Permission to Speak

Since I don’t have permission to speak about any one individual, the character I am going to portray is a clumsily surveyed, inconsistently sampled, and lazily consulted gathering of persons into one body, a genderless thrift of a niche, a Nietzsche niche, an ambassador—if you will, or won’t—of the post-college, mid-twenties independent type.

It is the very top-tip of that metaphorical cornucopia; I’m peeking through the weave like a microscope.

A government poll.

Or much like a person in your dream who has the face of your father, the teeth of that British barista you hate, the eyes you saw staring up at you, judging your spare tire in some magazine advertisement, those douche colored eyes, the concave chest of your friend’s that makes you cringe yet fascinates you enough to watch cereal eaten from it politely, the belly button that somehow looks like a calico cat you once had, Tom Cruise’s legs eternal sliding on linoleum floors, and either your grandpa’s foot or a dry bearclaw from that drive-thru café right off Soquel.

So there I was, discussing the future and past with a dream, a dream I’ll name Petri Dish.

Petri has worked many jobs, working many hours, yielding little pay. Petri claims to be a he. I have not seen enough of Petri to know one-way or the other, and he tells me it doesn’t matter anyways. He is probably right.

Petri is a landscaper, a beekeeper, an unpaid intern for many companies without promises, a salesman, a clerk, a barista, a custodian, a waiter, a dishwasher, a telemarketer, an unadmired activist, a misguided activist, a folk enthusiast, an antique collector, an indentured servant, a liquor and pornography savant buried in Kant, a stay-at-home philosopher, resume distributor, tomato dartboard, pop-culture scapegoat, under-paid day-care worker, unqualified professional, prolific interviewer, dirt-faced, bloody knuckled, wine breathed, dark circled, hungered, homeless, legal civilian, rural pavilion, arid hope, and narrow scoped.

Petri is neither clever enough to be simple, nor poignant enough to be complex.  

Petri discusses the insubordination of our promises by the double-knit advisors, the emotional cul-de-sacs in the lack of successes of our achievements as he watches crows drop nuts from the buzzing telephone wires. He chips away more green paint from a jeopardized area of the stairs.

Petri says, “We had to retune the luxuries in life to ones that cannot be refined in a bouquet of shopping malls and budding suburbs, in luxuries we cannot cosmetically augment in loans and monthly mortgage payments.

“Our furniture is recycled from the side of the road, our fine china is damaged and microwavable plastic-ware, our suits and dresses are fifty-percent off and a close-enough fit, our LCD’s are LSD, our organic dining is gleaned from the dumpster of an organic supermarket, our fields are artificial and genetically modified, our taxes file into missile launchers and redistribute across the sandy dunes of the middle east, our chin’s to the moon, our stories salvaged, our starry nights are recital halls full of Iphones, and our enclosed fields hum of naugahyde cows.”

As Petri lights his second pack of American Spirits, he thinks we lie about our lives and the places we’ve been like old sailors, slander mixed feelings over mixed drinks, finish our thoughts about Bob Dylan albums whether you like it or not, vulgarize till it’s moralized, talk about how the whole world is so full of shit you hide at the crack of dawn, talk about how we got more pussy than a midnight alley-way, more Dick than Vietnam, more ass than a toilet seat, write more poetry about our little snowflake hurt, sing in a melody of see-you-laters, stare at a pincushion sky, speak in a simile dynamo (like.like.like), ignore the reflecting light of stars and concentrate on the instagrams and twits, talk endlessly about pop-culture, leave rainy corners to the bastard taxicabs, never go walking, wake up in the morning just as it yawns into a new day, hung over but we aren’t taking lip from the night before, the Mcbellied-Domino-faced- Taco Bell tolled-bloodshot eyed-Starbuck abusers are climbing up a chimney looking from their presents, St. Nick is on the roof four sheets to the wind disowning the president of America three times before the lotto number shows up, and we all can’t shake that motherfucker who looks identical to us, facing you down and posturing, no matter where you go.  
   
Petri is a cunning invalid, knows exactly what to say at the exact wrong time.

Petri comes around not making any lasting impressions, something like clouds thumbing cross continental winds.

Petri holds the warmth of a new moment then pours into a new street, polluted in another gutter, then cures and transcends to another day and moves on.

Petri is a terrible charm, and charmingly terrible.

Petri talks of perpetual motion, the capitalist lotion, but it's always too much commotion.

Petri is a giant inhale of nature, a complete utilization of resources, wants to take up more space yet disappear from the crowd, yet be the crowd, absorb the crowd and become all, to be the universe.

Petri doesn’t believe in politics anymore. Thinks the government is run by the corporate fat cats and lizards that only have their own interests in mind.

Petri is a badass sissy, a half-assed renegade, an anti-hipster hipster.

I hate Petri. Petri that slum! That worthless mess of an underdeveloped personality! That’s why you can’t get a job! That’s why! You lazy neanderthal! Lamp post! Facebook gigolo! Farewell concubine! Orchid Slut! Dyanesian Nihilistic Keyhole!  

You didn’t work hard enough in school! You don’t have any life skills! You are a lazy-piece-of-shit day-dreamer that can’t organize or present yourself in an acceptable marketable manner! You are unfit for the modern world. You are obsolete to the eyes of the Baby Boomer throne! Hail to the throne!

You self-conceited, self-righteous, absorbed, defined, confined louse!

I take Petri by the throat I slam him against the wall.

Then the cobwebbed lantern above shakes and the lightbulb busts, little sparrows that were nesting in the rotting eave of the house sprint into the cursing sky, neighbors undressed or still in their drag peer out from every window with cameras, nails unfastened in the wooden boards, the water cup ripples and the water remains still, a belligerent wind just fired from the blowhole of the Leviathan bends the magnolia trees, a maelstrom of petals, leaves, white pages, yellow pages, dust, pollen, smoke, and small children swirl in an easterly gust, lizards and possums are hissing, cats are fighting and screaming, the dogs are barking, horses stare at the moon, monkey’s throwing shit everywhere, mice are eating snakes, snakes eating eagles, all the mother’s in the world are fainting, all the children crying, all the men are betting, the riots emerge from every street corner, the hungry are calling out, the thirsty storm the bars, boxers are knocking out the referees, the mission bells toll endlessly and amplified, the pavement cracks and Satan emerges with Hades and Ra rise akimbo above their children sneering debating what side of town they should erect their chateau.

I looked Petri straight in the eyes. Yet, only saw crooked pair of my own staring back at me. They share the same features of mine, but how different the intent, how imperfect the tilt, those eyes just like mine yet peculiar and unfamiliar.

“What the hell is wrong with you!” I hiss in is his marble face, gripping his sleeve as it trembles in the wind, “What the hell...is the matter!”  The acidic blues of the sky now crespicular, pepto-bismol hue.

The clouds reflect off his teeth, his moves like a marionette’s within my grasp.

He stares at me through tears, his clinical smile in the new narcotic pill of night, he whispers, “It’s not my fault…” Sweat coagulates on his brow, cheeks trembling, curly beard disfigured, mouth open, breathing heavily. “I don’t know what happened, why I am here.”

“Get the hell out of here you filth!” I feel the bones direct as an arrows, the muscles flexed as the arch of the sky, tendons tight as a steel pull, shoulders tense as a bull under the plough.

His face is blank, absent, like anti-matter. “I won’t...or more I can’t.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Do you know your unconscious? Ha, well that’s foolish! Ha, how could you? That wouldn’t be un- would it? Wouldn’t even be pre-? Though we qualify that too sometimes… the tip of the tongue, the parapraxis.”

My grip attenuates but I recover my project, lean him back into the wall and growl, “Explain yourself.”

“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs…What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes. الحلم ليس وليد كشف يفوق الطبيعة , بل هو يتبع قوانين النفس الإنسانية I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.”

“Is that Freud?”

“You are about to disown yourself my friend...or lover.” He laughs, his feature dismantles, his frame an indistinguishable heap of matter, and he disappears through the doorway.

And so on Petri went when I realized that he was reciting Dream Interpretations. I also realized that I would end off this piece with the second cheap trick to ending a story: revealing it was all a dream.

I tipped the cornucopia and the polls are out! But, I didn’t commit a literary foul. No, I was only talking to myself because I don’t have permission to talk about anyone else.