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Losing My Mind, a Mind Lost is One Well Worth Receiving, Especially if it Belongs to Someone Else

Balkans (2010) is a really great album to lose one's mind to. It makes me think of summer. It makes me imagine stealing an off-purple, 1976 Mercedes 450SEL 6.9. Tires screeching, burning—nay, tattooing—the pavement beneath the feet of this car. Mountains and hills and trees and grasses spring up around the slowly narrowing, deep-black road with yellow separating lines so bright that my headlights reflected in the light come close to blinding me. Sharp left, sharp right, my car oversteers and it's oh-so-beautiful ass begins to catch the front. I ease off the gas, and try to recover, eventually gaining enough control that I can finally slam on the fucking breaks and screech to a sideways-stop, mere inches from the edge of a reservoir on CT-58.

At the same time, a large truck carrying nothing but red bricks, of the earth, has screeched to a stop mere inches from my illicit car. Its headlights cast shadows onto the trees and hills that surround my car, some obscene puppet-show of almost-death being played out around me by unmoving actors. I rip open the door, and walk out into the street. I fall to my knees, their quaking too much to overcome, then slowly stand up with the help of my right arm and hand propping, then propelling, my torso upwards. The headlights, being higher than the roof of my grape-skinned car, also illuminate my face in some kind of reverse-raccoon-eyes and I look at the truck. Some silhouetted figure leans out of the window and yells some language from a world beyond my ears. I look, nay, I stare for longer than the heat-death of the universe, well past the time of the sun-as-red-giant engulfing the earth and all memories, all knowledge, all creations so-contained.

I get back in. I still have enough gas. I immediately slam on the gas and swerve around the truck, with what are perhaps sirens off in the distance. Easton only has three cops, who the fuck cares about them? They're probably asleep. I descend back onto my path, overshadowed by nothing but trees, the moon, and the stars. My white shirt is stained with sweat, now transparent, my milky flesh presses against the wet, cold fabric. I open the windows, and the winter air tweaks me. I put on sunglasses. I take them off and throw them, hard, against the seat to the right. The old, cracking leather poses enough of a barrier to my force that they break, and the glass lenses shatter. As I round a turn 30 miles per hour too damned fast, the broken glass falls over my, like confectioners sugar on some kind of demented pastry.

I'm somehow in New York. It's daytime. A customer snaps. I'm out of my daze, and I follow their gaze and the incomprehensible movements of their mouth, past their blue-suit and red bowtie, to a table scattered with plates and crumbs and other refuse. I slam it all into my plastic tray, throw it on the ground, yell, and rip off my shirt. I'm now running down 2nd avenue, across 13th street, onto 4th. Onto the subway, past a broken exit turnstile manned by the modern-day superhero that the comic artists of the nineteen-thirties could never have imagined. "Don't swipe! It's broken, just go through!"

I dash. I see the train coming. I keep running, down the stairs, I keep running, and I jump. Somehow through the slowly-opening doors, my right arm slams into the door. Bruised. I decide to follow whatever line I'm on for the next 20 or so minutes.

Grand Central Terminal's subway station arrives. I disembark, and calmly walk up the stairs. So calmly that people throw the de-shirted man angry looks. I spy a Metro North train ticket on the floor, and pick it up. It's for New Haven. I run to a random track, and look for nothing but the red train signifying a New-Haven-bound train. I see a wide-brimmed summer straw hat on the tracks below. I jump off the platform, grab it, and jump back on just before a red-bound train approaches the forward tracks. Commuters, toursits, college students; people of all kinds float off the train, their legs blurred by my vision (but not their faces, never their faces).

I'm on the train. It seems to float through space. Greenwich, Darien, Westport, Fairfield, New Haven are announced. I hate Darien. I find my camera on the seat next to me, sitting atop a freshly-laundered, folded-with-care white shirt. Linen. For summer. I put it on, I roll up my sleeves. A roll of film appears inside the film camera, by now an apparatus that gifts me surprise more than serious thought.

Blue pants. Not jeans. White shoes. Probably canvas. Straw hat on, I look sartorially ridiculous. As ridiculous as that word sounds. Red bowtie. Black suspenders. I rip off the newly-appeared accouterments that are not to my liking, keeping the straw hat. Suddenly I can only speak French, and with a French-translated map of New Haven in my hand I'm suddenly a tourist in my own body. A woman appears on my arm. Button nose, brown hair, younger than myself. More beautiful than anyone I've ever seen before, though perhaps only so beautiful to me. Eyes colored with the paintbrush of the gods, a whirlpool of every color known to man (and some not yet discovered). She looks happy, even tired, and leans onto the arm of mine that she's holding.

We walk past Toad's, past Yale. It's suddenly nighttime. I spot a young man sitting against the columns of a grad building belong to Yale. Not quite crying, yet his insides spilling out onto the dirty sidewalk. He takes a picture of the designs in the columns holding up the building. Perhaps he's missed a deadline.

Scene.

8.9/10