I like it here, can I stay?
I drive using both hands.
I clutch the steering wheel closer as a group of seemingly intimidating 'gangbangers', as they call them, cross the freshly painted road in front of me, followed by a solitary hypervigilant fox clutching the freshly torn cadaver of some sort of stuffed toy that looks like a plump Mayan army general.
I am more terrified of the latter; I thought the Mayans were a peaceful people. 'Sanctioned by the gods' reads the expression on the fox's face.
I have a thermos full of warm honeyed milk strapped into the passenger seat, as a reminder of things that are generally lovely but will do me more than harm than good.
I turn up the radio because no one knows this but they reserve all the husky, sexy voiced DJs for 3-4 am shows to make sure people don't drift off listening to them during working hours or on their commute home from work. Jennifer Pynchon comes on, she's only my third favourite, but she'll have to do. Tonight's topic is Haiti and what happens to slaves who rebel against their condition. I think about Wyclef Jean and his campaign to raise money for earthquake victims which turned out to be a massive scam. I think about my own campaign to make peace with everyone who ever stuffed my face and mouth with fresh snow on the first days of winter in front of the school entrance. That also turned out to be a massive scam.
I think about Bjork's changing accent, from Cockney to thick Icelandic. I don't think that was a massive scam. I too have changed my accent, I've changed my hair colour, my political views, my taste in music, my opinion on Brazilian waxing and stuffed push-up bras, on nationalism, bloodshed and gypsy weddings.
I'm driving to the post office depot to start a Christmas job sorting letters, parcels and postcards. I literally can't wait to look through cheap envelopes under the neon light to see a glimpse of scattered calligraphy dedicated to a loved one, a creepy narcoleptic relative, or a psychopath boss. Maybe there's even going to be a terrorist threat. I'm not actually going to open them, I'm just going to look through the semi transparent ones and maybe steal a couple and deliver them personally. They're going to let me go after the Christmas period, on the grounds of not being friendly enough or maybe because I have a constant weary look on my face instead of displaying the mandatory jovial spirit of the Christmas holidays.
I have my hopes pinned against this Christmas job, my own personal gulag of reinvention. I don't want to spend Christmas at home on my own and I don't want coffee to be the highlight on my day.
Look at me driving this car, whose inside I made all tropical and musky smelling. My heavy head clashes with the outside fog as I lean out the window at a stoplight to light a cigarette and wave to the janitor outside the council offices and suddenly I've lost all sense of entitlement. I learned how to drive a car through lucid dreaming before I did it in real life. I started practicing lucid dreaming because I thought it'd be a cheap way of getting flashy visions so I can manufacture mediocre art that would eventually improve with 'life experiences'. But I don't. I can't manufacture art. Painting religious icons in primary school with watercolour sets that imitate the texture of fluid gold doesn't mean shit.
I punch the GPS and it suddenly remembers to bark back its usual pedantic instructions at me. I'm about 2 miles from the depot and I wish my only desire was to die, so I could feel I haven't got anything to lose in this fragile improvised kingdom of mine, but it's not. The thousands of people I've met, experiences of different cultures and different systems of values of beliefs and watching executions of innocent people and executions of tyrants and listening to what I thought was sexy 'indigenous' ethnic music have all parted ways with my subconscious, as if to say 'look at you, so much fucking introspection and all you're about is love'. Boring, socially constructed, unapologetic, fucking one-on-one love. But stop me if you think you've heard this story before...
