Last moments before evacuation

Like two long lost spacemen returning from a flight at or near light speed, where things are similar in location to where they were when you left them but everyone you knew is grown, old and gone--new faces in the same places like a board game with the same rules but different playing pieces, i returned. Call the racecar or the hat, we lost the dog-what do you want for boardwalk?

we stopped at Newcom to buy sunglasses and body jewelry and a scarf too from a spanish speaking street merchant to complete the disguise because i wanted nothing to do with any strangers except the waitress, please just leave me be all i want is my peace with the people from my past, sitting and drinking on the patio smoking expensive cigars i really probably can't afford but it's amerika so give the people what they want, i have good credit in certain circles.

I left to say hello and goodbye to Julianna or Jewely-Santa depending on her mood, but it is always such a let down seeing her, there is the apprehension over unfinished business, incomplete love and early morning laying on the bed nakeds which never really happened because summer came too fast that one year and now i'm too far away and she's too fat, so i kept slightly quiet off the side while drinking caffeine and alcohol while all the ladies ate cake and Julianna got fatter. Women eating cake grosses me me out, like the inside of a camel's mouth-imagine that. It's always so anti-climatic now when i see Julianna and it's such a damn shame because we're almost long lost friends but the unfinished desires and longing for closure that always ends with everyone watching television and eating something gross just about kills me and promises me to never return and i usually don't until i forget the facts and come back a year or two later. Finally I spilled my alcohol and caffeine all over the floor which made a rickety segway for me to leave.

Drinking two Guiness on a back porch somewhere where 18 months ago my writing class gathered to trade wit and get drunk and tell invective jokes about Carsten so we could get to know him, get to dig the professor and his flaws so we could bust his balls like that time he wore really short shorts to class. Dark porter down the throat chases away mortality, until I can't find the bathroom and ask the bouncer if he'd think any less of me if i pissed outside and he says, "whatever man, i don't care." So i do, and finish just in time as the girls show up and we smoke on the porch and drink and laugh at sex ads in the classifieds because I guess print isn't quite dead yet, thanks to lonely GBM's that can still afford the space.

ANd the girls show up with thick Northeast accents, they have no r's and drink like I do and smoke like chimneys and i get caught in between that place where past memories of people hit the eternal present images and one can glimpse into the future and i see the beautiful girls as the beautiful irish women they are, were and always will be and i kind of slip down in my seat as they manage a free pitcher of beer somehow and we pour it into our bodies laughing in the cold September air like I do at least once a year each September before my birthday in the valley for the last five years.

And after the beer ran low and the guy who said it was cool to piss outside kicked us off the porch and told us to close our tabs already, right now, we exchanged bags of drugs for money and hand shakes and hugs and little kisses on the cheeks real innocent and childlike, because before evacuation what kind of commitments can be made other than hollow sounding "see you soons"? so we left each other right there in the parking lot which was more of a grassy field flattened by constant movement, and as the girls climbed in their separate vehicles and went their own separate ways before i went mine, and instead of following them like i always had in the past, i marveled at their pure beauty for perhaps the last time in the cold night time of uncertain autumnal migration, when everyone else had found their homes and were settling down preparing their finger tips and noses for the cold winter i was abandoning ship and getting ready to find my own land, for the world was just passing thru, and i was too, looking for a place to call home and stay for a bit in order to describe everything in beauteous wonder before evacuating 4...3...2...1...



Regards, Esortnom