Cats and Guns and Confessions
Monday April 17, 2023 12:05 P.M.
excerpts (and embellishments) from pages 33-37
i can't breathe with these words in my mouth ~Conor Oberst
My eyes feel wet with tears again, but I didn't cry this time. I feel good. I wipe off the illusion displayed on my cornea and gaze outside. I stare off to an impossible distance with my newfound vision. It was just dream dust, the amber-like fossil from the remnants of the world of feelings that dreams produce and then reduce to just a chunk of sand for me to dig out from the corners of my eyes like a child at the beach. Who cried these tears? I try to remember my dream, but the bed shifts and I am distracted long enough for the fruits of this mental labor to collapse into a tiny point. It must have solidified into a ball in my eyes as a reminder to feel feelings, and I do. But I feel the wrong things.
I'd rather feel sad right now. I feel good. I'm really happy. I'm plagued by this idea of permanent foresight. My mind thinks like a roller coaster, but not in the one-track sense. I know that roller coasters go up and down. Once you near the summit of another hill, you can stall at the top for a while. You know this ride will move on, and you will spiral down and throw up your guts and half- digested sushi-burrito in the process.
With my hand on the cold glass of the window directly next to my bed, I sit up and fix my attention outside. The rain from the night before had cleaned my incense-induced smoke-ridden windows but the effort is now nullified by a display of thick and volumetric clouds that linger over my backyard scene and abstract the view. They narrow my thoughts of the outdoors to a buzz and blur of questions and confusions instead of certainties and realities that would represent any sort of clarified output that a well functioning window would produce. I imagine that the decrepit building adjacent to mine collapses and reveals the city skyline of Philadelphia, along with a ball of sunlight to paint warm yellow light over all four walls of my bedroom. I think about the lives of the people that might have lived there before, and how they might feel that I am masquerading as a god in a sandbox and treating their house with such carelessness and selfishness to disregard their livelihood on a whim. I feel guilty for my cowardice and I apologize to the imaginary shrine outside, which lays as a bundle of bricks to the south of my bed. I pray incessantly.
I think about a tattoo He got this week. In the fewest amount of words I can possibly collect from my brain ether to summarize the design, It's a Cat with a Gun ...In my educated (desperate to rationalize) analysis, the permanent ink depicts a natural and mild-mannered creature nuzzled up against the de-personified version of death himself. I imagine how this weapon corrupts the cat, and the pit of despair that follows. From these initial thoughts, I realize that I am the one with my goddamn glass half empty. He doesn't see it that way. He sees a positive juxtaposition. An indomitable purity to muzzle and diminish the malevolent influence of the destructive symbol. Dodging the mess of clothes littering the floor, I walk to the bathroom and fill my bedside glass with sink water. I don't think that we can have guns without cats.
I've started a new prayer. It's in the form of an offering, or maybe a sacrifice. I don't know to which god yet this shrine is dedicated to, but I think I will figure it out when I'm older or when I inevitably give up and the tradition ends soon after it began due to the instability of the practices, which involve collecting cigarettes and locking them in a drawer located at my bed side table. I have labeled this activity the "Confession Drawer" or the "Confiscation Drawer". I don't have many devout followers. More people seem to be interested in taking things out than putting things in. I don't smoke, so I don't understand why everyone doesn't think it's as funny as I do. It is almost like I have been sleeping with a loaded gun pointed at my Health and Well-Being every night. Maybe I am being insensitive.
Taking some more time to adjust to consciousness beyond my dream world, I try to analyze all the objects in my room in an effort to remember myself. I feel like I fell asleep and was transported to a foreign location where my first animal instinct is to assess the danger level of my surroundings. Having visitors will do that. People and things float into my life through the door of my bedroom, viewing all the contents in unique and unexpected ways. I've lost some old novelties, gained some new artifacts. I look at the conjoined rings on the windowsill and they are foreign to me. I pray to them. It's more like a prayer at them. I don't think this god will care what that I misconstrue the object for the deity. Among the oddly well-organized clutter, I find Furman, A stuffed fox from my childhood. I haven't looked at him with any sort of thought or emotion at all for the last 15 years. Now I have a new reason. I pray again.
After I'm done reminiscing the memories attached to countless other objects, I wade through the multicolored sea of clothes at my feet to once again make my way to the bathroom. I look in the mirror for a while. Everything looks vaguely unfamiliar. My hair has been flattened from a new sleeping pattern. The part flows from left to right today. My facial hairs have grown in at an accelerated rate in their own designated patches. The skin under my eyes recedes back deeper into my skull. The only consistency is the steady change of my crooked jaw. I move my mouth back and forth for a while, staring deep into the mirror. I contort my face into silly shapes and hum melodies to songs that don't exist. I imagine an imaginary audience laughing at me. I wonder if my actions play a small part in some sort of orchestration for an elite society in a higher dimension, and this small display of stupidity is their comedic relief. I keep performing the movements for a few seconds after I snap out of it, In case someone up there really needs to laugh. I wonder if they have laughter and I wonder if they need to find things funny to displace hardships and sadness like us.
I try to quickly move on from this imaginary humiliation and pretend to be intensely entertained by the air freshener in the moldy corner of the room. It is cherry blossom scented. The artificial efflorescence fills the space with a blend of staleness and sugar that makes me feel nauseous, but is much better than the miasma of mold and mildew. When the particles of manufactured ignorance reach my nose, I escape into more memories of the weekend that just passed through me.
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I begin to recall waking up anxious two days prior, alone. I knew it was the anxiety that made me anxious, and it all just fed back into itself like an infinite energy generator. I just felt antsy, like if I stood still for just a moment longer, a stray bullet would strike me as a punishment for not being physically spontaneous. I felt so tired, but my brain was switched on with a rusty lever that slides in one direction with gentle ease, but takes a large mental load to wiggle back in the other direction, which is counterproductive when the entire point of being tired is to not exert any sort of mental energy.
(sliding into present tense, sorry liberals!)
I get on my bike and ride west. I use the Saturday morning overcast as the harbinger of a potential journal entry. I unconsciously slide the diary in my back left pocket, with no intention to write in it. I just want it close in case my brain escapes any of the labyrinths of thought I'm currently tangled in, so that if I might reach a semi-tangible solution, I could sketch it out in the margins and make a map and maybe escape. I imagine the specific set of synapses that connect to complete this maze are out there somewhere.
When I arrive at my destination, the festival had already started. The petals from the cherry blossoms are already all over the ground. I feel anxious again. My feelings bloom when I recall the history I have here. I settle down for a bit. I think I rushed here because if I didn't make it in time, I would have missed this very brief moment of flowering and spring would quickly merge into summer without my recognition, leaving all the cherry blossoms to wither and die unanimously on cracked cement sidewalks all across West Fairmount, to then be swept away by the Monday garbage trucks in an effort to remove this rebellious display of nature's ability to prevail in an effort to downplay this achievement. We made it through another year. We made it through the cold and the frozen and the dead. They don't want us to know that these feelings will thaw and return again. I wished the trees looked like this all the time, but they don't, so I soak up these feelings and store them for a winter where everything is cold and these branches are useless. I return home in the rain.
My memories trail to that Saturday night in my bed, but this time I'm not alone. I look up at the dark overcast sky through my window. I start to pray, to an old god, that a biblical flood might roll in and cover the streets. Some disaster so large that it will change our perspective on everything and delegitimize all our current insignificant human problems. I'm way too high in the ranks which constitute my own Hierarchy of Needs. I need her to push me down a notch or two. After I'm finished, I go to sleep. When the morning comes, the sky starts to clear up, and rays of sunlight pour through the cracks in the clouds. I apologize profusely and pray to something new.
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I return from my memory retracing trance to find myself staring at the mirror again. I smile at the faces in the background, I can see them now.
I hereby and henceforth terminate this message on Monday April 17, 2023 07:30 P.M. ~jj