzzles on the livingroom rug, coloring books on the couch... generic church cartoons. So I had to choose two very hard things. To stay in the one room of the house with any sings of life and light, but bare the grueling choice of pastimes available... or face the wild and dangerous world of anywhere else. The house was dead and dark. Long shadows were the only sign of light left as the sun dripped down behind the tree line (which, in Otter Creek Maine, was REAL fast). The outside was even more so. Eerily too quite, and windy dark. Of course I chose the rest of the house and the world beyond, a love for adventure had been instilled in me from an early age through watching my brothers play computer games.... duh. The hallways became dark foreboding passages, and the rooms caverns lost to time. The outside held the greatest excitment. It seemd you didnt need to be more then a dozen yards from the front door to feel like you had gone MUCH to far from the house. It felt like even in suburbia there were lions, goblins, and all sorts of legendary evil lurking even as close as the driveway. Those were the times when I felt like my house, my neighborhood, my family, my LIFE had fallen into obscurity. And now sitting here in the bleached heat of my apartment, I feel like I did then when I was 6. Sitting around and staring into the lonely, dead, still water world around me. This difference is the heat. The similarity? My entire being at the moment seems to have desenced into obscurity. This time though, my father wont wake up from his nap at 10 in the evening and offer to make cookies or biscuits. My mother isn't going to finally get up and read a book to me and my brother. I'll just sit here and find cool parts of my bedroom wall to smash my bare body against (my desperado method for trying to cool down without getting into the shower again or waste the cool in my refrigerator). Maybe the people I hear talking to me are simply part of the trip your sure to get from sitting in a sweat box all afternoon. Maybe their the beginnings of my middle aged, white, American, male psychopathic symptoms? Maybe its just the TV?... maybe.

Well I'll sweep up a piece of kitchen tile real nice, try to see if I can broil some bacon on it. Feed it to the cat, and keep her tongue out of my innards when I drip down to a puddle on the sofa cushion.