Notes On A Dog’s Day Suicide

Daze. It is quite possible that some days are just born depraved, they’re bad eggs from the beginning. Maybe Mother Midnight malnurishes some of her children so that they become counter productive to their light and life granting goal. It’s conceivable that these days are rebelling, in typical preteen fashion, for some kind of negative attention, to set itself apart from the streamlined conformity of its drone siblings. Can you tell a bad day to go sit in the corner and make it think about what it’s done? And if such is the case, how does one go about treating temperamental temper tantrums from celestial beings like days? Do you scold it sternly as you would a three year old who just peed his pants to agitate you for not stopping to heed to his thimble-sized bladder? Do you stand on top of the highest spot you can locate and draw your hand back while uttering threats of giving it the wiping of its life if it doesn’t shape up its attitude and stand up straight? Or do you try and reason with its sullen smirk by informing it that we humans invented the measure of time that it is defined by and if it doesn’t work with you here, you may just a have to un-invevnt it? I’ve been told by some that it is merely a matter of mindset on such days of disorder, of course these are the same malignant, misanthropic mongoloids who mainline the merriment of the broad Buddha without winking at his weeping counter part, optical optimists. This is a matter for better days, anyway, certainly even those karma kumquats can say that they have felt the wet towel snap of bad days.

Sometimes the day doesn’t even seem to put any effort in to your relationship, like last Wensday for prime example.

I could feel something seeping through my embroidered embryonic quilt of Quaalude sleep, that warm womb of nocturnal nectar. Without any kind of windy warning shot it screamed at me through my depraved Chernobyl alarm clock, like symphonic forsepts wrenching me from the balm of slumber, I was partially aborted from the incubator of unconsciousness. There was no yellow sticky pad note warning me the kind of day this one was, his day older brother sure as hell didn’t warn me, and my cerebral fax machine must have been out of cerebellum paper. It is always Russian roulette with the Aztec calendar cylinder.

Stumbling through my room something was vaguely different about the air, I didn’t recall it being the same consistency and texture as the atmosphere in a seedy Turkish bath house. The stale humidity pawed like an idle lion at my newly birthed to day-body as I prepared to shave. The shave itself is enough to invoke shudders of stainless steel terror in most fair skinned men, such as myself. The pure notion of dragging that hideously dull, rusted blade across my tender tar-tar face made me wish for a second draw at the sexual lottery. At least women can stand tall with their fuzzy legs leaning on a brick wall of feminist rhetoric, while men can only explain their lumberjack beard with names like Jim Beam, and Captain Morgan. Shaving this early in the newly sprung morning humidity makes a person hyperaware of certain aspects in the daily hygiene ritual, like every pore on your face, for one. You can savor, in the dank edification, each individual hair being torn from its follicle hiding spot and fresh, crimson blood replacing it. These are the preemptive marks of a mischievous day, humidity. In smooth, dry climates when one cuts themselves shaving, there is a distinguishable cut, measures can be taken to clot its flow, and it is an isolated instant that won’t stay on the permanent record. In the seething, cumbersome morning humidity however, one does not have the convenience of a singular standing cut to cover, no, instead there seems to be a myriad of “soft” spots of the face that merely ooze blood. There is no direct source of these hemoglobin hobgoblins in crimson retention ponds. It is more like clusters of pores just opened up the floodgates and, by osmosis blood appears, and brings its ugly kid sister, stinging agony, in tow. Trying to stiffen these brutish blood squatters is nearly impossible, better luck is had wallpapering the entire face with toilet paper.

Showering in this climate is futile as well, for by virtue of the day’s demeanor alone, a toe must my stubbed on the near-by toilet for passing toll. It is boorish manner of barbed day’s like this one that are not content with the blood spilt at the sink alter of alms, but it requires various humiliatingly torturous consecrations with every step, as to reaffirm just who is dealing the cards. This particular backhanded baksheesh involves the sacrificial little toe to be caught on the jaded edge of a sweating porcelain toilet, the one that segways into the nude stubble into the mildew slicked shower floor.

The few moments that seem to come duty free from the humidity border patrol are moments spent in the shower. Its no matter that on mournful mornings as these the water spits out on me in that luke-warm urine kind of way that only truly old building’s plumbing can provide. Still the shower remains the confessional booth of the secular world. Refuge from the outside and admonishment from the within, these things and Zen treats will unconditionally await humanity no further than the shower curtain. Proverbs of which you can create your own Tao to take with you. Lasting, one hand clapping debates on whether the glutinous folds of verdant mildew in the cracks of the tiles highlight them, or does the tile highlight the fetid flora. On these days, whimsical wisdom giveway to acrid prophecies on the damned day that dawns currently, thoughts of the various manners of eluding any kind of interaction with it. With rent to be paid there is no way to go under or over these distempered days. With my head hung as low as the tail between my legs, I wax on if there is any opposing the day deity, is there level of sacrificial lambs that must be slaughtered for the proper bad-day Passover to be met. Isn’t peeling a layer of facial flesh off with a rusted razor and the stubbing of a toe enough?

With these thoughts in the waiting room of my mind, reading Highlife’s or year old Newsweek’s, I hopped out of the shower only to slip again. Only this time landing the base of my skull with the thick thwap of impact on the rim of the toilet. “At least now my little toe and my skull have some kind of empathy for one another.” I bemused my rattled thoughts with, trying not ponder any further on what this day might have me do for it’s merriment. Springing to my feet with the speed of Apollo on greased ball bearings, I tried to regain a manner of duty so as to not let on to the snickering day that it was wearing on me already. I took quickly to trying my nude, freshly bruised body in away to try and catch that Irish Spring Zest. Despite my efforts, the tenacious humidity spurned any notion of mercy, and by the time I had dried my self, I was newly anointed with the saline dew of sweat afresh. At this point, only a puny twenty minutes after my crude awakening to this temper tantrum of a day, I was broken. With chipped teeth grinded as my mind pleaded for exoneration from the punishments of such a callow mannered day. But once again I ask, what can a mortal bring to the astral blackjack table when the chips are stacked in the house’s favor? Sure, you can grovel and plead with the dealer to give you another hand, but that just makes the day laugh at you even harder. I suppose you could try and get heavy, you’ll just end up with a black eye, or a head recently bounced off a toilet bowl. Instead, I merely looked to have the terrible twenty four-hour’s blood lust satisfied. On the way down my three-flat’s stairwell, which was recently baptized in vomit (a welcome sign that I was not the only one afflicted with the morning’s sickness), I began to marvel at the sheer size of this day’s vindication. And even more pressing was the tariff that must be offered up to quell it’s rampage. The early civilizations had the right tip off on how to handle the anger off the heavens, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. Whether or not this spilling of cherry crimson virgin blood actually mattered to the god’s that be is completely irrelevant, it helped the people. It was like the ever-popular scheduled riots of Central America, it may not make a lick of difference to forwarding the cause, but it sure is nice to make the innocent pay for it. This is completely rational, we sinners (that’s all of you) have obviously committed some kind of sensual sin, there fore the God’s that give out bad days have dealt a heavy hand; locust, first born dead, holocausts, forty years of wandering in the wilderness, failed crops, you get the idea, fire and brimstone, baby. Then you have your pious and blemish free individuals (that’s them), while you receive the cat o’ nine tails of karma, they are humbly working or praying, well if they are getting off so easy then they must be in cahoots with the powers that be. The only logical solution to imbalance of suffering is to go after those who don’t suffer, and force them to. Besides, when offering up a sacrifice to the gods, one does not want to use anything but the best. Well, with time these things have evolved so that the retribution is fit into our nine to five lives, the payment is sent from on high and pops up on the palmpilot to ruin the next few days or so, when ever is inconvenient, how’s your ten o’ clock looking?

With a head full of depraved ideals on human sacrifice to appease a bad day, I stumbled out into the street, my mind still functioning as the cherubim’s meat grinder. The stench of humidity swarmed me like a hoard of angry water molecule wasps would; the air was a kin to the mating musk of a large mammal, running on a primordial gas powered generator. There was no solace to be found in the sky, which was coated in an oatmeal veneer that looked as though God had spilled soured buttermilk all over the sky, and was trying to use that pale, tawny sun to dry it up. The effect of such a heavy, washed out filter was a lose of actual distinction between color and cobwebs. On days such as this, there is an overwhelming gray imbued lighting that ember burns brightly, nothing and nobody is privy to their own enunciated tone, we all share different tonalities of totalitarian Gray, and mentally, not unlike Dorian’s portrait.

The drab, hot asphalt street seems to bubble out of the clogged drains, like despondent lava from sewer volcanoes. And the things above ground seem to sway under the humidities heavy hand as if all life, flora and fauna, is drowning in Mother Earth’s milky musk. Could there be a certain penance that is reserved in a break-in-case-of-emergency glass box?

“The weight of this challenge firmly rests upon my shoulders” I find myself saying to the flock of pigeons that trudge in front me. The flock’s total lack of understanding of my early dawn epiphany provokes me to discern that one of the rancid birds will be my first hollowed offering. Coming upon a stationary group that were huddled about like a leper colony at a cannibal picnic, the PIGeon’s attention directed around the bloated carcass of a fallen brother of theirs. The misfortunate comrade cum culinary delight received an on going circle of flesh protruding pecks through his rank flesh at the hands of former friends and family. The staggering metaphorical content of the cannibal carousal that was commencing at six thirty am caused me to shutter momentarily before drawing back my left shoe right above my sacrificial selection as he greedily awaited his turn in the pecking order. I steadied my foot of justice over the pigeon that was closest to a dove in appearance, probably due to the fact that it was caked in the albino frosting of fecal remnants from all its family. As I was slowly bringing my vindicating foot over its shit laden body, my past inner monologue kicked in and I remembered that the first rule of sacrifice is that the subject must be pure to be received. With this in the lubricated chamber of my mind, I paused my crushing foot right as it grazed the chosen bird, resulting in its drilling my tender ankle with its now blood browned beak. The reversed attack so surprised the pack that they scattered from the Earth, leaving me to nurse my gapping ankle wound and the half eaten pigeon meat to watch me with its pecked- clean ocular cavities.

Wounded again by the day and its pigeon minion, hobbled down the empty, heat throbbing street towards my L platform goal. My mood had been serapes momentarily by the pumping of fear that I would not only not be able to find an appropriate sacrifice, but now I feared that I might actually be that sacrifice. Turning the corner near an abandoned bus stop on the abandoned street, I was then confronted by the one thing that no man on his way to ten hours of soul-numbing work ever likes to see a fucking derelict. This was not your run of the gin mill derelict either, this was a full blown, gray-skinned, tattered flannel shirted, soiled trousers, bare footed, glue-sniffing, paint-huffing heathen. It is not that I like I lack empathy for him, nor am I the kind that has ever suggested to another living thing that they should go out and get a job, right before I pelt them square in the forehead with a lint laden nickel. No, it is the actuality that I detest that he gets to spend the whole day getting stone-blind twisted and I have to go to work. And for what? So that I can do the same fucking thing? So that I can silently beg through my indentured servitude enough at the end of the week I can afford to go out and hold my own medulla oblongata holocaust? The only thing that separates us is that I have better taste in the brain rot grog that inflate my skull and ego, and he is direct in what he wants and he goes out and gets it. “You Know Rich, so and so junkie is a ‘shoot from the hip kinda guy’ he knows exactly what he wants and goes for the gusto to get it, no holds bar, never give up at any cost, know what I mean, Richer, that’s the kinda guy that I want in my corner office.” I hate him and them for having both brass cock rings that I could never grab onto, the ability to have little shame in the innate carnality that drives them to exist everyday, and then the self truistic nature to not deny themselves that. Yeah, well I still have nicer teeth, smell pretty, so fuck you.

Trying to avoid his gaunt gaze, I only made him more aware of my presence, and avoidance of his. The funny thing about huffers, such as this gentleman, is that they think they are the only ones that know that they ingest paint like paunchy vampires at a fat farm. He and I do the same dance every morning, the nod of presence into stare into paved nothingness at my shoes, while he chokes on his viscous words, trying to get the traffic jam of words over the toothy road block in his mouth before I can speed by the request for money I really don’t have and the cigarette that I’m not going to relinquish.

On this already ill fated morning, I attempt to find some kind of solace in the fact that at least this small ritual will be honored. I in turn, decide to alter the dance alter that will typically tango on, instead of just careening past him with my head firmly focused on the ground, allowing him to approach me, hoping that he can offer some kind of cabala Qutip of comprehensive cohesion to mend a broken day. But, he too decides to change his course of action as well, he stumbles towards me like a drunk lemming and topples to his knees like his Achilles tendon went back to roast behind his knee cap. Spilling his Diet Coke can filled with white spray paint to the pulsating pavement, he looks up at me with yellow, lacer-coated eyes, tilts his skull open at the mouth, producing more vomit than I have ever seen. He proceeds to unburden this heavy load onto my tennis shoes with heaves violent enough to elicit aftershocks somewhere felt in California, and a mudslide in Mexico City. The regurgitate return was the consistency of yeast in cement mixed with two thirds soiled bathroom rug from an invalids home, the utter girth and amount that was produced forced him to gag even more, arching his dragon vertebra back lick a behlemic dog in heat.

It wasn’t until I realized that tiny dough drops from the sick had splattered into my fetid pigeon blemish that I jumped around him, violently cursing him and secretly envying him at the sametime. I am a Tijuana tequila worm of envy that he was just able to unload all of his inner strife of bile inlaid burden onto stranger’s feet and then be completely relived of it. Instant admonishment at the price of my soles. I thought quickly of the needed sacrifice that had yet to present its presence at present. I lurched forward in strangely calm demeanor, while the huffer wallowed in the puddle of his fresh baked stomach casserole, trying to straighten my mental tie in case anyone was watching, kicking the actual vomit from my limping, whimpering leg. Just trying to grab another quill that the day’s porcupine had placed into my soul’s thigh.

I was not going to turn around, what then anyway? I knew without the day offering a formal memo that events would continue in this manner no matter what topographical direction I headed. Situation was frightenly bowing on critical mental mass. The gray sky had now started to coagulate into cottage cheese like rings around the sun, like God had tripped over the sun and skinned his knee. I promptly resolved to keep pressing forward to the L tracks even though I was absolutely no state of any kind for travel. But know I had caught the fear, fear that if I did not carry through to my goal, though I actually doubt I would have gone into my place of employment festooned in a dope fiend’s puke and leg probably already swelling from rabies and various other parasites coursing through my blood stream and into my brain. Still, I had to push forward for fear that the day would seize this moment of weakness and pounce on me for the kill, and who knows how much more its depraved anguish could be twisted like a screw into the meat of my mind, or like a pigeon beak into my ankle.

Hobbling at a good clip, putting about a block or so between the vagrant and myself, I slowed my pace enough to catch my tumble weed breath and to let loose with a fresh pack of sweats. This sweat was a bit more determined than the last, this one held more sinister implications in the pour that it let loose and the icy tempeture that it contained. The mass out pouring of precipitation caused me quiver and loss my feeble attempt at balance. I attempted to push forth, making it about half a block closer on the necropolis block of gyro take out stands and weave parlor’s with blown up pictorials of Jabba the Hut women. Slumping against the heat and a liquor store called Islam’s Valley; I tried repeatedly to regain any form of cognitive thought process, to no avail. My mind systematically spun like a nickel washer filled with my mental mud.

“What the hell led me to this point? Where did these perceptual populations surface in regards to Aztec sacrifice?” I found myself inquiring to a raw-boned CTA trooper as he helped push my sweltering body through the turnstile. He simply grunted at me as my brain searched its creamy nougat for a caramel swirl of memory on how I had finally gotten to the L. I looked down at a source of rout tension coming from my throbbing arm to see that my hand folded into an origomy interpretation of Jonny Truman with althritest. My entire body wash saturated in the slick sick of my saline pore’s pouring sweat. I could no longer feel anything form my ankle, minus the thick lava flow of crimson life force from it. Whatever that damn bird or the fucking paint huffer had given me was kicking into high gear, and fast. I imagined little minnow parasites nibbling on my nervous system like stale bread.

Clawing my way up the red brick stairwell towards the train I was narrowly missed in the flash flood of stampeding commuters up and over me, and I in turn narrowly missed the train. As I made it up to the platform, I nearly broke the dam of tears that had been welling the resivours of my eyes from the mornings out set. I plopped down on one of the benches and let a wave of nausea induced by cessation of my motion. Staring down at the oil sweating wood, I tried to calm the havoc in my guliver that traveled, up my throat to be released in a foul bile spray in the path of an on coming train. Thinking this gut release would be my last; I climbed aboard a Southbound Redline. Assuming I was still on schedule more or less I glanced briefly at my wristwatch to find that the time was now eight forty three am. Some how in my misadventures, I had also sacrificed two hours, along with my health and dignity. I was then assured by fate that I was the sacrificial lamb for the day. And maybe it is not even sacrificial; maybe it is just food, that the planet has a quota of people it must eat before the day can go about it business. I thought these things to myself because I found that inner monologue was all that I had available since my jaw had suddenly locked into place, forcing a permanent Cheshire grin. Anew, the eye offending brine appeared in my sockets just waiting for the calvier of sobs that had not been allowed to charge through my locked jaw.

I quickly glanced around, and observed that I was the only passenger on the train that wasn’t suffering from jungle sweats and tetanus. No one else on the train bled like I bled, from the places I did.

The train jerked and sputtered like an impotent champagne bottle, and all its human cargo mimicked the little carbonation bubbles within. Sitting frozen in paralysis, face pressed hard against the window, staring out at the day that had so far tried to level me. I was trying to learn its speratic jesters and motions as the little train that could stuttered along like an ADD afflicted squirrel with a lisp. As the social petiri dish pulled into the station at Bryn Mar, the train finally blew its frustrated load, and black smoke poured from each side of it. Like an iron frog on a wooden lily pad, the train cuddled with the platform while most of the tadpoles that rode with in abandoned ship.

Pondering my new found magic touch of transforming things from normalize into shit, I noticed a large long haired German Shepherd on top of one of the nearby roofs of a decapitated three flat. The serene scene inspired me to lean further into the troubled train’s looking glass and follow the hound’s smooth movements. The Dog was about a story above me, prancing about on a torn tar papered roof. He was built like an organic armored truck, muscles rippling as he leapt about. From where I was frozen it was difficult to tell whether his German jig was due to joy or melancholy. The subtle grace that he exuded placated my fevered head comparable to opium silk smoke pouring over a freshly flawed pearl. Focusing on the frolicking canine above me seemed to subdue me and the rampaging Mothra day that threatened to destroy the city of Me. I was not the only one enthralled by the dog’s day dance, several others stayed on the train to view it, most smiled wearily to themselves.

I never questioned when the dog was dancing why he was dancing. I never wondered why he stopped and saunter to the edge of the building looked over once, down at our miserable, sweat saturated faces. I never questioned when he slowly paced three times around the shanty rooftop. I always questioned why he returned to the same focal point where he had looked at us before, and jumped.

I suppose reflecting on it; the dog didn’t really jump. He didn’t scrabble like a lummox on greased ball bearings over the edge either. He merely walked over the brim of the roof onto nothing. I wouldn’t accept that he was chasing a bug or that he was to close to the edge, because he sized everything up, he knew the risks and just walked in to the thick humid nothing.

Just like the rest of us.

I recall a rush through my aching body as I watched the dog plummet to the hot asphalt that lie in wait with a cement catcher’s mit. I wish that I could call this rush one of fear or horror, still it was one of total release. It was as if that horrible day had been violently jerking off in that back seat of a ‘73 Cadillac Elderodo with the heat on and the windows up, and it had finally blown its angry red load on the passenger side vinyl seat, and was now relaxing with a half smoked Swisher Sweet. I think I may have even let an exhausted laugh slip through my clenched teeth, while others let out shrieks.

I don’t recall hearing or seeing the dog hit the ground, but I suspect that it was around the same time that a spasms ripped through my back like a lime Jell-O tsunami. I stepped out on to the platform and curled up on the bench due to some kind of labor dispute between my muscles and my brain. I laid on the bench and felt wave after wave of laughter took body away in the giddy under toe of the dog’s sacrifice.