Songs About Drifters

    From the window of an airliner, the clouds always look like palaces in the sky to me, where people could live eternally aetherial, changing forms but always made of the same matter. This was what was probably going through my head on the very long flight to Seoul, assuming I had the window open. I usually did if it was light out. The parabola of a trans-Pacific flight took us across the endless miles of tundra. It was hard not to imagine being stranded down there in the white, where a lifetime of walking would not take me to any place different even if I could stand the cold.
    I was on this flight as a way to escape from Chicago, and I guess I had been in Chicago as a way to escape from whatever came before that. There was an open apartment if I wanted it, and my unemployment checks could just barely cover the rent, if I sold a few of my CDs at the record store down the block. I holed up in there for a while. It was a city. A real city.
    We set off fireworks by dropping them from the rooftop on the fouth of july. Down into the alleyway, but there was a homeless guy down there sleeping, and when he woke up he and his friends yelled at us from the street. There was some sort of language barrier.
    I remember little of this time. I hung out with my roommate's cat, played video games, did other things, my god this is boring to write about.
    Chicago was a paradise of poverty. A panhandler in front of every bank, a Mexican restaurant on every corner, overpriced thrift shops and furniture stores alternating with the bars that both employed and serviced my generation - new ciders every week, and a free pizza with every beer. The El was convenient, comforting and filthy. Parades of underpasses and abandoned factories gave way for naked cyclists pedaling fiercely against the wind. When the blizzard hit, the streets were ours for a whole weekend. Tramping through the snow that shut down my street, the lights spun across my eyes and illuminated the concrete geometries that belonged to me at night, when the suits and cops had all gone home.

    He intentionally left the narrative behind for a time because it was as dull as dull could be. Endless parades of animals ran through his brain, and he could only speculate as to the reasons for them. When his cat disappeared and his other cat died, he imagined them frolicking through the sky together, laser beams firing from their eyes, annihilating the world below and leaving only the sky palaces where they might live forever.
    I used to stalk the streets of my campus in the small hours of the morning, drunk and smoking cigarettes, enjoying the lamplit fog, imagining for some reason bursts of flame and glass from the upper stories of the dormitories, I guess because it was something exciting, and everything was dull dull dull.
    I would go to parties at local bars and drink beer. I would sit on patios at restaurants and drink beer. I would send my job search reports to unemployment. I would occasionally go to parties because of my roommates. I would meet very few people, more when I began volunteering at a tutoring center.
    I can't say why we're talking about this now. I want to imagine a world below our own, where the corridors reshape themselves by the day so there is always something new to explore, traps and beasts and treasures, and waterfalls beneath the earth, and all the other beings sightless in the dark, from the dark, so they cannot see me crawling through the halls.
    If God were to exist, I would imagine him lurking in this place, on the lowest level, at the center of the Earth, making notes, flipping switches, fiddling with dials and levers that controlled sea levels and magma pressure, solving formulas in his head pertaining to how his adjustments might affect the insigificant but entertaining life on the surface, which he would monitor from a series of godly satellites connected by towers to wires that ran down beneath the surface into this megastructure, through switchboards manned by the gnomes whose daily activities really ran the universe, or at least the nuts and bolts parts of it that big idea men like God couldn't handle on their own.
    Is this what I thought about while sitting in that plane over the Pacific? Maybe, but maybe it was just about how I couldn't get any sleep for 40 hours straight, and how the food on international flights was actually pretty good. It wasn't my first overseas flight, but it would be my first in a long series, as flying back and forth over the Pacific became a regular fact of my life from then on. While travel became a more mundane activity, flying did not in the sense that I always expected to die on these flights, probably by being crushed when a seat in front of me came loose and took off my head as our fuselage crumbled to dust.
    More likely these were the thoughts I was having while sitting there buckled into that seat. Or imagining thrombosis in my legs while watching a movie on someone else's screen, trying with all my might not to touch the fat hairy arm next to me, or ignore the fat, hairy breathing from the fat, hairy man it was attached to. I drank and ate whatever was offered, and once or twice, I even tried ordering some alcohol. I was a drinker in those days, would be even more of one in the days to come, as that was what people did in Seoul, especially people like me. But there on the flight, drink just made things worse. Being confined to my seat made it no fun, and only exacerbated the sleep loss into something sublime and eldritch whose tentacles reached from my brain into my lungs and spine, taking over my body and turning it into something that no longer required sleep or even food, but ran on pain instead.
    That's how I was still awake when we landed and I hopped in a van to my new apartment, passing from the airport toward the city along a thin peninsula where towering tombstones disappeared into the mist. We ventured into the mountains beyond and into the countless streets, where the van broke down on a steep incline, and we had to get out and push. This sent the van rushing downhill where it plowed directly into a parked car. At this point I had ceased to particularly care about anything other than sleep loss. I scratched my head and had no thoughts or feelings about the van shattering the headlights of the car down the street, or the fact that it was November and I was cold and wet. Another car picked us up, and then I found myself in an empty apartment with no heat.
    Before that, though, it was probably Friday night in this place that  I now was, now that time existed again, and my coworkers were going out on the town. I was so far from sleep that it no longer existed and so I went with them, ate meat and drank as much as I could put down. We drank from shallow cups of milky liquid and shouted in our two languages which combined into wordlessness. I was asleep, had been asleep, had never slept. Then I was home, and there was nothing to do, not even shower or change clothes. There was no heat and no clothes, because my luggage was missing. I put socks on my hands and held them over the electric stove, wearing everything that I owned.
    I used to drink when I wrote, or rather write when I drank, and the results were jazzier. Not much jazz in this. I've replaced it with caffeine, and I don't know what that does other than give me pains in my chest and stomach.
    I'll keep going because the music is still playing, but I'm starting to get tired of this. My brain wants to change the channel. My attention span is 15 to 30 minutes, maybe less depending on the day. Go man, go.
    Never once in my life had I the courage to sit down and tell the truth, but I could lie endlessly in this format. I had a hamster once, when I was a child, and a bad person. I would hold his front paws in the air and watch him dance. I would scare him with my toy cobra. I'd like to think that he tolerated it, but I have no idea what really went throug his hamster brain. One day, he began to fart a lot, and another day he died, then I think he was buried somewhere.
    I didn't know how to speak Korean or the bus schedule, which was how I ended up miles from my apartment, not only in a different neighborhood, but far enough from the city that I could see its lights and towers on the horizon, drowning out everything else until the space around me was only ground and darkness. I remember walking against the wind down a highway, holding my jacket close in the November cold. I remember stopping in a convenience store and trying to borrow a cell phone from a man who just shrugged repeatedly at me until I left. I eventually found a taxi. The end.
    Talking of the day in and day out realities that followed may prove difficult. It was very normal. The heater was one day fixed, and then the floor was toasty, and I could finally take the socks off my hands. I laid down on the floor after coming in from the cold. I dried my clean clothes on the floor because the heat dried them faster, and the air did not dry them at all. But I had a sizeable space and a flat screen TV and a bed with a heavy blanket. My CRT was back home in a garage or a storage space, along with the furniture I would later sell because I had no more use for furniture in my life after Chicago. Itinerants do not carry furniture on their backs. I lived with what I could carry on my back, and whatever televisions happened to be at my destination, which was none after this single flat screen monitor.
    The city did not sleep, so neither did I. The high school students went home from cram school at 10 pm, and we went "home" after that, by which I mean to the club. Or a club. Any club. There were so many. We drank and ate and drank and danced and drank, and then I would fall asleep at 5:30 in the morning then wake up at 3 pm to go back to work. Have a little narrative summary, because my memories beyond that are too frazzled and fragmented for more. Sometimes I'm amazed I remember anything at all.
    Unbeknownst to me, I had decided to fall in love with two women that year, rather than the usual one. One was short and stocky but _sculpted_, in that she looked as if she had chiseled herself out of clay in front of the mirror every morning, crafting her own jawline, nose, and bust from scratch each day to perfectly suit her. The other was a reedy, pasty manic pixie dream girl, but the real kind, the kind that sometimes drinks too much wine and barfs in your lap, or changes attitudes at the drop of the proverbial hat.
    In the dark nights of prepubescence, I listened endlessly to Robert Plant sing about wandering to find his lost love. The Tolkien references were lost on me at the time, but I did envision a land of green spaces and distant mountains, mysterious cabins deep in the woods, and across them all a wandering, tragic figure hiking, following a shadow across my eyelids. An old casette tape single had a water-damaged cover of a bearded, cloaked man with a bundle of sticks on his back. Was this a fellow wayfarer, someone met on the road, even the man himself? It didn't matter, because the horizon was waiting in the background.
    If I was searching for anything, it was probably the same thing that fellow in the song was. I dreamed about a girl that was far away, who changed with the years to fit my own circumstances. Sometimes she had brown hair, sometimes red, sometimes green eyes or light blue or brown. Sometimes she was far to the West, sometimes to the East, but always beyond sight, beyond the road, the sun, in the sky.
    November rains were cold and fierce, and flooded the alleyways of downtown, running into the soles of my sneakers, flushing dead rats from the gutters, kept away in plastic tents where the smells of fish broth and smoke predominated. I met my friends in front of the convenice store by the train station, just down the hill from the ancient palace whose wall still ran along the edge of the neighborhood, shorter than it once was when it probably repelled or fell to invading armies. I don't know, I didn't retain much history of the place.
    I had thought I would be a musician in between writing sessions, but finding groups of like-minded artists becomes more difficult out in the real world of work. I switched from so many hours high and drunk playing every note I could think of with any drummer who would sit down behind the kit, to playing the notes in my room for myself, plugged out or plugged into my own headphones, listening only to my own sounds and regressing as an artist as a result. Instead I watched every season of The Office, staying up until well past sunrise, then staying up some more.
    There was a man who would fight you for a dollar, which really meant he would bob and weave while you tried to land a drunken punch, because those were the kind of people who wanted to fight someone so much they would pay for it. Or you could find a streetside arcade with a boxing machine, pads that would register your hits and give you back a score. There were motorcycles everywhere, veering over the sidewalks and around the crowds. The lights made the nights brighter than the day, which was perfect for me because I had never adjusted to the hues of the sun. They hurt my eyes and made me tired. They were the hues of work and serious business. Night was the time that I owned, and that others in the city owned with me, because cities were built for the night, when the colored bulbs and neon could decorate and disguise the ugly, grey facades and turn them into magic.
    There was a neighborhood made of trash. The train stop was still intact, but all of the other buildings had been condemned, and so they were filled with trash, and were themselves trash. The place fascinated me. A trash neighborhood is a place where anything could exist, because a non-trash neighborhood can only produce things of market value, or things that do not offend by their appearance or smell. Trash buildings could contain anything, and all of it could be up for grabs if you just hop the fence. I dream that one day the Pacific trash will form solid islands with their own unique ecosystems: creatures and plants and spores all adapted to the detritus of humanity. I will be there in my gas mask and trash gown spearing three-armed fish and collecting mushrooms to take my back to my trash igloo and my trash-powered stove. My life will be short, because what ruining the environment really means is that we've ruined it for ourselves, but the spores will be fine. You cannot kill the environment, it will environ no matter what you do.
    The old district around the ancient palace even had its own trash piles, at the back of traditional houses,where stray kittens played and whined and hissed at each other atop the mounds of garbage.

Unimagined

 
    Unfortunate ladies in the sky sprouting metal wings that cut clouds into tiny, bite-size pieces which you might taste like marshmallows drifting down your gullet, finding their way between your ribs as one might the rafters of an old unused attic, there to bloom forever as spiritual second and third hearts that keep you forever dreaming, forever light and airy and asleep, and wishing for something else so hard that you drift between cities and countries searching for it.
    This was I suppose how you became who you are, an event that took place before the advent of conscious thought, reinforced over time by your deep dives into this or that universe, the realms of countless other dreamers expressed on pages and screens and through sound waves. You listened and read and watched and then saw your room lift itself off the ground and grow legs and run you down the street, straight through a plate glass mirror beyond which were realms unimagined by the unimaginative.
    And so you lurk now in the places between these realms, peering in, dipping your toes in, wading up to the waist, but always leaving to stand outside watching from Elsewhere. Elsewhere, where the rainbows glow and the nights are as deep as the ocean. Elsewhere, where sheep bounce over the meadows hunting wolves, and candy is poisonous and mushrooms taste like candy. Elsewhere, where a loaded gun is always handy but never necessary.
    Your name is Gherritt. You stand beyond the mirrors in your sleep. Lifting weightless weights, planning, plotting, waiting for the day you might wake and cease to be Gherritt, to become someone else.
    The city is a series of sewers. Sew enough buildings together and what you have is one big burrow, housing all that is human in its spiritless halls, where sewage flows ever downward, but is ever produced anew. You are somewhere in this endless building, still sleeping beyond the mirror.
    You have a six-legged cow named Bertha. You keep a box of mints in your pocket, something that you think of as mints because they taste nice, but they also make your brain explode with every bite.
    Over the hills, grasses wave as tall as treetops hiding gods.
    I fiddle with dials on your bed, keeping you alive and kicking. You kick aginst the mirrors, but they are made of material harder than stone.

    The sensation of floating is real. This is your actual physical state. What is not real is your sense of control over it. The sense of floating where you like rather than in one specific spot.
    Beyond the stone mirrors there is only glass, if you could just reach beyond them with the ball of your foot and shatter it, the dreams might flow out into a putrid puddle on the floor and leave you there gasping air and feeling for the gun that was always handy, but is now absent and necessary. You do these things and then there are shouts in the hallway. through the blur in your eyes, you see that the hills do not exist, there is only the corridor. You have arrived in one specific place at last and no longer have the ability to leave and go elsewhere. Perhaps you are awake, and perhaps you are just having a nightmare, one that you cannot immediately exit from.
    Outside this room is a train station in the dead of night, a switchyard enclosed in a series of tunnels, darkness out beyond the platforms twitching with unease, uncomfortably aware of its own endlessness. Cold breath drifts in out of the nothingness, drying out your skin so that it feels too tight. You flex your fingers expecting your knuckles to split open like sausage casings.
    Somewhere in this building is a city, but for now it is only the station and the sewers, bereft of any life except for the uniformed men who search for you with their flashlights cutting the dark of the many outcrops and unused gantries of this place.
    You reach into your pocket and find something round and squishy, studded with probosci. When you squeeze it, it squeaks like a chew toy. The noise attracts the flashlights and so you place it back in your pocket and huddle, draw the darkness around you until the lights go away. The shouting voices fade with them, and then you are alone, far from the rainbows and the sheep, alone with your squeaky toy and the clothes you are wearing, which you have never seen before but must belong to you.