preached all day long about smartphone addiction while his daughter was on her smartphone, ignoring him
“A human life,” he was saying. “Controlled by a piece of plastic with lights. A destiny completely determined by a machine designed by corporations to become god, to claim souls. How blind, how utterly and impossibly blind a whole generation of human beings can be. To willingly subject themselves to slavery like that. Their thumbs and fingers always tap-tap-tapping that screen as if trying to break their soul free from beyond. But it never happens. You cannot break a door by merely knocking on it...”
“Whatever, dude,” said his daughter with the phone before her face
He shook his head and then looked at me. This time I too was looking at my phone. “I see she has corrupted you too,” he said. “Shame. I was hoping it could be the other way around just for once.”
I let the phone down. “Me? Oh no, I was just checking my e-mail. I've sent some poems to a bunch of publishers and was hoping to see a reply or something.”
They had the poor girl lie on the cold tile floor and then they all pissed on her and you could hear them tell her to open her mouth wide and stick her tongue out It was one of the poorest videos on the site but the women watching it recognized the girl She went to the same high school as them back in the day
So trashy porn is what she turned to
Not exceptionally unusual, but one of the kids running in the park before them was her child Just eight or nine
"You know," said one of them. "Like it or not it's just a matter of time until our sons catch wind of this and then..."
"Oh my..."
"Goodness!"
"The sins of the parents are visited upon the children. It's not fair. Imagine the life her poor kid's gonna have."
"Yeah, our own kids might very well be the bullies, we'll never know. Like I said, it's a matter of time..."
"Well, goodness, what can we do about it?"
"Flag the video?"
"You know it won't work..."
"Oh, I got an idea. What if... you know, what if we all uploaded sexy vids of us. Um, not necessarily as trashy as this one but just pornographic enough. The boys won't be able to gang up and bully one if all their mothers did it... Right? C'mon, let's do it for that poor kid. Think about his future..."
the dreams of drunks are the strangest and often most beautiful
It’s what he came to think this morning after he woke up with the empty glass under the blanket
Surely it was that glass and the liquor in his guts that made him dream of a frozen woman, clear as glass
She smiled at him with diamond teeth and stooped like only a professional stripper could next to his limp body
She rolled him onto his belly and his limpid, numb eyes watched her grow an icicle from between her legs but they closed by the time she carved a hole into his liver and began to fuck him until the ice melted
That was a nice dream, he concluded
And tonight he’d go to sleep with two glasses and a bottle under the blanket
Father used his fists a lot Though never on the kids
On the walls and the furniture and the doors and the mailbox and the fence and the neighbors and random people on the street and strangers in the bar and a few times the poor dog and one time on mother
He was the childhood’s villain
To defeat him one had to become a hero
and becoming a hero took time
And today after all this time the villain of childhood was dead
He died at the hands of some other character, a neutral one
A cop who told him to drop to the ground and father didn’t so he got shot
That was it The end of his saga
Utterly unsatisfactory anticlimactic disappointing just bad
There was no final showdown between hero and villain
because those things only happen in childhood and childhood had ended a long time ago
“I was ten years old,” she said, her head resting on my shoulder. “And the flames covered the damn sky. Though our neighbor was actually lucky. Lucky I didn’t burn his house. I mean, motherfucker had it coming. You don’t run over a girl’s puppy and expect to get out scratch free, you know?”
“I too had a neighbor who ran over my puppy with his tractor,” I said. “I think I was also around ten.”
“And what did you do about it?” she asked
“Nothing,” I said
“What? But how?”
“Like I said, I was just some insignificant kid from the countryside. All I could do was cry.”
“My God,” she said, “that’s so fucking lame. Where’s that neighbor of yours today?”
“I’ve no idea. Perhaps he’s dead. He was pretty old when it all happened.”
“If that’s the case then you have the duty to go piss on his grave. At least.”
“Um… I wouldn’t know where that is. And besides, I learned to forgive.”
“That’s what the weak say. What kind of man are you?”
he takes his old wrinkled notebook and the black pen
and finds a spot from which he can observe the people and write down what he imagines to be their inner conversations
It passes the time
and it takes away attention from his own inner conversations
It’s like a prescription drug he has to take for the rest of his life and the twenty-nine bookshelves filled with notebooks he has at home stand as proof of that
But this will be the last one, he promises himself as he closes the notebook and walks up to the bridge
Daydreaming as a profession 