The Ends

by October 7th, 2008 - Creative » Writing »

Thomas K’s Dream Diary – August 17th, 2008

All the senses are all at once dominated by a terrible, stinking and gritty heat that shines and slimes through what was once thought to be the firmly secured windows of the mind. In competition with one another, your sight, hearing, smell, and taste swim against the current of your thoughts through a brightly brown, sickly fog from under which you eventually come up for air…an air that, though less noticeably, is still thoroughly tainted with much the same quality.

From out the blur of a gasoline haze…

An uncertain mix of loiterer and uncommitted customer, I am seated in the front of a Dunkin’ Donuts that one can enter from our time, but which, in fact, exists in something very much like the 1970’s…with diner booths framing the walls of the room like ribs to the womb, through a décor gently rolling a swash of orange swatches, a perfect gradient that dies a horrible death cutting too abruptly to a kandy korn brown.

And the cashier’s face says the same. Attempting to compose a meal from their offerings, I ask for a plain donut such as the one I hold in my hand as precedence. This is met with great confusion. Up from under her absurd, upturned baker’s hat, the cashier explains, ”No. We only have donuts with…well…with stuff on them.”

I begin ordering very typical donuts with stuff on them and each one turns out to be a rarer delicacy than I had imagined. Learning that they do not even have a chocolate glazed variety, I am convinced that this will prove to be an infinitely exhausting exercise. I excuse myself so as not to do further irreparable harm to this donut timestream.

Now that I find myself on the verge of becoming a less static vagrant, I’m not sure that I want to carry my acoustic guitar with me on whatever adventures hopefully lie in store. With only a gelatinous conception of 3 or 4 things in this world, and not all of these concepts being physical locations, my options are severely limited in regards to safe storage.

On first and only thought, I think of leaving it securely in the wooden rocket silo that Alex lives in. This is essentially a vast vertical wooden funnel that spirals and falters where it is more shabbily constructed and houses, like termites in a wooden pillar, swarms of human beings huddling under its arches and burrowing into its walls with expert desperation. Despite its designation as a rocket silo, it is not dangerous because of this as it is rarely used as a rocket silo due to the fact that it is wooden.

In fact, very near its entrance, chiseled into a marble slab are words of wisdom recorded upon its unveiling: “Horrible….terrible idea. Have the responsible persons already been shot? Would have done better with this marble. Wood?!”

Surely, my acoustic guitar would be safe there, hidden securely…if not lost forever…

Daydreaming within a dream and now already many blocks down the street, I think again that there may be too much travel of too dangerous a quality to venture forth on this plan. When next I think…I realize that I do not actually have my guitar with me…

“Bugger fucking all!”

I rush back to the donut joint, looking out for a kind soul who should already be running after me. I run instead into someone that I know as Joel, holding my guitar in his hand with a hard black plastic guitar carrying case strapped to his back. As I reach for the guitar in his hand, he taunts me with the object of my desire, a fish dangling on the end of a rod as we together put on an odd dance crossing the highly trafficked street, spiraling gracefully out of all but certain death at successive last seconds. Leaning in and feigning a kiss, I finally tear it away from him and begin my travel once more in the opposite direction.

Stubborn for my victory, I smile dumbly…ignoring the other part of my mind that is assembling a more detailed record of the conquest. The guitar feels lighter and of a lesser, almost cardboard quality. Actually inspecting what I hold in my hand, I find, most unappealingly, that it is in fact not my guitar and is instead a very cheap facsimile only barely filling the requirements of a functional musical instrument.

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