I could smell the apathy.  It was coming from me, which was odd that I could smell it, seeing as complacent delirium usually exists as a function of the calloused unawareness that begets it. Or something like that. Behind the cash register, behind the bar, behind my eyes, I am losing it. “It” being a proficient ability to be human. I was losing the battle of wits. The victor being the laminated tiger strand bamboo floorboards of the Thai Cuisine restaurant where I am the lone waiter and bartender, and the lone schizophrenic phenomenon that stumbles up to the innocuous,  tentative patron and bewilders them. They are hungry and bedraggled by their own labyrinthine lives where my interaction is a fleeting moment in a wide life. This demographic is always entirely unprepared for the experience — one they had obviously misjudged as they considered Thai food and gazed through the cross-sectioned window panes at the man cleaning the bar. At that moment, it would appear normal. But if they had passed the window again, and again, they would notice a pattern — a routine that would give-way to a head-turn, and give away the game. I’m always cleaning the bar – even though it is already clean, and always will be.

Ed the Regular waltzes up, and initiates a conversation about the weather, or a game, or the laminated bamboo flooring. What I see is my worst nightmare, as Ed interrupts today’s discount existentialism into the reason I’m standing behind a Thai bar in the first place, listening to people give standard discussion straight from the operator’s manual while they peek behind to steal a look at their food being prepared. What was Ed even talking about? Why does he even want food? Does he not see my grimaced expression, wrinkled into a knot like Ed’s Thai-inspired digestive tract? I assume my face reflected the compressed emotions that boiled behind it, but apparently it did not. But again, I could smell it, and I suspect so could he. Ed must enjoy it. The sick fuck.

♦♦♦

I’m at another one of my therapeutic shaman sessions with Fran — the bewildered anarchist whose perception of reality is as flat as the earth in the conspiratorial youtube videos she subscribes to. The sessions are a reprieve from my slow jog towards the anhedonic slaughterhouse, and I look forward to them. She reads my Tarot cards as I kick back on an upturned milk crate and smoke weed and contemplate my own sanity as we bend over the Game of Thrones-themed Tarot deck and debate the reason I’ve refrained from sex for over a year. Wedged amidst her closet-sized kitchen in the gloomy two-room apartment that separates the back of the restaurant from the muddy parking lot behind, the cards gaze up at me embittered and abused with the charge of initiating deep-talk and dredging for mild repression. As always, I return the expression. 

In a book I’m writing, I had recently killed off my main character — I’m not sure how it happened, but Justin Hodgeton was dead. I didn’t tell Fran this, nor have I informed the other characters in the story. He was just dead. Dead and gone. I thought of it when I was at the grocery store while the clerk was ringing out my cabbage, coconut milk and zucchini. The clerk had asked me a question, and I nodded my head, blinking back the desire to flop on the un-moped tile and ooze below the concrete foundation. When I left, I realized that I had forgotten the coconut milk, which was left on the designated side of the steel conveyor table of items not needing bags — which I realized in the car was what the clerk was trying to communicate to me when I blissfully ignored her question. So I killed off Justin Hodgeton. The troubled part-time musician had been leaving a club alone and was hit while crossing the street by a distracted mortician in a hobbled Honda civic with a low rear-tire, who was receiving a phone call from his ex-wife – the conversation didn’t end well. 

The series arc for Justin didn’t seem to be anything profound, nor remotely proficient in terms of his personal story-structure, but he went by the wayside all the same. Fran was more focused on the moons and the cards and the flat-earth, however, so I indulged her as I usually do with what I had seen in the sky when I was on my flat rooftop the night prior, gazing at the sky. I had seen nothing; nothing but a profound sense of unease that was hovering just beyond my vision. But, like I always do when I’m sitting stoned on an upturned milk crate, I made up some intensely engrossing observations that would undoubtedly uncork a solid session of my kitchen cult psychiatry.

“I have nothing to give to her who lacks nothing at all” – The Epic of Gilgamesh.

This verse was painted on the wall facing the milking parlor, and as I wrote it, I carefully aligned it with enough distance between the other scrawled philosophical excerpts so the cows could read it while being milked. The cows always appreciate a serving of stoic insight while their udders are mechanically pumped dry—if they didn’t, they would say something. And if they could handle the burden of understanding Socrates, they would know that knowing anything is actually knowing nothing at all, so their silence would be more profound than their conjecture. And I listened to their silence attentively.

There used to be another man who worked on this dairy farm where I write on the walls. His name was Frank and these cows were groveling philistines in his presence. They were mindless brutes, and he knew it, and would often joke that the cows were stuck in the same continuous loop, day after day, with nothing new or interesting. Frank was an autocratic Maoist. Fortunately, Frank was hit by a runaway tractor, and is not concerned with cows anymore.

This is a commune. We live and breathe the same air, these cows and I, and there is no questioning our comradery. Unfortunately, through years of insufficient ventilation, the air is almost entirely consisting of methane, and we have all developed an addiction to the stuff – which has prompted a personal philosophical renaissance, as well as an identity problem for the cows. I’ve been huffing methane forever, but these cows are getting too heavy with it; they need to settle down before they all suffer an existential crisis. At one point, I was asked by a rather contentious cow named Tom Malthus if I was Jesus. I told him no, I wasn’t a reformer, I’m not Jesus. “Good,” Malthus said. “Because I am.”

Friedrich Nietzsche says that if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it starts to gaze back at you—Nietzsche must have been keen on huffing manure in his day. I used to dream of the abyss even before I read that line, and it never looked in my direction. The only abyss that ever gazed back at me was in the eyes of a cow that died one morning when I hadn’t tied her up properly. She must have split her legs on an ice patch and broke her back, because I found her lying in a pile of manure, shaking uncontrollably. We buried her outside in the field across from the barn.

Some nights I stay up brooding in my apartment above the milking parlor, captivated by the ghosts in my room or the wind against the window. It reminds me of the wind I heard as a child, when I used to huddle under the blankets. In these moments, with the glass shaking against the bars and my mind curling into a fetal position, I am a child again. I think of lost loves or mistakes I’ve made. Memories that I could never replicate suddenly reappear beside my bed –  moments too big for my mind to handle. It takes all my power to stifle the deafening wails of people I will never see again, and the colors behind my eyes press against the darkness in front until something breaks and I’m falling through the floor. I inhale deeply, until my mind is spotless, and I’m again perched above the milking parlor, and sleep finds me once more.

♦

A cow once told me a French joke: an optimistic man jumps off a building, and every floor he exclaims “so far so good.” The cow would often ramble—due to the methane—but with a meaning. The meaning here being the impression; falling is fine, so why stop now? The landing, however, is inevitable yet contextually indiscernible to the happy fellow flying towards it. Though, I thought at the time, at least he’s staying engaged with the immediate world surrounding him. She buttressed the joke to Heraclitus’ philosophy: that no foot is placed in the same river twice—reality is change and flow. Heraclitus must have been exceptionally high the day he thought that, and he’s got a point. Every day I’m living, I’m actually dying—dying in a dairy barn. Some days the river flows too fast, and I get this feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something else. The cow must have been equally as high as Heraclitus, because I haven’t even written that on the walls yet. She walked away muttering something about a breaking point.

On the morning I painted Gilgamesh on the walls, I hadn’t even bothered to read the entire epic, and only turned to a page that looked interesting and decided to throw the cows a line that reminded me of something in my past. The passage was about Gilgamesh when he vanquished the demon Humbaba from some forest after nearly turning insane simply from the dread of approaching it. He kills it, and is lusted over afterwards by an old rich goddess. But he has nothing to offer her, because he possesses nothing that she needs. My whole life has been filled with people who didn’t need anything from me, but I was never in the right position to accept that, as is the case with the cows.

I don’t think Gilgamesh was high on methane when he vanquished Humbaba, and I wonder what the demon did when Gilgamesh approached it, and gazed upon its countenance; did the demon gaze back?

He thought about getting back in his car, but then Walter Broozey remembered he was depressed, and the drive home would be just as depressing as walking into the waiting room of the Counseling Center, so he decided to continue.

The waiting room’s soothing guise always made Walter feel like he had walked into a Xanax pill. The white pastel walls and oversized eggshell couches boasted a strong sense of insignificance and substantive nothingness, which happened to be exactly what he was waiting to remove by seeing a therapist. It was a chamber of Walter’s own perpetual latency; nothing actually happened in this room, nothing hid behind its sterile color scheme. The room was a palpable medication, and he felt comfortable in it, almost sedated.

Walter settled himself within the bosom of the nearest couch, and for a second, he no longer wished to spew his repressed obsessions upon some hapless soul. For a second, he was content in the embrace of the waiting room. But then Walter blinked, and he was depressed again.

When Walter waited on the couch during his previous sessions, he had waited patiently alongside a man with the same time-slot as him. Doug, who crawled in and burrowed into the chairs like Walter, was never one for talking. They never exchanged names, but Walter caught snippets of Doug’s life from the threshold conversations between him and the collector of his problems when he shuffled towards the door at 3:00 pm every Wednesday. Doug was a thumb of a man. His expressions were ones that Walter assumed a thumb would have if thumbs could display emotion; his face was knotted into a constant half-frown with bulging eyes that always appeared to be blissfully unaware of the body that they were packed into.  Doug would always fall into the arms of the waiting room and stare at Walter intently while releasing a loud, iterating wheeze. Perhaps this was Doug trying to display some form of emotion, or communication of some kind. Either way, it became a ritual for Walter – like clockwork. He never appreciated the staring, but Walter did appreciate the background noise, even if it was at the detriment of Doug’s health. The waiting room never appreciated Doug, but like Walter, it never said anything.

        The sight of Walter on the couch, with his body contorted as if it were wedged into a small go-cart and tipped 45 degrees towards the nearest armrest, complete with an indiscriminately directed grimace, didn’t exactly inspire much conversation. Talking was never a directive in the waiting room. The whole experience of projecting years of repressed insight onto unassuming strangers was only made worse when they’d project it right back. It was best to leave the psychoanalysis to the professionals.

        But on this day, instead of Doug, a woman sat down across from Walter, and looked too tired to be a new enthusiast to the anhedonic hobby of therapy. Walter had never seen her in this time-slot before. Where was Doug? He had been waiting for the rhythmic sound of Doug’s breathing to interrupt the stone silence. Perhaps Doug had a psychological breakthrough and was cured. But Walter doubted it.

The woman across from Walter had a soft expression, and her listless, wandering stare gradually traced a path around the room as if dredging for some vestigial impetus that brought her there in the first place.

“Fuck this,” she proclaimed with some confidence to the waiting room. Walter looked up from his depression with morbid curiosity – someone was talking in the waiting room. His body was now wedged between the armrest and the side cushions of the couch so much that he half-expected her droning stare to overlook him. He looked up at the ceiling in hopes that it would reciprocate her optimism, but unfortunately for Walter, the waiting room was considerably more depressed than he was, and didn’t have the energy to respond.

The woman in Doug’s seat had long yellowing blondish hair, like a sunflower, and it reminded him of another woman he knew long before he was laying on couches in waiting rooms. She had sunflowery hair too, they had been together in New York, and had fought constantly, and he hated living with her. He remembered arguing over the right ways to fasten a canoe down on a car in the middle of a rain storm, stuck in the clutches of some campground in the Adirondacks. They screamed about clove-hitches and silk knots in hopes that if they yelled loud enough one of them would suddenly know what they were talking about. It was a miserable time, and he could still see her standing under a pine tree with her hair drooping, waving a tangled mass of rope and crying about some unrelated dinner party.

She had been going to school at NYU when they met. He was the humbling, intellectually psychotic bartender, and she, the psychology major with no interest in psychoanalysing anything but the bottom of a martini glass. They were a perfect match. He had recently graduated from Syracuse with a major in english, but he got tired of words and decided to throw himself behind the bar of a grungy Manhattan watering hole. They were both insane in their own ways, and Walter enjoyed this complementarity.

Even before waiting rooms, Walter had a habit of sliding into chasms of loneliness and emotional fatigue, and she was always there to pull him back out, regardless of the circumstances. But Walter couldn’t remember what happened, or when he saw her for the last time.

“Today’s the shittiest day of my life,” the woman in the chair said.

“Me too,” Walter replied, to the surprise of the waiting room.

♦

The next week, Walter showed up to the waiting room late. He had been standing outside the Counseling Center again, staring at the gold, glossy letters imprinted against the brick above the main door. When he arrived in the waiting room, the woman he had seen before was seated in the same chair by the door.

As Walter walked past, her perfume caught him; he knew that smell, it was lilac. It came in a sparkly maroon perfume bottle and had some fancy name with a large “J” on the front. Walter remembered smelling it when they went to the Mountain Jam festival up in Hunter Mountain one summer, because he could faintly detect the smell of the campfire they had set up that night. She had been wearing it that day, where they spent two hours trying to sneak in because they had lost their tickets, going from fence to fence in search of a security guard-free area. They eventually gathered enough people with the same intentions and they all assembled at the sweet spot with the best fence-to-guard ratio, with one lonely security guard in range, and his belly had suggested that he wasn’t up to the task of corralling all of them. Walter remembered there was a second of silent apprehension when the guard realized what was about to happen. Then they all bull-rushed him,  and her and Walter made it over, though Walter had fallen directly into the waiting arms of a large mud pit. She had told him she loved him on the other side of the fence, and he didn’t remember if he said it back.

Walter face-planted onto the waiting room’s thin carpeting. The nostalgia had held him for just long enough for his right foot to forget where it was and snag against the leg of the woman’s chair.

“Jesus how’d that even happen? Why didn’t you brace your fall? Are you okay?” The woman said.

The smell was gone.

“Yeah I do this every now and then, tradition thing, ya know.”

“Vertigos a pretty dumb tradition.”

Walter crawled to the couch and climbed on.

“So why are you here, besides being anxious or depressed or whatever,” she asked, with a level of candor that made the waiting room bristle.

“Well, yeah…–,” Walter began before he was immediately cut off.

“You know that apple that looks perfect at the grocery store, and it’s right in the middle and so red you just can’t look away, and just the sight of it is enough to guilt trip you into eating it, except when you eat it, its rotten and mushy, and you never want to eat apples again, and you can never look at produce apples the same way? That’s why I’m here,” she said.  “Rotten fucking apples.”

Who was this woman, Walter thought. Apples? What did apples have to do with anything?

“That sounds awful,” Walter replied with some sincerity.

But before the conversation could go on any longer, the door next to the woman opened, and she jumped into her appointment.

♦

When Walter came in for his next appointment, he didn’t hesitate at the door. This time, Walter wasn’t thinking about the golden letters, or jumping back in his car to be just as depressed on the ride home. He was thinking of a plan so he could do a drive-by smelling of the woman’s perfume when she came and sat down. Walter waited patiently with a magazine that he had no intention of reading, staring at the clock.

Eventually the woman opened the door and sat in the chair, and Walter immediately jumped up to go to the water cooler that was out in the hall. But when Walter passed her, there was no lilac, or bonfire; she was wearing a different perfume, and it smelled like some sort of rose, but real roses, like as if she actually had a bushel hidden in the black purse in her lap. He never liked those romantic, gift-basket flowers, he never knew what kinds to get, although he had always assumed everyone appreciated roses. But when he was at her door, she did not want them. But she didn’t even like roses, and never had – she liked daisies, yellow daisies. But there was a vendor that had roses by the street, and Walter hadn’t had time to think, and just bought them, and didn’t ask for his money back when he returned them. They were red, and they looked perfect.

Walter came back from the water cooler and slumped back on the couch, tilting towards the armrest and considered asking the woman to wear different perfume. She didn’t look very happy today, but then again, she was wedged within the walls of a place where happiness was always just around the corner, but never actually there.

“What do you talk about in there?” she asked.

Walter half-expected the waiting room to throw some sort of lightning bolt down at her, but the waiting room was still trying to figure out what her perfume smelled like, and wasn’t paying attention.

“I talk about depression and anxiety,” he responded.

“But why, whats up?”

“Rotten flowers,” Walter said.

“Flowers? You can tell when a flower is rotten, besides, flowers become dried-up, they don’t rot.”

“These flowers do”

One day you will wake up and remember that existence is an abject contradiction, and the only solace is the unattended bottomless dream you slept through and the bowl of soup in the fridge. The soup needs more salt – and it should’ve been cooked longer; scallions? To realize this, in the ordinary instant, may be too heavy a burden; there’s always some maniacal oracle creeping around in the ruminant of your mind, waiting to strike at the first sign of a freudian slip; but there’s nothing like a cataclysmic crisis to wake you up. That’ll teach you to add more salt.

To live is to suffer, they say, and to survive is to finish your soup and stop swimming in it. It will never taste good –  the portions are too small and it’s over too fast. Woody Allen said this, in more of a morbid, interpretively shapeless way. Nietzsche did as well, if that helps.

But no one can stop swimming, not I, not you, not Nietzsche. A time will come when you find yourself peering too close to the edge of that soupy, metaphorical abyss – perhaps you fall in, or out. If you stare past the edge, into the nothingness and abyss long enough, it will eventually catch on, and begin to stare back at you. There is always an edge to the present – always a cliff past the point of perception, where the doors to the exit remain shut. The edge is the same in any form: Shakespeare’s stage; Nietzsche’s abyss; Huxley’s threshold; the side of the bowl.

I came face-to-face with this edge while I was reading Ernest Hemingway on the toilet in the early morning hours. I was working my way through “The Moveable Feast” when I became suddenly aware that there was blood in my stool. On its own, this is no fuel for any fire. But the instant made me keenly aware that the abyss may have been staring at me, without my knowledge of any fleeting eye-contact.  In that moment, the thin veil of complacency was shattered, and I realized that the words I was reading on the toilet were actually nothing but goddam, bloody shit. That was it, the seal was broken. There’s no going back to the real world after that: this book wasn’t good. In fact, it was awful, just like the mixture in the bowl. Why was I reading it? By the contrived grace of my bleeding toilet, I was seeing the light. Was it an existential crisis? For a writer, Probably. And like most existential crises, it came at a rather unexpected time, and in an undesired form. Hemingway and Hemorrhoids wasn’t the optimal choice, but there it is, right? We can’t all drink from the ladle.

I didn’t go to the doctor, instead I went to the bookstore – to find the true cause of this gastrointestinal, canonical hemorrhage that turned my entire day into some sort of acute, retroactive karma emitting from some repressed memory, or perhaps from that spoiled soup I left out. And to the tune of most metamorphoses, I went with the entire meaning of life in mind; a kind of soul search on steroids.

Life’s meaning is something you’re not supposed to pay attention to. You ignore it, flush the toilet, walk away – with Ernest Hemingway still intact. The bulk of it is nonsense, anyway, with a couple moments wedged here and there that reminds the reader that life is a book and everyone is illiterate and hopelessly tracing the lines like some kind of phonetic brail reader; completely in denial.  When you’re out of the soup, however, meaning begins to take on a new form. Walking feels weird; the stammering homeless man seems inviting; you see the mold, the structure; pavement; dreams: but there’s another side, a peeling back of the sticky surface of something superimposed – layered,  until me takes on a new meaning. You. Vertigo – because you’re out, but you’re sitting right next to the abyss, and it’s stringing together a long list of problems it has – problems you don’t care about. Because the abyss doesn’t matter. Because finding meaning isn’t finding anything – it’s an indelible unmasking of you. That’s meaning, or lack thereof. What am I doing? The soup is tasteless, no flavor. No fucking salt.

I ambushed the bookstore to survey anything that could enlighten mind, body and bowels. If I was dying, by any indication of the tomato soup in my toilet, what does this grotesque life add up to? Wisdom, morals, beauty, art – it’s all a fucking crazy, deteriorating beast, trying to eat the entire world.

To be continued...