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Who cared? Who had time to stop for a moment in this fast paced and self-absorbed world? Who even had the time think anymore?

Oh how I just wanted to taste the bottom layer of the American Dream, and even if I suffered from panic attacks and yearned for a life with an apartment that wasn’t overrun by ants and bats and any other critter than squatted within the walls and pipes and boarded up milk drops and shoots of the complex; even if I was starting to think that the internet was out of control and that nothing made sense in the United States anymore; even then, just like so many other people, well I still kept my mouth shut.
I did what we all do, at least those of us who are conscious and free thinking citizens of the STATE, I just swallowed my fear and kept going on and on. I just did the same thing as I did the day before. Like my country’s own government, I too was guilty, I too conducted business as usual.

And just like the day before, I would open my eyes to the sun or the snow or the rain. I would get up and take a piss, put my sweater of the day on, and then I would feed my cat.
Just like every other day I would look in the mirror and see a new wrinkle or swell on my face, another bone would crack, some days my gums would bleed. Before my very eyes I was turning into a bloody pirate.
On most days when I was looking in the mirror I would hear a pop and thank goodness I wasnt concerned in the least that my bones were breaking for no reason at all, because I was so zoned into my mind. I wasn’t  even thinking about my body, a body that seemed to be falling apart.
And I say thank goodness, because luckily this pop sound was the toast that was released from the gridlock of the toaster, the same kind of whole grain wheat toast that I ate just like every other morning.
Every day I would slip on my shoes, usually I would stub my toe on the same corner of the new blue chair that I recently was given by my brother. He told me the chair cost more than I make in two months.
“Thank you Felix” I said.
“I hate you. You know that felix”. Of course I said this in my head.

After stubbing my toe that was constantly bleeding (there was blood on one sock of every pair I owned) I would grab the butter from the fridge and eat my toast while walking to work on these same old streets that I walked every day; these very same streets that I now walk upon with Cloud.
Like every fucking hour and second and blink of my life I would fold my toast in half, and like a French fry and ketchup I would dip my toast into the rectangle container of spreadable butter, of course getting crumbs all over my sweater.
With this lovely and  monotonous life I was tuning into quite a bummer to be around, but so what?

I gave in and said “this is just the way it is”. Just the way it goes as you pass the years from young adult to middle age, and then with a snap of the fingers you turn into a fragile bitter man, just humming sick and demented tunes to himself, as he was pushed right along the straight line that led only to one place, which is of course the end of the road, death.

Still, with every day that the milky way provided I thought something was going on, that something needed to change. And even if that something was only within me, only within my everyday routine, well I sure as hell was going to try. I was going to figure out some way to make this shit show called my life as reasonably pleasant as I possibly could.

You know what I did? I thought about ordering cable, but instead, I became a closet drunk.

Like so many people do, I kept on doing the same thing over and over again. Repeating what caused my anxiety and mimicking the same thing that has provided the same results that always did one thing consistently, that is, frighten the living shit out of me.

And I tried to sleep like I did when I was a kid. I tried to sleep every damn night to the sounds of cop sirens and beggars pleading, the sounds of the streets, the sounds of barking dogs and the spraying of pesticides; the sounds of loneliness, the sounds of only my mind, the sounds of echoing beats within the subwoofers that are my temples; the sounds of hungry children and skinny puppy dogs, the sounds of midnight bankers and drunken heartbreakers. The sounds of paranoia and theological political conversations; the sounds of the deadbolt locked three times, unlocked, and once again locked three more times. The sounds of my two feet rubbing together trying to stay warm, and Yep, these were just the sounds of the everyday night.