December 10th, 2005
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Midnight Cowboy
Wandering is not not knowing where you are going, but not having any place to go.
I wander the streets of Tokyo, on foot and on a rusty bicycle, half-watching twelve million people march by with shopping bags and eyeliner, dirty in a vest unwashed from leaning on too many lampposts in Shibuya.
My house is cold, and empty, and I pass between fretting over unpolished floors and indifferent ambivalence, spending weekends and mornings in bed with ten million things to do and not an ounce of motivation to accomplish a single one.
I log two dollar and forty cent convenience store transactions into pirated software, feeling the swelling weight of rising interest rates and the soaring value of the dollar, dialing people and hanging up in the hope they’ll call me back and reverse the charges of a ninety second phone call.
I’m tired of myself and tired of my being tired, so sick of complaining about my situation that I hate what I am to pieces, so whenever talking with someone I haven’t met in a while, I dig my fingernails into my palms and wish I’d just shut the hell up and be supportive for someone else so I can forget about myself.
My hours away from the computer are a string of phone calls to failed relationships, messages unreturned or being the receiving end of half-earnest apologies for not yet getting together, as the other waits in a new lover’s house while he showers.
Tires low on air roll and I ramble on, minutes mean less and less, and the weighty decisions of the day amount to deciding which pornographic novel to buy, rifling through mounds for one under four dollars, and in the end giving up thinking how four dollars is half a day’s food and possibly six hundred calories, one more obligatory meal to sustain life and fend off malnutrition, so I can go to work and make the dollars and cents to feed the cycle for another month.
Dreams were something, and being truly happy a memory, but now all the memories are other lives long gone, and the only days I have to build are those spent in a bland waiting room for “the next big thing”, which remains behind a door that leads to nothing. I live on a sound stage, and the crew has long since gone home.
