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Words

Moving to New Jersey, I have slipped into a deep hibernation brought on by my first winter in nearly seven years. Boredom has stripped me of my leaves and the sap that usually flows from my every pore has sunk into my roots for a long nap. I walk the streets snoring big grandpa snores and I lay in bed lacking the energy to even sleep. I have no car, no bike, no job, no money, no TV, no stereo, no bed, no couch, no chairs, no food, no friends, no distractions, no bitterness, no hate, no antagonists, no lust, no erections, no insanity, no attitude, no ambition, no hope, no strength, no will, no identity. I am the boredest man alive!

In this deep, boring hibernation, as my body lies perfectly still, my mind has awoken and it is being fed a cuisine of dreams and memories stored in capacious rolls of fat. I grow restless and wake prematurely before the thaw of spring craving berries and honey. Leaving the cave, I become a sleepwalking amoeba and the pitri-world around me has transformed itself into a lucid dream of sugar water and protozoa that I reach out with my digestive finger and devour out of instinct rather than by choice. My one cell has only one desire—to write! All that I ingest is broken down into letters, commas, hyphens, colons, punctuation marks. I see images, hear sounds, smell aromas, feel sensations, taste flavors, and shit out words.

Walking down the street, we sludge unconsciously through an invisible cloud of radio waves, beeper signals, television frequencies, radiations, eccentricities, but with the right contraption acting as a host to these spirits, one can communicate with this other dimension. Now that I have lost all of my analog and digital distractions, I have become a natural receiver like the man who begins to complain of headaches from the sounds of country music and commercials blaring in his mind day and night, only to discover after much medical testing, that the shrapnel left in his head after his war injury has become a natural receiver of radio transmissions. The shrapnel from my own psychological war has mixed with my chemistry and now I have become a receiver of words. I gaze at a ham hock, but instead of a photographic image of a ham hock, I see hundreds of words that could be associated with the ham hock: bone, gristle, ham, meat, steamy, cook, marrow, chow, leg, hog, pig, corpse, tasty, salty, fat, protein, cholesterol, stink finger, muscle, dead, fried, spit, roasted, yum, pork, chew, shit, choke, oink, glazed, slaughter, food, blood, cells, butcher, cleaver, band saw, pound, flesh, piglet, and so on.

Words, they are everywhere, swimming around us like fish just waiting to be caught and fried. I sit in Stevens Park and cast out a line and catch the Chrysler Building on a bass lure. I stretch trotline across the city bus and catch the vast mixture of humanity on stink bait. I throw great nets out of my apartment window and scoop out the mysteries of life still flipping and pissed off. I toss an M80 into a passing car and blast horror right into my lap. I throw my harpoon at monstrosities and eat the blubber of obsession. Words, they are everywhere, nibbling on my ears, bolting past my eyes. Catch ‘em if you can.

Entry date: December of 1995

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© 2005 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on August 7, 2005 in
Emotion: Elation, Type: Journal Entry