Working Title

“I just can’t get enough of this shit.”
I looked up at Raymond as he muttered this to himself. He was prone to fits of sarcasm, and this was one of those incidents. It got on my nerves, really, but I was willing to put up with a certain amount of Raymond’s bullshit. “What shit?”
He set down the paper he had been reading. “Nothing, just…” he made a strange gesture, more with his wrist than his limp hand, which he circulated lazily as he tried to gather his thoughts. “Some notice of a new government program. It’s garbage.” The paper had been set face down, and Raymond, lifting his beer and pulling from it long, set it down on top of the leaflet with a sneer. I noticed a distant look in his eyes as he watched the condensation gather on his glass and run down, soaking into the paper, warping it. Cheap ink began to bleed through.
“What’s the program?”
Ray glanced around the bar, noting the other patrons in the dimly lit establishment. He picked his beer back up and just before sipping it he muttered, “Tell you later.”
My brother could also be prone to fits of paranoia. In recent years, I had noticed him acting increasingly frustrated, agitated and angry at nothing at all. His posture had begun to slump, as though he had been struggling against something and was losing, the slow realization of defeat gradually creeping its way into his eyes. I wished that I could know what tortured him; all I wanted to do was help him come to terms with… whatever.
Which was why I accompanied him to the bar and drank with him. At first I thought it might be a way to get him to talk to me about what was bothering him, but we started coming to the bar more and more and he was talking less and less. He would bring newspapers and other leaflets along with him, sipping beer or whiskey and reading in silence. And I would sit with him quietly, drinking what he drank and probing, waiting to hear from him.
We used to be so close, as boys. He was my older brother, though only by two years. Often it felt more like I was the older one, the way I would look after Ray. He tended to get preoccupied. Sometimes I think he might see the whole damn world as a distraction from whatever it is that goes on in his head. I worry about my brother.
He had brought no newspaper this time, so when he broke his stare away from the leaflet he had nowhere to look but at me. He took a deep breath and held it, eyes closed, he held the breath so tightly I though his chest might burst open. Then he opened his eyes, let the breath out slow, and squarely met my gaze. “I’m frightened, Eli.”
And I became frightened, too, though of what I wasn’t sure yet. I could just see the abject fear on his face, the wet trembling in his eyes as his teeth sought out that small spot on his lip that had been scarred from years of anxious chewing. I prodded him, asked him to tell me more, begged him to tell me why it was he was so scared, but he would speak no more of it. We drank in silence until I blacked out, and the next morning he would speak no more of it.

It was another seven months, when I had almost given up, before I heard another word about it from him.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I'm constantly amazed at just how long life is. The amount of time it takes me to write this sentence is so minuscule, so fucking irrelevant. Two seconds, the breadth of time in which so little can be accomplished, but so much can be destroyed. An object can fall twenty meters, a heart could break, a bone could snap or a library catch fire. So much can be lost so quickly.
Imagine how much you can lose in five years. If life steadily declines, without improvement, for that long, then what does that mean? There is an old saying, which makes fun of an even older saying, and it goes: "Quitters never win, and winners never quit. But those who never win, AND never quit, are idiots."
I've been called a lot of things, but no one ever thought I was an idiot, not even when I did incredibly stupid things. But I've done enough of them now that I'm starting to wonder whether I have sort of unclassifiable handicap, some inexplicable form of brain damage that makes me seem perfectly intelligent and suited for real life but really leaves me bereft of any ability to function on a normal level. I'm like the opposite of Rain Man. Instead of seeming useless and being brilliant I seem quite capable but really can't fucking do anything.
How many lives were led in mediocrity that began with great ambition?
Is normal life the best I have to look forward to? Is that bad? Is there even such a thing as normal life?
I have a close friend, a true artist and classic ascetic. He renounced material society years ago, gave away all of his possessions, and has been hitchhiking across the country ever since. He eats enough to survive, sleeps enough to keep going, and makes art wherever he goes. The large part of his work will never gain recognition, because the bridges and abandoned warehouses that he uses as canvas will eventually be painted over or knocked down, but he paints anyway because he doesn't care who sees or doesn't see it, or whether it will still be there the next day. He certainly doesn't care if any of his real canvases ever sells because he has no use for the money.
I could never live like that, or so I thought. I want to have a bed, and a house to keep it in. I want to have an iPod, or an iPhone, and a Cadillac, and a yacht, and a mansion, and a football team, and a TV station and a publishing company and a record label and fucking everything else that there is for a person to have in this world. But I don't have any of these things. I'm practically homeless, broke, with no marketable skills and (obviously) a downward spiral of negative thinking. All I know is that I need to get back to writing more often, and so here I am. There is no need to hesitate at posting such ersonal thoughts here, as I don't use my real name and nobody reads this blog anyway.
I mean, shit, it never updates, now does it?