Bad Art
I started to write this a while ago, in November I think. It never really went anywhere, but even unfinished thoughts often have merit. I don’t want to reread it lest I feel the need to change things or delete ideas.
It’s at this time of year, with the falling of the leaves and the quiet coming of the first snow, that I like to observe the expressionless faces of the people of this too-perfect cow town. Like bad art, or like overcooked coffee that for some reason unknown carries the somber taste of old wood, or like the stones of the river that no longer appear to be full of life and stories but instead show only the worn out acceptance of the season’s change, they go about their frigid lives worrying about the decay of their youthful summer and the coming of the long season of colorless coats and cold fingers and the kind of chill that cuts your cheeks and causes your speech to slur. Yes, I am one of them too, no better and certainly no worse, walking down damp streets with my hands in my pockets and my gaze cast towards my stony feet, thinking only of ways to leave my decaying body and throw my mind skyward and take my soul back to that windy beach down south, miles away from anything at all.
Now we sit in a cafe that’s so hip it’s unbearable, banging away at black keys as we hide from love and death and sleep and the freezing reality that’s just a thin pane of glass away. Why is it that all we ever want is that which we can never have, to be alone when we’re together and to be together when we’re alone, to lie in the sun when the sky is throwing ice at us and to run through the snow when the tilt of this rock dictates that we’ll be so hot our blood will boil? We have expressed our rage at old art to the point that the only thing we’re capable of doing is hurling paint at a wall.
Conditions are worsening and speech is becoming frantic as we reproduce endlessly, throwing our offspring at each other in wars that mean nothing, in the name of no man and no ideal. I cannot help but smile in the presence of my brothers as we descend this mountainside of our youth, in the middle of our rightful coming of age, mournfully unaware that the city that lies below harbors little more than thieves and ghosts, but we are cheerful nonetheless, because we are young and know nothing more than our mother’s blinding love and the sweet tastes of food grown from pure earth.
