melt

I was sitting on my sofa. The blinds were half open and light filtered
through - it didn't really want to but it had no choice. I often think
about life and dying. About every minute wasted. About what my face would
look like if I was old. About me being dead and people reading my words,
seeing my art - and wondering about me and thinking about me as a
caricature because we all try to think about things in the simplest ways
and I will have already been far removed from this world. Dead somewhere.

Too maudlin.

Anyways I was sitting on my sofa, and the light was half-hearted. I had a
2 oz shot of whiskey filled to the brim so even surface tension made it
bubble a bit and raise higher. Beautiful things are always so fragile. The
door burst open and a man stumbled into the room tracking grass seeds all
over the floor. Burdocks poured out of his billowing jackets folds. His
beard rained tobacco flakes across the coffee table and over the whiskey.
Surface tension broke and a little whiskey flowed away down the glass. I
was saving the whiskey as motivation for when I finished writing a story I
started. Once done I would shoot it, but now I felt a little embarassed by
its presense. He leaned a rough acoustic guitar against the wall near the
door he had burst through. Its long guitar strings curled wildly away from
the tuners. His throat did a deep mumble and then he coughed and cleared
it and began singing Pearl Jam and Creedence Clearwater Revival songs at
the same time. Ahh it was a good song, familiar and real. Rich in its
realness. Piles of 90s grunge rock albums fell from his jacket as he
searched in it for cigarettes and a lighter. I saw the Temple of the Dogs'
ridiculous album cover sitting at the top of one pile.

Ridiculous shit... I screamed (why not?) and knocked over the shot glass
as I quickly stood up... tobacco and whiskey mingled together over the
coffee table top. The dark wood top made the whiskey look like oil. The
bearded man crouched towards the coffee table and said a joke, laughed,
and slurped up the whiskey. "Can't let it go to waste!", "A crime!",
"Precious elixer!". He swaggered up from the coffee table and lit a smoke
that arched great orange glowing lines as it moved from finger to lips.
Smoke blows out and I feel it in my lungs too. How can this give us
cancer? How can smoking be anything but a cure? Yellowed scaley fingers
and hoarse throats with holes! He exhaled more smoke and it became clouds
of evaporating denim. Blue faded denim. 90s denim, the denim the rednecks
wore. Hand-me-downs dating back to dead cousins from the 70s. Canadian
denim. Our streets deserve to be paved in denim. He puffed the smoke up
and it evaporated away into the stucco ceiling. The bottle of whiskey
moved from the kitchen counter to the sticky tobacco flaked coffee table
and we pulled from it. Rich burning. It feels best behind the eyes. He now
sang a few lines of a familiar old song. The Beatles maybe? Reaching for
the bottle cigarettes poured out from his arm across the floor and over
the table. "Heh, last cigarettes in the world" he said, and I realized he
was right - these were surely the last smokes in the world.

"We should save them!" I said, "I can freeze them, they keep forever that
way" I went to the kitchen and dug in the drawers for a freezer bag. He
laughed, "Its not worth it!".. "Oh." ..."its not worth it." I had found
the freezer bag but my hands dropped and I left it in the drawer next to
the two thirds burnt birthday candles and the broccoli rubber bands.

I walked back to the sofa, stepping on the cigarettes and the occasional
CD jewel case. I looked down and saw Silverchair's Frogstomp, its case
cracked under my foot. Daniel Johns recorded that album when he was like
16. "Wait till tomorrow... fatboy... fatboy", I half-sang it and my voice
trailed off and away into the stucco. The stucco ceilings absorb more of
us than anything else. When we die they should cut away the stucco
ceilings and burn them.

We agreed that we were both hungry and we left my apartment and swam down
the stairs. Guitar picks spilt out of his pockets as we moved and they
left a dull coloured trail. The 7-11 was too brightly lit and its doors
swung open too hard. The bright magazines stared at me, smiling faces and
neoflourescent teeth. Celebrities smiled into the cameras and the cameras
poured their smiles into the 7-11s. Smiling at me like that. A girl with a
ponytail used the 7-11 ATM. The chip aisle burned with colour. "Jesus", I
thought. I grabbed two bags of mixed nuts and had to pay on debit for
them. The machine was running slow and a line of 20 truckers and meth
addicts waited behind me. BEEP BEEP APROVED. Take your fucking nuts and
die asshole. They were all there to buy cigarettes and the store clerk had
to inform each one of them that cigarettes no longer existed. They all
bought gum instead.

I waited outside holding my two bags of mixed nuts and saw cars pull in
and out. Furled faces of men and women drove machines and parked them
neatly within the yellow lines. My bearded friend stepped out from the
store, eating from an open bag of corn chips. "Lets go." The wind blew
across the pavement and the litter of an empty bag of mixed nuts scraped
across it. Its ugly purple and transparent plastic body blew up into the
air and pierced itself on the buds of a tree branch above. "Thats not
mine..." I told him, "I don't litter". He laughed and lit the last smoke
in the world.

Back at home we stepped around the leaning guitar and across the piles of
CDs. My feet left impressions in the grass seed floor and burdocks stuck
to my denim ankles. I pushed around my laptop and pulled up youtube and
loaded up videos of songs. "Heh thats really something", he said. He
pulled from the whiskey bottle and sank back into the sofa. I clicked on
videos and we sat and watched them. He sank into the sofa. I played a
video, "this is pretty popular right now" I said and he started to sink
completley away into the sofa. With a sigh he was gone. Some scraps of his
jacket and a guitar capo remained. I had lots of garbage bags so it was
okay. I filled the bags with the denim smoke, the cracked CDs, and the wet
tobacco and dragged it down the stairs to the back alley and lifted it
into the green dumpster.