Not having a beer on a day like today is being lost in a
dithering lumber as you trundle down the parallel arteries of the neighborhood
where you live wondering which hurts more, your heart (which resembles a nest
of used tampons after Lilith fair) or your finances (how the phuck can you be
this broke, you work all the time? All you do is work…) a still-life stagger
swilled into the kilter and stride of your gait as you smoke, as you walk, as the clouds slop into a bulbous dirty parking lot ache overhead, a
chandelier made out of used earl-grey tea bags, the vernal quilt of the golf
course skiing into optical periphery like freshly snapped leprechaun linen—
Not having a beer on a day like today is getting pissed off
when you notice used syringes on the side of the street (This is West Peoria
for fuck’s sake) right next to a SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign sprouting out of
the earth like a willowed husk of corn
in late-March.
Not having a beer on a day like today is feeling lonely on a
moss-flavored day that looks like you are fumbling across the optical periphery of time through goggles
constructed out of old 7-up bottles.
Not having a beer on a day like today is thinking about the
scene in Infinite Jest where David Foster Wallace pontificates, “Sometimes
human beings just have to stay in one place and, like, hurt.”
Not having a beer on a day like today is getting a letter
from a family member who misread something you composed nine years ago and
hurting because you made someone you love and care about hurt.
Not having a beer on a day like today is when she tells you
not to publically kiss her forehead on the distilled blankness of her facebook
profile page because she has a boyfriend, but you kiss it anyway, a child
pirouetting into the stream of a park faucet using only the tips of his toes
for the first time.
Not having a beer is having I.M. text-sex with someone you
just met, your fingers unbuttoning the powdery clasps of her corset in a snap
of alphabetical thumbs and coital vowels.
Not having beer on a day like today is realizing you are out
of smokes and that you don’t want to go get more because (for a terse moment)
you say to hell with the voluntary 40-day drought and feel that, since you’ve worked sixteen
hours and are going back to work in another four, you more than entitled to purchase a cheap $1.29 24 oz. PBR and cracking it open and noticing
how the fizz blossoms into a sudsy ovation before pressing the cylinder to your
lips only you refrain because part of you knew from the outset that there would
be days like this when you would have to refrain from chugging an emotionally savior-sating beer on a day like today.
Not having a beer on a day like today is hearing her voice
for the first time in eight months, calling her because you can feel her
somehow and thinking how her voice sounds like a glass whisper kissing the back
of your neck when you are asleep.
The sleep of childhood.
You ask if you can give her a hug over the phone.
Not having a beer on a day like today is getting into the
company car and blasting out into the country, even though you are supposed to drive only on
work related assignments, you motor into the
gravel veins of desolate country roads,
the sight of a bruised silo or a
hunched over barn somehow giving you hope, barbed wire fences flanked on the
side of the road reminiscent of ledger
lines on sheet music void of notes,
awaiting for music to be filled.
Not having a beer on a day like today is realizing that beer
would save you. That it would make you feel very happy and relaxed. It would
make you feel special and loved.
Not having a beer on a day like today is pulling your car to
the side of the road somewhere outside Hanna City and just sitting on the hood
and feeling hurt. Wishing there was some metaphysical epoxy you could apply to
the metaphysical fissures of lost inside your chest so you don’t fucking hurt
all the time.
Not having a beer on a day like today is listening to the
sprinkled gridlock-honk of geese nasally-harmonizing in the next pasture over.
Not having a beer on a day like today is wishing you could
cry because it feels like you’ve failed in every facet of your life.
Not having a beer like today is looking down and noticing a
feather planted near your feet that you
can almost swear wasn’t there when you were pensively staring down at the
ground two minutes earlier. The molted
quill taupe-colored with shades of gray, almost the exact same color of the
coffee cups they used to have a LUMS back in the day.
Not having a beer on a day like today is picking up the
feather like an orchestral conductor and a wand and gently caressing the stem of the quill where a talisman and
somehow (even though it is bleak and grisly and wind-thrashing sullen outside)
somehow for a moment, finding hope when you think about the article your read
last week in a self-help book about Psycho-Cybernetics
which you wouldn’t be caught dead reading in public because fellow writers’ who
recognize you would think you were intellectually flaccid and not well read.
Not having a beer on a day like today is remembering the passage you read last
week while holding the feather in front of you is remembering the passage you
read last week about how a century ago, when the first aeronautical vessels
were being created it was always thought that they needed to be build with
wings that would flap, when the truth is an airplane doesn’t require wings to
fly.
A vessel blasting and ricocheting through chasms of
stratospheric arroyos and turbulent ravines of aerie nothingness does not
require wings to transport and soar.
Angels don’t need wings to fly.
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