A monument. A moment. A monumental moment. A catastrophe in a catastrophic cacophony of welled up emotions and hurt feelings and a million years of evolution all wrapped up in a burrito of cheese and chorizo and some bubbly water. I have no idea. Not a single thought on the matter or the manner or the makeup of any particular organism or how it grew into being some other life form. I have no idea how time exists in one space and somehow manages to show up completely different in another. I have no idea about ideas or thought processes or food processors. I have no idea about long walks before Christmas to a house full of strangers and the pictures I may or may have not taken along the way. I have no idea about the music that pours into the air from just behind my head. I have an empty brain and the only that’ll come out are these words and I’m trying like hell to put them in order so that someday when I’m old I can look back on these and kind of remember what it was that I was thinking. It’s a record. A snapshot of time. A picture in an album. A painting of a painting and an explanation of dreams about people bound in rope riding horses along some deadly ridge far away from anybody. It’s the painting next to my bed. It’s the one piece of yesterday that looms like a wall over me when I sleep.
Or is it?
Perhaps it’s just some happening of happenstance or a circumnavigation of circumstance? Perhaps it is perhaps. Per haps. Per caps. Per. Purr. Fur. Collar. Hollar. Yell and scream except I can never understand why the volume has to be so loud when it’s clear that the only people talking are standing right next to each other on the steps outside the hotel. On those steps above the path and adjacent to the road. That’s where they scream and throw punches and wait for someone to come and tell them to leave. That’s how they do it there in the city. That’s how it unfolds when the weather permits and when it doesn’t they wander in with their toil and they spend too long in the bathroom and they mutter odd things at the counter and they leave behind their belongings and they pass out and they piss on the floor. They do that because they can’t do it another way. They do it because it’s how life is for them in that moment. It’s monumental, their moment. It’s the life they have in their present and I doubt very much that it is anything they would have ever chosen had they been given the choice or the option or the long straw or the low card or whatever other method had been presented to them to pick out their future. Instead, they ended up here. On these steps over this path. Screaming and yelling and fighting. They ended up here by making choices in the their moments. They ended up here because so many other places wouldn’t take them. They ended up here. Under these bridges and in these bushes. Drinking and drugging and sleeping and stealing and passing out. They ended up here and somehow managed to get cast away from the comforts of everything else everyone else knows as comforts. They ended up here, on our steps looking for some kind of love or kindness or empathy or generosity. They ended up here never knowing what kind rejection faces them next. They ended up here with the doubts that shadow their every move. They ended up here and all we can do is smash our heads together and figure out how we’re going to get rid of them. That’s our best solution. Solve the problem by forcing it out or replacing it with other people that get along more like we do. We came up with that instead of speaking kindly to everyone and making allowances in our own comfort to help comfort those that aren’t comfortable. We came up with that big master plan to plant trees and install fences to protect our magical space from the wretches of our scene. We came up with it. We hatched our plan. We declared our moment as a testament to our monument. We wrote down our solution to the catastrophe and we put it up on the signs we jammed down deep into the earth.
We are here. So is everyone else.