simple machines
We are in a bar. I promise it don’t matter which one. Knowing us, we’re actually probably at home, but the desperation remains the same: like the room you’re choosing to be in might beget its own exit. I’m talking doors, I guess, thinking structurally, but the problem is something else entirely, down to its gnarled root.
And I think you’re talking about some guy. Gender, too, is basically inessential here, but if it is a queer relationship, it is almost entirely by way of the parts involved. Either way, we are sitting, we are sipping. Referring to someone, especially one’s mom, as a “smother,” strikes me as deeply cruel, but I don’t know how else to describe myself in trying to ease this headache through inducing a second, more justifiable headache tomorrow morning. I’m tearing up my second napkin and you’re explaining to me how lovable you are. I forget how you’re doing it this time, but I don’t think that’s important. Are you sensing a theme here?
While we’re in the business of discussing what has long since been established, I’m trying to tell you that I don’t belong here. This city, obviously, and also this room, and quite probably also the I itself if we’re allowed to get syntactic (they haven’t made rules strong enough to dissuade me here) because what am I if not the drink in my hands, the seat I take up next in front of you, or the delusion of company that allows you to keep going and remain perfect, in place, all at once?
Am I an enabler? I think to myself not infrequently. Not for you, precisely, for this would require some deep presence on my part, and I’m still trying to find myself between the bartop and the bag hook. I bring my tarot cards everywhere though I so rarely have occasion to whip it out. Nobody really wants to know. I’m drifting off towards terms of simple machines and think I resonate most with that of a wedge, or maybe a screw. When did we start referring to all that as a screw, anyhow? Maybe gender does matter, but just as it calcifies. I could be as impotent as any man or woman, and even change my stroke accordingly. Mostly, I’m just tipsy. Crazy work, to be frantic and paralyzed, all at once. All that kinetic energy won’t help a thing once you’re already on the floor.
A pop-timist by trade, I’ve been thinking about the lyrics to “Work” by Rihanna this whole time. But I wake up and act like nothing’s wrong. It’s not really an act, if you think about it. Before you hit the floor, all that pretension could have been in good faith. God could still be coming, if you think about it. Just get ready for it such that you don’t have to stay ready. The Lord is a lever, obviously. He is all reach.
I think about this in terms of the table. Like we could afford to close some distance. But that was never the real barrier. Space would be such a simple fix, and we are nothing if we are not making things harder for ourselves. Really, I mean it, nothing, like nothing the matter. Nothing could never be wrong. It’s not really the drink, but the glass you leave after. What are we ever paying for if not our own abnegation. What better evidence could we possibly leave. How poignant! is a thing I have been known to say, out loud, even. Look: we all pick our poison. On days like this, I might pick two.
And maybe, in the end, our debris really will redeem us. I read the first three sentences of an essay about immigrant clutter while you were in the bathroom, and I’m tempted to spill about the time I’ve spent working in museums, how it’s mostly all just framing (the secret seventh simple machine) or the second time I did acid and realized that the whole of life can be understood as a cascading data set, or how Russian dolls, being full of themselves, are still functionally empty,