There's too much to tell you all. I say this because I sometimes think about the past, but what I mean to say is that 'the past' as I remember it has a terrible dissonance when the memories you collect start competing with each other. There is this sense that every individual memory you still have is at arms with all the others, just trying to find some common theme to explain their existence.

I have become instantly certain of my imminent death at the merciless hand of coronary artery disease, and the rate of my typing this letter has slowed as a result of intermittent breaks to check my own vital signs. My chest feels like it's going cold and I am more conscious of the dull ringing in my ears, the one that never goes away unless you drown it out with loud music. They say the developers of the first iPod cut a deal with the Ear Doctors Union of America. Under the terms of the contract, Apple would increase the max volume of the device to an obscenely high decibel count in exchange for a lucrative sum. It makes me angry, but as the Evangelical musician/millionaire assures me of, is that they will answer to God for blowing out the eardrums of millions.

I feel a strong urge to write something of substance before I pass out from this deliberative state. I will begin now, but I will stop if it becomes trite.

The train left the station several hours ago, and it is already not long until we shall be in the big city. We fall asleep ruefully, awkwardly rushed and contorted, often in middle of the carriages. We became obstacles to anyone wishing to move around without restraint, as one so often yearns to do on a voyage. I find one of the worst things about being an adult is not having an excuse for acting out on airplanes, looking in the bathroom mirror at that decrepit figure and not even being allowed to yell out how much it fucking sucks. That just makes it suck more.

Like every other time i've caught the train to the big city, I am awoken by the irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance, each driven into the coastline like darts landing on different indicators of value. The irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance makes me fancy that the train line is is a tiny blood vessel in the eye of the dormant giant Urbania, a lazy brute constituted almost entirely of bottleshops and cement. I wind down the window, inviting in thick wisps of smoke from the engine room of the train. This annoys my compatriots greatly, but I see it as an important submission to the ever-present coarseness and flippancy of the big city. The smoke fills the cabin and the Winter air makes everyone's teeth rattle in chorus with the shrill train on the tracks.

I arrive in the city with my friends and one suggests we all pay a visit to someone he knows in the area. I express disinterest, imagining an apartment practically identical--furniture and all--to the cabin of the train, but add that he should come out and show us around. 'A local will able to things about this city that we as tourists would otherwise never be allowed to see, and will never so much as notice in our own lives, where we get on much as likepeople do', I would say, being of the opinion that locals, acting in any capacity, are indispensable. I am hardly of the opinion that you should accost and pester locals in the hope that they will strike at you and spit a word at you that doesn't mean anything, that you might recount it to people as one of the memorable moments of the trip. Instead, just enjoy the locals like a theatregoer enjoys the escape from their lives to watch actors pretend to act out their own. And while their problems will seem mundane, the tragecy will not be something you can set your watch to as in the final act of a tragedy, their unwinding is acted out before you in every moment. The bus driver sweating a puddle and having his arms pulled around by the steering wheel as he navigates through the trafficjaded student thinking only of future eminence, wearing a blindfold of anticipation as the world goes by. The affected disinterest in the boundless the beauty of their city never fails to depress me.

I am woken from momentary stupor by what appears to be a party. I don't see anyone that I know and begin to panic, so I breath in semi-quavers and calmly towards the bowl of fruit punch that sits half empty on the table, orange wedges floating around like unused inflatable pool toys. 'I wasn't expecting to see you here', I hear from behind me spoken incredulously, and turn around. It's Urilla, a girl I know from university; I sometimes bump into her at the coffee stand, and perhaps for this reason she has always struck me as a person who needs coffee to affect interest, in people and ideas.
'I don't know how I got here', I reply.
'I saw you come in an hour ago with a group of people. Since then you've kind of just been here'. This is, at least, my best guess at what she said. The music bounces off the walls of the apartment like a caged animal. She asks if I want to go for a walk with her.
'Somewhere quiet', she says. I nod my head ironically, almost begrudgingly, as though i'm not suffering even more than she is.

Walking to the door, I take the opportunity to appraise Urilla. She is pale and strikingly beautiful, in an aenemic sort of way, but everything else about her attempts to conceal her attractiveness as though it were a burden. Her black hair hangs over her eyes like decaying flower petals, and it looks as though she has not removed her eyemakeup since she first applied it as a teenager. Nonetheless, as we walk to the door every guy on the room gets the same idea--that he might win her over by treating her a little nicer than she treats herself, which is not at all.

END

The tourist represents a state of being in which I becomes overwhelmed by all the different ways of handling this situation--freedom from employment, physical freedom, from the people you know, and the places you frequent. Some tourists can't handle freedom that isn't ideological, freedom you can touch and know to be present in yourself. I hold out my hand in front of me and make basic some gestures, clenching my fist, counting to ten on my fingers, the same gestures I saw being made by an amputee with his bionic hand on television.

To truly enjoy himself, the tourist must not spend a second of his time on the phone to his loved ones giving stock of all the exciting activities which gave shape to his day. He must positively disassociate telephones and computers with people. They say the adoration of portraits and artistic likenesses represents a tragic flaw in the human species. By 'they', I am referring of course to the people who are able to imagine their idols in non-physical or semi-physical form, like justice or adventure. With this group the tourist is affiliated.

The image of the tourist himself changes depending on who you're talking to; the traveller is only one of the possible identities of the tourist. The insatiable traveller sometimes sees a dramatic shift in his own personality when he is travelling. He sleeps with a few women, more perhaps than he would have living at home, and arrives at the asinine opinion that he doesn't want to go back to the way things were before the departure date of his return ticket.

He travels relentlessly all throughout his life, but never actually discovers that he was unhappy with it. This was incidently the reason developed a partiality to his travel self over his unhappy life self, as most people with unhappy lives do. When the traveller runs out of money he is forced to return home, where he has a monumental decision about his identity waiting for him: select a reason you will endure a life you otherwise wouldn't endure living. It seems awfully melodramatic, but this is honestly what the traveller contemplates when faced with the mundanity of a normal life.

One option, the more popular option, is to work for a living like my parents did. The colonist fills his timetable with engagements and disavows travel for distracting him from the 'important things in life'. Really he has come to know the only important thing in life, attempting to align your everyday lifestyle as closely as possible to that of the luxurant traveller, who uses money instead of opportunism to gain enjoyment. He is horribly lazy and gives his credit card to anyone willing to subordinate themselves to him in any way that he wishes. Fortunately there are billion dollar industries set up solely to contain him like a dam contains water. In doing so they keep him and his kind away from the rest of us, for he is insufferable and wholly incapable of conversation.

Fantasize about quitting your job on a whim and backpacking for years, but never ever actually do it

The first thing I have discovered and the first thing worth discovering about travel is what people see in it. I have ridden this train with my family many times and every time I discovered to my delight that they are much more affable when they take time away from their lives. I came to the naive conclusion that 'life' was good, but that they lacked scenery and perhaps culture, two things I have since become reliant on.

'Holiday life' was just us taking advantage of our ability to fly around the world, or rather that is how I saw it at the time. I have no doubt that even from that young age I had some rudimentary understanding of money, how it is possible to make lofty assumptions of a person's wealth by the car that they drove and the clothes that they worth, and that money was roughly equivalent to enjoyment. Perhaps I hadn't yet learned that it must be exchanged for hours of your life, but if someone had told me this I would only have been more excited, possessing a fortune of the stuff myself.

I turn into the The tourist looks back on the variable formula for holiday enjoyment with regret.

Seeing the world from behind the veil of self-awareness

The trees swayed violently in a single direction and gave the impression that they were hairs on a human head being combed by a rushed barber. It was not a time to leave the house, the wind was so strong; the people feared leaving the houses, and so they became swollen with people who lit fires inside of them. They lit fires and they brooded as people often do in the home. Some were forced to interact with their families--in the room where the fireplace was. Some just chose to lie naked on their heated tile floors. They gradually repaired the family's structure while rubbing their hands together and breathing into the space between them.

You know how you can sometimes tell a person's car from their personality? In my experience I find you will only have success with certain types of people, but when you meet one such person you will be so struck by the resemblance of car to human being that you float thereafter in this strange dematerialised state where every human has a corresponding car, and that person's choice of car is paramount to their grown and achieving self-actualisation. Do you remember where you were as a kid when you first realised that different kinds of people drove different cars? It is such an important lesson that i'm sure any official first realisation would disappoint you. These days the parents are desperate for their kids to learn this lesson so that they shut up and sit silently in some sort of reverence. Some guy realised one day that TV is the only thing in which kids will sit quietly in front of and invented headrest TV. From then on, their kids were enchanted with the things that really had only become enchanting because of adding TV to them. So enchanted that they never spoke of it, but simply understood. Cars with TVs in them are way better than cars absent of TVs entirely. Who wants to be bored when Spongebob is on all damn day.

Returning to the paramount aim of humanity. It is one of two things: Finding a car that perfectly suits your personality, or using your car to define your personality. It's this strange chimerical hybridisation of car and human. You might not realise at the time that you are being moved in a direction that is infact, 'wrong', or simply one on which you hadn't planned on being. I am quite simply astounded by the fact that these walkways are not used more extensively. You could imagine one carrying a certain high class of graduates up to the clouds on the steepest incline imaginable, as steep as Everest, and them just standing there disenchantedly, like they were glued to it.

Those moving walkway, the purpose of which is essentially the same as the plane you are catching, as well as the taxi you have signalled down before you've even landed. You 'voluntarily' leave your arm up in vague hope it will impart a threatening message to fellow passengers--that you will not be beaten to the first taxicab. 'Not in this city, sister'. The agressive commuter dimeanour will not work to your favour; you will recieve your baggage in order, and of this order you may never truely know. It is an order that knows to plant drugs in the bag that looks the most granola, and one we have all at least once imagined, especially if we happen to have had china or glass, or god forbid, a bottle of wine, in our bags. The image is one of pure mirth, like they're making it a competition who can be the most negligent with customers' bags. Fucking bag people, throwing around my bag and screaming boy howdy when they hear something break.

There is no formal order, or if there is, it's probably better to just presume there isn't so that you may successfuly dam the rivers of rage that will spill onto the buffed marble airport floor when you happen to be one of people left waiting for their bag at the carousel for longer than fifteen minutes. Or if you're a melancholic person, you might haplessly wonder what you have done to anger the baggage arbitrator so. There has been a misdeed or a transgressive act, of this everyone is agreed. But how far back are we talking? And who is it that get's to decide how far back we're talking, anyway? We are all that person at one time or another, as though this was some great philosophical statement--nobody gets through life without their bag being one of the last ones out of the carosel. To wear a grimace while everyone else goes to the terminal McDonalds to spend quality time WITH the grimace. whose bag was at the very back, unimaginably confined (you start to moralise as thoughit were a living thing and not just a capsule for storing your travel possessions. To passers by who are in no mood to hear it, they exclaim how I will not be getting into the first taxi on the rank, so that I may sit comfortably for the next half hour as though you were paying for your transport in the form of not standing up.

A broken down jeep in was discovered in Ancient Rome

They found the strangest things in the most public places.
They found a broken down jeep in Ancient Rome
this shiny new thing that glinted on the horizon
and sat in park, so stubbornly out of place
like it ought to have been on a rested incline
as a feature in some game show
and they didn't know a thing about this car
they called it a commanded box of steel
they didn't know that Jeep meant general purpose vehicle
or that it was an SUV
and that people from our time bought them because they wanted to
be prepared for purposes most fuel efficient vehicles couldn't handle
purposes most of them would never really need
like off-road, skidding and four wheel driving and listening to music
travelling at the speed of
chariots on crack
The jeep made things pretty bad pretty early
they got the motor to run
and decoded basic English, finding it suspiciously redolent
of their own
in order to read the owner's manual in the glovebox
the part most of us ridicule for even having to explain
'Fill the gas tank (picture bellow) with petroleum'
but that great endevour met a great wall
and the greatest philosophers
politicians and alchemists looked embarassing trying to figure out
how to work the damned thing
And the man who finally suggested that the 'gas tank'
must be filled with a liquid fuel
went on to be proclaimed
a god among men
And the man who extracted the fabled fuel from the gas tank
without damaging the vehicle (there was one political faction
who wished to destroy and incinerate the machine without caring to preserve or study it, and yet another who wished to leave it in it's place without studying it,
saying that they themselves would not contemplate destroying the machine
fearing their legacy to be one of ignomitity if they did)
And the man who


and, by some miracle of inspiration,
replicated

Keep it down

Today has been about
keeping my thoughts and liquor down
breathing as though air were a scarce commodity
damage control of the mind
be still, and remember that you are a person
who doesn't hold anyone's hair back
True, she is
a tiger in a nursery
brutal without ever meaning to be
but not evil, never evil

One to nine

The other day an old friend from high school
comes to my house
a sad character with whom
I hadn't heard from
since graduation
and would you believe
that after all these years
the first thing he says to me is
that he's too drunk to stand up
so we sit down awkwardly and he starts talking about this
and that, until finally he admits that
He has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair
he is a morbid caricature of his former self
There are large gaping holes in his stomach
something, I observe, has been eating away at him for years
‘Do you think I will ever be able to get my life together?’
is all he asks, then just stares and awaits my honest
reply, for I was always someone he could trust to give
him my honest opinion
he might as well have handed me a gavel
I didn’t answer him
I just told him about these concrete statues I once saw
at a bus stop in Portland
like me they were sullen, waiting for the bus
that had not come;
one man was scratching his concrete head over a
sudoku
in the back of his concrete newspaper
another was frozen in the act of lighting a concrete cigarette
and years later,
when I went back to that place
they were all still there
every one of them
waiting
for the bus
for the nicotine hit
for all the numbers to align
from one to nine

the colonist and the native

In my experience, the interplay of love and sex is extremely one-sided. It is like when the Colonist tells the Native to sit down and speak the language of business, that is, the language we believe to be universal. ‘This is some fine soil you’ve got here’, he says, taking up a handful of dirt and appraising it as a jeweller would a zirconium. He conducts himself coolly, without giving away his intentions, much like a collector considering an item for his already extensive collection. ‘What say we make a deal: a nation’s worth of this terrific, cultivatable stuff in exchange for more liquor than your virgin liver can handle!’. And when that pen is placed in her hand and she takes her first deep swig of brandy, she might be forgiven for thinking that she’s just duped this delightfully naive dandy for all he’s got. ‘Dirt for liquor!’, she will exclaim, blurt out as it were, once the liquor has rendered her thoughts as transparent as the bottle she drinks from, ‘what a one-sided exchange!’. And the Colonist chuckles quietly to himself.‘Indeed’, he will say with an affected, car salesman grin.