Stuck

I’m stuck. It’s like this temporary affliction but it’s a feeling I can’t shake. And I find myself here, often. Not sure how to describe it really but here’s my attempt: it’s that kind of moment where your feet feel bound in concrete or ice or maybe even quicksand, cos there’s a certain amount of sinking going on here too. You try and twist and turn but no matter the amount of energy expended you are still there, unmoving. Like in a dream where you are running, running, but getting nowhere fast, just dragging your heels on some road or crawling toward your next destination knowing you are a) going to be very late and in trouble with your mother or b) going to die. And there’s no real relationship to anything in particular so it’s a sort of universal stasis. A place you find yourself in despite wanting, with everything you’ve got, to move, and to get the hell out of wherever it is you are, which is somewhere you certainly don’t want to be. And a doctor might enter into this scene and will possibly make suggestions of ways to alleviate this problem, to get this sorted out or to put your body in motion, despite these measures being only temporary or superficial. You might swallow something that your digestive system can only barely tolerate but will soon become addicted to and then inevitably crave to the point that you won’t be able to live without it. In fact, you will die if you don’t swallow. That is what will be prescribed. Swallow or die. It’s a choice you will have to make. Because you want to start getting up or right out of the bed, from under the covers, or out of the gutter, the sewers and start to absorb some serious sunlight. And, my dear friends, it’s been dark in here. The lid has been screwed on tight and you have no option but to wait for some knight in shining amour to unscrew you, undo you, screw you. He’s up there, somewhere. And he is good with his hands and often carries a corkscrew and usually a swiss blade knife, just in case. He’s good at rescue attempts. Don’t ask him, however, for talk or to engage in conversation or provide profound counsel in your time of need. Forget about that. Forget that he might have some answers for you. Forget that he might actually listen and perhaps even learn a thing or two. Forget about him staying longer than he believes is needed. Because he will always talk over you, talk louder and with blind authority. And certainly watch out for the ritual act, his act of digging you out of some place for a brief moment in time only to drop you right back in a deeper hole in a not too distant other place in the not too distant future. He’ll be good for one thing but good for nothing. But at least, for a second or two, he’ll pull you up and pull you off and push you around for a bit, so at least it will be physical and real, a bit like turbulence on a plane: you will feel something and it will most likely be ok, if not good. A way, then, to be unstuck. You won’t have to tell him about the things you swallow to make you appear like a normal person in public. He will introduce you to others as an eccentric or some other endearing tag he’ll apply to a person who is actually just barely coping with the noise people make. He won’t understand why you react so strongly to the sound of screaming babies and their arrogant mothers. He won’t grasp your inability to deal with smokers in confined places. He will certainly not accept your intolerance to small groups of pissed young men walking with murder in their eyes in the quiet back streets. He will say that you are old before your time. That you are incapable of decent social interaction. That you are weird around people, especially at parties. That your drinking habits are in fact comparable to those pissed young men who walk with murder in their eyes in those quiet back streets. But, you will say, it’s a recognition of mutual fear that brings it out in me. It’s a knowledge that those young men and myself are actually almost the same. We’re like animals ready to tear at flesh and suck on blood. We’re no better than each other, really. And we’re just as fucked up and stuck in a rut as each other. So it’s not that I’m just terrified that they’ll jump me and stick a knife into my stomach or that they’ll bash my skull against the brick wall in this lane-way and then beat me to the ground screaming faggot or cocksucker in my ear only to have one of them fuck me with a long-neck beer bottle. It’s the fact that, if they did, I might enjoy it. That these are the kind of men I really love because they are beasts ready to pounce. Urban werewolves that stalk city streets at night. And to feel alive, to walk alone, to be on these streets, as a kind of equal, or opposite, whatever works for them, I am their prey. I am happy to be eaten just to feel alive. They could parade me through the main streets as their prize and throw me into the river. And I could have said to each and everyone of you just this: see, there you are, I experienced something today.

JASON