ticker tape

i’ve begun a diary of my stock market analysis on what we will term a sister blog.

my expectation is that writing down my thoughts on the market will cause me to posture and lie to myself, with deleterious consequences.

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blaine

blaine is a conscientious objector — from existence.

we are on the roof of his apartment, near the water tower. i suggest that he jump, but he waves it away as another stupid idea on my part.

the key, he explains, is random behavior. he is protesting existence by refusing it any intelligibility. because we are biological creatures, our brains fool us into making sense of things.

“most people do this. they take a lump of chaos, eat it, shit it out and call that order. i refuse to call the act of shitting order.”

did i mention that blaine is a university president? no? perhaps i should have started with that. also, his wife and young daughter sleep 3 stories below.

blaine sees no irony in his philosophy of abstaining from existence and his job as a university president or his role as a husband and father.

“we work to live.” he says simply. “i’m not in control of my unconscious mind, the part driving my behavior. for that matter, i’m not in control of my conscious mind. my unconscious mind is in control of my conscious mind. but my unconscious mind grants me the illusion that i am in control of my conscious mind.”

“then in what way are you abstaining from existence?”

“i don’t grant anything meaning.”

“you wake in the morning and put on a tie.”

“yes, but it’s meaningless. i refuse to grant that act meaning.”

“then why bother doing it?”

“why bother not doing it?”

“because it takes less effort not to?”

“for me, my job is the path of least resistance. for you, sleeping till noon and drinking all day is the path of least resistance. i don’t put any more effort into it than you do. i’m just being myself.”

i have to admit that i have no idea what he is talking about. blaine is merely another insane person who has latched onto me. the insane do that. i’m an insanity magnet.

next, blaine tells me he’s very concerned about my drinking. it isn’t good for me, and i could be doing more productive things with my time.

“i thought existence was meaningless? what can it possibly matter what i do?” i say.

“it doesn’t matter what you do. it doesn’t matter one bit. everything is futile. but the more you try the more futile things are, and i’m all in favor of that.”

rafif

I can see Rafif at the far end of the bar, a silhouette in the bright light of the doorway. The Great Rafif, raconteur, felon, charmer of women, accidental drunk. He is calm; others along the bar twitch and gesticulate nervously as they listen to his story. I can’t hear his words yet they communicate. Already the room is like a framed image of itself as seen through a wide angle lens, as the conjurer’s murmur of a voice evokes memories of other tales, stories whose details reveal themselves only reluctantly and at long last. A key detail here and there and the mind fills in the rest. The story is told only with details yet the details themselves become lost within the story. An open window here. A nightstand there. From these inanimate objects the world is breathed into being, yet they remain unnoticed in the corner because the mind is busy filling in the remaining scenery. The woman. Was she beautiful?

the shape of things

the city is necessarily a simplification, a physical place comprised of people, land, buildings, houses, streets, cars, rivers, vegetation, and animals colliding with less tangible families, businesses, laws, boundaries, communities and customs, condensed to a single concept in a single mind at a single time. ever since i quit my job that concept has continually flattened and broadened like a pancake, as if subject to a force from above like a rolling pin.  i’m acutely aware of this mental contortion, because many of my friends and acquaintances have been pushed to the periphery.

hector

hector had the easy smile of a man who had committed great atrocities. he was a police officer, but he only came around when he was off-duty. he mostly came by just to get high and fuck one of the girls in the chorus in the bathroom. the chorus was the name given by stan for the regular girls who liked to get high and fuck guys like hector in the bathroom.  spengler had no patience for the girls in the chorus and hated hector because he was always getting laid in the bathroom.

a monday afternoon

spengler leaned against the end of the bar, acting in an unofficial capacity. nobody was sure what the hell he meant by this, so he explained it several times. “what i’m doing now,” he said, stroking his frosty beer mug as if it were a loved one, “is unofficial”.

“what the hell does that mean?” asked pierce.

“it means it doesn’t count.”

“what the hell does that mean?” asked pierce.

“the world is divided into two hemispheres. the official and the unofficial. so i’m clarifying that what i’m doing now is unofficial.”

“what the hell difference does it make?” asked pierce.

“it makes all the difference. we live in a modern world..”

“dude, you live in the fucking 19th century.” said stan, polishing wine glasses behind the bar.

“whatever you do is whatever you fucking do. it doesn’t matter whether you say it’s official or not.” said pierce.

“of course it does. for instance, let’s say today is monday instead of saturday.”

“today is monday.” said stan.

“whatever. just pretend for the sake of argument that it’s monday.”

“it is monday.” said pierce.

“ok. it’s monday. so monday is a more official day than saturday, in general. wouldn’t you agree?”

“i don’t know. it’s monday afternoon and you’re here getting drunk. shouldn’t you be at work or something?” said stan.

“yes, officially, i should be at work, not here drinking beer. that’s why i started out by making the distinction that what i’m doing now is unofficial.”

“but the fact is you’re here drinking beer. it doesn’t matter whether you say it’s unofficial or not.”

“here’s what you two don’t understand about the world. not everything can be official. because, officially, we’re all fucked. officially, we’re all assholes. officially, we’re all going to die. but unofficially…” he took a giant swig of beer while the others waited impatiently for him to finish his sentence, “…unofficially we exist as free, immortal spirits. superior beings. but only unofficially.”

“don’t you have it reversed?” said lauren, sitting at the corner table. “aren’t we supposed to officially be good, whereas we know unofficially that we all suck?”

“no. you think that because you’re a girl. girls have everything backwards. that’s what makes them girls.”

pierce was losing patience. “what fucking difference does all this shit matter? whatever you do is whatever you do. nobody is keeping score. there is no official record.”

“sure, but we have to live as if there were an official record. otherwise everything would be chaos.”

“no, your world is chaos. skipping work and getting drunk on a monday afternoon and arguing that half the world is official and the other half isn’t. that’s chaos.” said pierce.

“no, because officially i’m in a meeting right now.” said spengler, loosening his tie.

9/80

they sat on the fire escape, snorting heroin. it was their friday afternoon routine, that is, on the fridays they had off. how lucky they were — as lovers at least — to have coincidental fridays off. it was like a new form of astrology. half the people got one friday off while the other half got the other. who’s to say one’s destiny wasn’t intrinsically written into this schedule? alex worked in operations while alexis worked in accounting. would they have ever discovered the other also loved snorting heroin in the afternoon if their every-other-friday-offs didn’t coincide?

that was the subject of their heroin induced discussion, while peering down the alley 8 stories below with its verdant hanging ferns and climbing shadows. they took the idea to the next level, though. it wasn’t their fridays off, per se, that had brought them together. it was the pattern, the rhythm, that the schedule locked them in. they weren’t like the other half whose cycle countered theirs. their tuesdays were different. their weekends were different. their way of life was different.

“such a small change” alex continued “changes everything.”

“yes.” agreed alexis. “it all makes so much sense.”

whereas most conversations take a little bit of q&a or quid pro quo or a reframing of minor disagreements in perceptions, this one did not. their frame of mind was one in the same, which only compounded the feeling that it had to do with the sort of people they were, people who felt and understood and perceived all the same nuances of the universe.

“the funny thing is,” said alexis “is that the other half wouldn’t even understand what we are saying even though it would apply to them equally. but they wouldn’t understand because they are different.”

“exactly” said alex. “i was just thinking exactly that.”