text || Nicholas Grider

FUN AND GAMES


Intimacy verging on understanding, human feelings verging on public relations.  Where to put your hands, where to put your face.  What to do with the sun when it rises or sets.  What happens after the end of your internal martial law.  What happens divided into waste and fantasy.  A long drive from one broken home to another.  Small talk as a form of social control.

Literally motionless.  All the lights are on but nobody is home.

Say this: “All the lights are on and everybody knows.”  Say this: “You kind of light up my life.”  The shelf life of the limitations of the self, the need to collect more evidence, the idea of best light and lost or stolen mornings.  Sunshine in tin cans and shorthand apologies.

Say this: “Couldn’t be with us tonight” stranded in private wilderness learning how to talk to the natives, where "the natives are restless" and plugged in and want their money back.  How to say “take me with you.”  How to bow out before the punchline.  How to say “that isn’t what I meant.”

Institutional prophylactics for scene-makers, no snapshots allowed, private manscaping every few weeks and a pint-sized sense of fate and a working knowledge of the industry.  Everybody waves and says hello.  Everyone everywhere you’ll never have a need to see again.

You would wave hello to all that if you knew how; you can never go home again but you can fall asleep hiding in someone else's bed.Public love of being human played out in shambling tableaux vivant.  Half of success is heatstroke.  Being there is half of showing up.  Waiting at the gates with the other barbarians.  The sound of mental crutches splintering.  The original cast soundtrack to being thrown to the wolves.  The best years of your life pressed under glass.

The applause sign is beginning to wear thin.

You're going to have a long walk in your internal wilderness.  You’re going to have to pay more attention to being human.  

It’s all fun and games and somebody gets hurt.