Dream: 4/5/09

Here’s a sun drenched shopping plaza. Dirty and grimy, it fell into the cracks after the suburban sprawl. We’ve got brown-bagged forties. It’s part of our tacit agreement: we won’t give the storeowners shit if they let us drink.

There’s six of us, including me and Joe. I’m slouching on a bench, already wading in drunk-dom thanks to my malt liquor. This seems to happen a lot. Everyone else carries on without me, stirring their excitability and getting pumped for Joe’s demolition derby.

I’m having trouble mustering the enthusiasm, but I figure relieving myself might alleviate my sense of sloth. A few of us head into one of the shops, leaving our bottles outside. The bathroom is filthy, far worse than that of a gas station, and it reeks like a fucking latrine. I must be really drunk, since I’m getting pissed on. It’s spraying from a few different directions, and I can hear one of my friends laughing at me.

And this is how things go.

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“How was the derby?” Koch asks.

“Alright.” He doesn’t actually care, so I don’t bother to elaborate. He won’t hear about Joe’s crashed car, how it flipped a zillion times before it returned to the ground. And I don’t want to tell him that I couldn’t stop sweating, or that I held my head between my legs and tried not to cry.

Koch is only around when he needs to bail me out. Since Joe’s dead, I can’t live at his house anymore. I’m scum, but I’m not tactless; I’m innocuous scum. Koch practically sped to the scene before I even finished dialing him. And now, he’s backing down Joe’s driveway, a looped, paved hill about 1/10 mile. I can’t even back out of a parking spot, but Koch can follow the curves of the driveway like a needle tracing a groove. He’s backwards coasting on autopilot.

Sometimes, we harbor hatred for good people, in part because of insecurities and vanities. And because of this one vehicular talent, something that shows his talent, I’m resentful. The spotlight should be on Koch for his selflessness, but the attention’s reverted back towards me. I can allow anyone to enable me.

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I’m cleaning a house. It’s in the slums, but free of noise; I imagine myself as the sole survivor of some unpublicized apocalypse.

Has this become my home? Blank walls, cold concrete floor, no windows, a stained mattress lying directly on the floor. My only personal item is a bulky backpack, composed of hidden compartments and superfluous pockets. I grope around for something and detect a bump, so I unzip one part and pull out an iPod. Tiny sounds emerge from its pair of attached headphones. I stick them in my ears, but it’s all warbled. And the screen is a melted mess, so I’ll never know this song.

How long was it before I reached this point? It happened way too fast.