Chapter 9b
Wednesday,September 22, 2004
Questions get me nowhere. Answers, now those are nice, but I've got far too few to rely on them for much. And so what if I had more? What would I do with them? What good are answers when nobody knows the questions to ask?
The things I know for certain take up a remarkably small corner of my brain. I know, for instance, that at this moment I would much rather be at home with a cold beer and a bag of weed. On the other hand, home seems like a pretty foreign concept as I stopped having a clearly definable home many years ago now. Beer? Yeah, I remember that. Weed? Sure, I remember that, too. That's not to say I remember these things accurately but the memory is there none the less.
A woman from across the bar keeps looking at me in quick nervous glances while I'm writing in my journal. I'm sure it's a little odd, a middle-aged man just scribbling away in a notebook while everybody else recounts their stories of success and despair to the patrons around them. Me, I'm not one of them. I was alone. I wondered for a moment if maybe that's why she kept looking at me. It's not, of course. The reason she kept looking is that I've hardly diverted my eyes from her in the last quarter of an hour.
I have found some comfort in places like this. Before I cherished my solitude, and in some ways still do. Being alone has always helped me to focus on whatever I was trying to do. Focusing was never easy but it had only gotten harder. The voices make it harder. It was so much easier to listen to their thoughts rather than my own. Even when they're barely audible and indistinguishable I will sit and listen, maybe just for a change in tone or a single word I might recognize. Maybe because my thoughts don't make much more sense, maybe because my own are so fleeting, maybe because I'm helpless and predestined to hear those words in place of my own. Whatever the reason, I felt I could blame them in part for the scattered nature of my thoughts.
That's why I can find comfort in places like this. It's a bar, of course, so people are speaking, talking, interacting, and their voices swallow up the ones I'm hearing. I wouldn't expect that to work, honestly, I would expect a voice beginning from within me to be audible regardless of background noise, but I'm not here to question, only to do.
I noticed at some point that she was looking at me again. Again I reminded myself not to stare. She was beautiful, sure, but she was nothing. A bar fly. A stupid whore I could fuck then send home. If I wanted to be real chivalrous I might even give her cab money. Why do I fixate like this?
I tried for a moment to go back to writing in here and failed. I can look away for no more than half a dozen words at a time it seems. It was during one of my bouts of conflict, torn between staring at her and imagining how she looked when she was naked, how she looked when she was spread and how she looked as she was penetrated, that one finally did break through the dingy clatter of drunken assholes.
I was right in my initial assessment. I had never started to doubt that the voices were not internal. I had no reason to. Each person has lived his or her own life according to input from their various senses. If I heard something that others didn't, is that really unique? Is replying to the voices I hear not simply just polite? I know many people have never agreed with that sentiment, of course, and with good reason, given that they don't understand the nature of the issue, but I do understand it. If I react to what my senses tell me, is that wrong? Is it any different than what other people do?
When I heard the voice I closed the book and averted my eyes from her, images of her sexual self shattering into fine shards of glass almost instantly. When I got home I opened my journal back to that page to work among the clamor of other selves. The work is always hard, chronicling such a bizarre and disjointed life as mine always is, but it needs to happen, if only rarely. I hurried to finish, battling other ideas away from my conscious mind as well as I could. I felt the need to document what I had been told in that single extraordinary moment of internal communication in the bad but, try as I might, the ideas I have are not my own to command. When I got home the words were gone. I finished the mockery of recreation I had started anyway, because I at least knew enough to know I hadn't earlier, but to no ends. There may have been some missive, something integral to my life and sanity perhaps, but I had lost it.
If only I could keep my mind on top of collecting the pieces and putting them together. There's a full picture that can be formed from this. I'm sure of it. The culture I was brought up in demands that the pieces always fit together and make a complete picture if you have them all. But did I even have them all? Did I have even enough to make a guess at the meaning of the impressionist shapes I could lay down?
Again my thoughts flew away. The woman at the bar, the curvature the Earth, the pull of gravity, the proper order to imbibe alcoholic beverages, all of it was there except what I was looking for. This is the common result when I do try to think. If only I had more time to try, I thought. If only I could spend the next hundred years answering one minute question at a time until I finally had something.
One of us spoke to while I thought this and his words rang undeniably true. "Tempus neminem manet."
There were questions I wanted to ask those voices. The first thing I would have asked is why they can talk to me when I can't talk to them. There were more, possibly several more although I'd never been able to set my mind to creating a comprehensive list, but none of them mattered until the first was answered.
I haven't achieved much in some time. I have battled my own demons and watched them consume me but accomplished little else. To a casual reader, these are the continued ramblings of a mad man. Assume for a moment, though, if you can push your willing suspension of disbelief far enough to trust any of my words, that I had finally found something. To a normal person, to the kind of person I still have vague memories of being, the resulting find might have come from a few moments of passing thought. Still, I have found something and that is enough. I even have it in writing. I will find a way to communicate back if there is such a way. If I'm not already communicating back, that is, if I'm not just a much a specter to those voices as they are to me.