Wednesday, January 30, 2013

City on a Hill (Keith alone)

     And what are we to make of Keith?

     Keith: the product of successes, glorious and unrestrained progresses. His father the self-made man, rising from the glut and gutter of poverty to wealth and power and stability. An influence in his community and a gatherer of respect. Caring and kind and with great foresight. Keith's mother? Charities are her children, she creates a new one every five years, nurtures them, breeds them, foresees their future then sends them off to productivity and prosperity. Selfless, a soothsayer, a giant in her own flesh, written about. One of those few who prospers greatly from helping others.
     The other's?
     His siblings? All great people: ivy leaguers, entrepreneurs, a motorcycle racer, company owners. Five in total and just one is not on his own. Just one of them is not written about in papers, not discussed in circles and considered in adjudication, not considered unique or outstanding or given a name, the great ugly deceiver.
    His upbringing had been no different from his brothers and sisters, with the quality schools and the quality neighborhood, the family "home" in the well laid-out and tree lined city streets. He had, in fact, been a high achieving and happy child like all the others. Reassured time and again that he could be anything he wanted to be, infinite potential became an integral part of his identity. To a certain extent it began to show as true. And in this time he was never the type to crow or pride.
  Around the beginning of high school, as he left childhood and began the awkward ascent to adulthood a shift happened. He began to brood, began the worry. Began to recluse in his room or range around the katzenjamming city alone. When he would return (this at 14 or 15) and was grilled he always assured concerned parties he was 'walking around' downtown but then, who knew?
     Who could tell?
     A small alternative school was chosen as his best route, as an appropriate venue for his intelligence (proving more and more to be of the eclectic and very willful sort), though Keith, even here, seemed yet to sink deeper. It's a coincidental shame then that he began drinking young, effectively muting the most striking pinnacles of his thought, and right as they were beginning to take definite form. Keith's natural easy charisma at this time came to full fruition which put him at a previously unkown social peak. Perhaps by a sort of magic he never exploited or abused this. He found it to be a strong drug, the acceptance of others, the admiration of others. It drove him harder and faster than any other force in his life.
   He began to force mistakes, began to cause his own violent fall. One may never know why he did this, why he began to pull himself down: whether out of self-loathing or out of accident or some other curious and vicious urge. He graduated from high school just barely, the majority of his high school friends alienated by that time.
    College came to him and he accepted it apathetically, a very different person from a few years ago. He took to the attendant campus life ardently however: the clean slate here a blessing for a time. He developed a 'group', amazed his professors with his well timed and incisive quips, his stovetop wit. Found fawning girls in no short supply and quickly learned how to use them. But again, and this time before the year was out he found himself outcast, bereft of close friends and confidants.
   He slurred and stumbled when he drank, would slide into violence in a heart beat. He learned never to express his anger, never to bark, just to bite, to get it all out in a quick moment. Turn away and he had broken something, say a wrong word and you were already hit, Keith always claiming a drunken joke in his defense.
   He settled in with Jeff and Keely on a whim, he found them comforting, or perhaps simple. Two that he could never see rejecting him for his mistakes. Perhaps he found in them a common pain, a congruent sense of failure. He drank now all the time, at every turn and quietly, banking up his worst calamities to strike while he was away from the house. He recognized this and tried to stay home as much as possible. Music (even more now) became his second drug, his evener. Where the notes tended to counteract the effects of the alcohol.
 
 Here it is
You're shit
You're shit
You're shit
you're shit
everything you have done is shit
everything you have done in your entire life is shit.
     Yeah no. She was shit. It was all total shit.
Every little thing, every second and glance and blink and fry was shit.
You deserve what you get and all This Shit?
      You deserve it.
Those paintings you made?
      Shit.
And the band?
      Pearl hated you.
      James hated you.
      Perry tolerated you
       Maybe.
       Maybe Perry tolerated you, that might be pushing it.
   You deserve the shitty girls that you fuck and the shitty drugs that you do and the shitty room that you live in and the shitty books that you read and the shitty movies that you watch and the shitty clothes that you wear and your shitty family that (for some reason) keep giving you stuff and being nice to you and they don't do what they surely want which is to off you...
      This bed smells like shit and you haven't washed it in months, probably shit in your sleep when you were drunk, no girl is ever going to want to sleep here with you, what girl would want to sleep here with you in a shit bed?
      What do you even do? When was the last time you even tried for one of you classes? Have you turned in a single assignment on time this year? Lucky if you graduate, just because you are the only person who talks in your classes, teachers think you have something to say, everything you just read in some magazine. Just lucky enough to remember it.
    This fucking Franzia tastes like piss too, you who wallow in your shit and piss and soak it up, soak it into your pores then convert it and excrete it out of your mouth...

   Just wish I could sleep

       Just wish I could sleep

    Fucking Nyquil, have to take four caps now for this to work, probably destroying my liver, like little chemical knives through my blood stream. Taste sticks in my mouth forever, just wash it down.
    hardly taste the Franzia over it.
    UH and its so fucking hot or its too cold or its too dry or too humid this fucking attic room can't hold anything well, it's a hostile environment. I can feel the fucking floor through the mattress, i need a new mattress, this thing fucking sucks probably the reason my body feels like shit all the time, joints hurt and back hurts.
     
      just wish i could sleep

      could put on music or read before this nyquil kicks in, fucking CDs are scratched anyways
      NO fucking radio, not the radio,
      okay there fine, this works, works alright.
     Chill.
     Lull me to sleep Beth, works okay, god dammit and i need to get up before 9 tomorrow and its...
     fucking already 1:30
god dammit. why do i even do this? why do i even keep going? If i ever graduate my degree will be worthless, not that i could even get or keep or want a job.
  Should have just stayed at Loken's and smoked coke all day. At least i would have been good all the time, like that time we watched that long ass movie by that russian guy, where they are walking and walking
     ...his name was
     ...i don't remember and they just walk the whole time and they are searching for that room and we watched that movie and smoked black tar, smoked four or five times that day, that was a pretty good day
   i could do that again every day, just chilling and smoking and watching and nodding and waking and pissing and smoking over and over, hardly even ate anything that day, it was like the tar was running down my face and my spine and legs just warm and covering and sexy and moving through me all nice and warm the whole time the whole day like with la brea animals stuck in my face and in my lungs breathing in and out felt so good with the animals so old, and breathing with me saber tooted tigers and wooly mammoths,
  jesus all that mammoth in my lungs throwing that bolt, just walking and throwing and throwing and smoking and smoking nothing happening and the suspense growing and
          why'd he do that?
in the black tar room
where all your wishes come true
 never say, they just
walking down the streets,
downtown on the sidewalks,
wandering black tar stalkers,
 and
room tar and
mammoth tar pipes,
 verses
 versts
land vests
               v...
um

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