I just got back from Boo Road where I often go to tell my wild plans to the two Marines who live out there on the side of I-94 in Northern Indiana to see if they are full of bullshit, because if there is even a little bullshit in those plans I know they will, with much excitement and yelling, tell me all about the nature of that bullshit.
This scene has played itself out many times over the years that I have been taking the train out of Chicago to seek this sagely advice in the comfort of their garage from which they do their dealings. Many times I ignored their advice only to come to realize, from the rubble of another broken scheme, that they had been precise in their predictions. This is because they know me as well as you can, I think.
I’d dropped the plan on the table for dissection as soon as I walked through the sliding door of the garage.
I’m leaving town on the paper trail again (code for a tour of paper making with the Combat Paper Project) come Friday and I don’t know when I’m coming back. I’m going to be a writer.
I was prepared for the worst. My eyes shot back and forth. Sergio, untamable raw force that he is, sat quietly and looked happy, shaking his head slowly while lighting a bowl. Vinny edged forward and said “fuck yeah man, fuckin’ do it brother!” And that was that. My plan had passed the test. I was free to go.
We spent the rest of the night shooting the shit about the state of the world. It always comes back to the same thing every time. The poor are stupid and weak, activists have their heads up their asses, the CEO’s are in desperate need of killing and the only way to live anymore is to accept as a given that everything is fucked and just keep going about your awesome way into the setting of our sun. Every time we get together this is the path of our speech. The only thing that varies is how much time it takes to get to the violent parts and whether or not we make it past our daydreams of sticking a pitchfork up the asses of the people who are responsible for letting things continue to go on the way that they are.
“PTSD man.”
Another trend in our conversations has started to come up over and over again now that the boys have girlfriends. Lately we’ve been finding ourselves talking more and more about how much whoring we’ve done and why we’ve done it. We are as honest as we are vulgar in our assessments. Vinny and I got into a little scuffle over whether it was worst to sleep with hundreds of women one night at a time or to take my preferred road of breaking hearts. We all decided that to even have such a conversation says too much about us.
We chain smoked cigarettes and the medicine late into the night.
Sergio brought me into town today. We were talking about life on a spaceship while he sped through Mordor, USA (Gary, In) towards Chicago.
We spent the morning in the VA. I nervously bound my fingers together while his girlfriend Morgan and I sat in the lobby, waiting for a filing cabinet to fly out of the door. Sometimes the boy Hulks out. This trip went by very calmly.
Now I’m back at Aaron’s place packing up my things into a duffel bag and a suitcase wondering at how now even this is normal. Once again I am leaving yet I feel nothing. What happened to the rush? Now that this is just a way of life I have grown to take advantage of its charms.
The Paper Trail 