LJIdol F/R Home Game - Topic 0 - Introduction
I'm not actually playing. I don't quite have the time or quite as much brainspace as I'd like to do it with any seriousness, but now and then I'll probably have an idea that the topic brings out in me and I feel like I'd be giving up something to not roll with it.
It's not that late on a Sunday night, but it looks it--feels it. Winter's setting in. The darkness becomes denser, rolling over this tiny town that is now my home like a creeping smoke that oozes between the low buildings, an invasion on two fronts. Behind me, the sky is red or orange or brown or green where the sun goes down. I can't tell, quite; bad sense of color. In front of me, the dense, humid dark is pushing forward, only held back by streetlights.
I'm standing at a bus stop. I'm not waiting for a bus. I don't entirely understand what these bus stops are for. This town doesn't have a public transit service. It's the first time in years I've lived without one. On the other hand, it's a thirty-minute walk from our place on the edge of town to the train station on the other far side of town. But all over town are these dilapidated blue bus stops, waiting for buses that don't seem intent on coming.
It feels right. Two steps forward and there's no more sidewalk. Just grass leading to disused-looking industrial buildings. I'm standing there with my secondhand smartphone, a pair of people crooning Japanese in my ears while I look around for a new stretch of sidewalk. Across the street is high fence and keycard-locked gates, ahead of me grass and a two-story building whose functions I don't know.
The dark is creeping in, my nose is cold, and my knees are starting to hurt, out here where the sidewalk ends. Past here, I am unwelcome because I am not going there to produce, I am not going there to be a part of someone else's machine, I am not going to be productive or industrious and I can almost sense that this city is telling me that for all I am welcome in the city, this part of it is not for me. It is slumbering and interlopers would disturb it unkindly.
But I feel my legs itching. I want to keep moving. I've been exercising more and it gives me a need for motion. Either that or it's another welcome side-effect of the new medication (30mg Elvanse). I can't quite tell.
I take a picture of the place where the sidewalk ends, sad that the lens can't quite capture what my eyes do. Even when it doesn't flash, it lightens, adjusts the contrast and brightness to make the sight understandable to others. But I can't infuse the picture with the occasional throb of something that's not quite vertigo, that crisp wetness separating October from November either offering to turn me around with them or to pull me along with the lost month.
I feel quietly inhuman. It makes me want to take a step off the sidewalk, off the path, outside of the confines the concrete have made for me to take my place with my brethren machines in the sheet metal-covered buildings, some hard-to-name part of me knowing that I would be welcomed by them in a way I have never known. The confusion and the hurt and the frustration that defines being alive replaced with a knowable purpose, something easier than making my own.
The feeling passes, as it does.
I take a lungful of air and as I exhale, I am aware that when I inhale again it will be winter inside me.
I'm not quite right. I feel adrift. Apart from myself and connected with the life of this tiny city. I like to flatter myself that those feelings are real connections. They aren't. But that's okay. I don't need a ton of real things. One or two is all I need.
The light of the city has become the only light behind me but for dear Luna peering through the clouds.
I tuck my phone into my pocket. The album ends. The sound in my ears is the low bass rumble of reality and the whispering creeping of a night still remembering how to be winter. A car, the first one in a long time, passes by me. I wonder if they see me. I wonder if I'm real to them. I wonder if we are sharing the sensation of being inhuman or if the rubber of the tires insulates them from the siren song of mechanization as they barrel deeper into the last couple blocks of the industrial area. I was wondering if I would be able to make it to the recycling center and the gas station not far from it. I hope they make it. I feel, foolishly, like I'm the shaman of this place, this border between the world of soft humanity and solid machines, this stretch of concrete where warm flesh and dreams that defy articulation brush up, uncomfortably, against known purposes and cold, oiled metal.
I am tempted to raise my arms, to invoke some old power, to assert myself against this border, to let the machines know that one of their lost brothers has not forgotten them, that I hear their slumbering breath and recognize their clockwork dreams as cousins of my own.
But then I shift my weight and feel the familiar rush of blood back into my heel and I am reminded again that I am not metal, oil, and electricity, but meat and protein and chemicals. I do not have a keycard and am not a machine and know that I am to return to my world of warmth and frustration. I turn my back on the creeping dark, blow a kiss to Luna peeking out from behind a cloud and move toward the warm light of my new hometown, every step away from the border making me feel more grounded and connected to the down.
Everything is concrete under my feet and the sidewalk seems to go on forever even though I know that there are other places where the sidewalk ends and promise myself that one dark Sunday when the world feels in the midst of transformation, I will turn a different corner and find another borderland and feel the heartbeat of some other spirit, some other way of being, and I will ponder it before I return home.
It's not that late on a Sunday night, but it looks it--feels it. Winter's setting in. The darkness becomes denser, rolling over this tiny town that is now my home like a creeping smoke that oozes between the low buildings, an invasion on two fronts. Behind me, the sky is red or orange or brown or green where the sun goes down. I can't tell, quite; bad sense of color. In front of me, the dense, humid dark is pushing forward, only held back by streetlights.
I'm standing at a bus stop. I'm not waiting for a bus. I don't entirely understand what these bus stops are for. This town doesn't have a public transit service. It's the first time in years I've lived without one. On the other hand, it's a thirty-minute walk from our place on the edge of town to the train station on the other far side of town. But all over town are these dilapidated blue bus stops, waiting for buses that don't seem intent on coming.
It feels right. Two steps forward and there's no more sidewalk. Just grass leading to disused-looking industrial buildings. I'm standing there with my secondhand smartphone, a pair of people crooning Japanese in my ears while I look around for a new stretch of sidewalk. Across the street is high fence and keycard-locked gates, ahead of me grass and a two-story building whose functions I don't know.
The dark is creeping in, my nose is cold, and my knees are starting to hurt, out here where the sidewalk ends. Past here, I am unwelcome because I am not going there to produce, I am not going there to be a part of someone else's machine, I am not going to be productive or industrious and I can almost sense that this city is telling me that for all I am welcome in the city, this part of it is not for me. It is slumbering and interlopers would disturb it unkindly.
But I feel my legs itching. I want to keep moving. I've been exercising more and it gives me a need for motion. Either that or it's another welcome side-effect of the new medication (30mg Elvanse). I can't quite tell.
I take a picture of the place where the sidewalk ends, sad that the lens can't quite capture what my eyes do. Even when it doesn't flash, it lightens, adjusts the contrast and brightness to make the sight understandable to others. But I can't infuse the picture with the occasional throb of something that's not quite vertigo, that crisp wetness separating October from November either offering to turn me around with them or to pull me along with the lost month.
I feel quietly inhuman. It makes me want to take a step off the sidewalk, off the path, outside of the confines the concrete have made for me to take my place with my brethren machines in the sheet metal-covered buildings, some hard-to-name part of me knowing that I would be welcomed by them in a way I have never known. The confusion and the hurt and the frustration that defines being alive replaced with a knowable purpose, something easier than making my own.
The feeling passes, as it does.
I take a lungful of air and as I exhale, I am aware that when I inhale again it will be winter inside me.
I'm not quite right. I feel adrift. Apart from myself and connected with the life of this tiny city. I like to flatter myself that those feelings are real connections. They aren't. But that's okay. I don't need a ton of real things. One or two is all I need.
The light of the city has become the only light behind me but for dear Luna peering through the clouds.
I tuck my phone into my pocket. The album ends. The sound in my ears is the low bass rumble of reality and the whispering creeping of a night still remembering how to be winter. A car, the first one in a long time, passes by me. I wonder if they see me. I wonder if I'm real to them. I wonder if we are sharing the sensation of being inhuman or if the rubber of the tires insulates them from the siren song of mechanization as they barrel deeper into the last couple blocks of the industrial area. I was wondering if I would be able to make it to the recycling center and the gas station not far from it. I hope they make it. I feel, foolishly, like I'm the shaman of this place, this border between the world of soft humanity and solid machines, this stretch of concrete where warm flesh and dreams that defy articulation brush up, uncomfortably, against known purposes and cold, oiled metal.
I am tempted to raise my arms, to invoke some old power, to assert myself against this border, to let the machines know that one of their lost brothers has not forgotten them, that I hear their slumbering breath and recognize their clockwork dreams as cousins of my own.
But then I shift my weight and feel the familiar rush of blood back into my heel and I am reminded again that I am not metal, oil, and electricity, but meat and protein and chemicals. I do not have a keycard and am not a machine and know that I am to return to my world of warmth and frustration. I turn my back on the creeping dark, blow a kiss to Luna peeking out from behind a cloud and move toward the warm light of my new hometown, every step away from the border making me feel more grounded and connected to the down.
Everything is concrete under my feet and the sidewalk seems to go on forever even though I know that there are other places where the sidewalk ends and promise myself that one dark Sunday when the world feels in the midst of transformation, I will turn a different corner and find another borderland and feel the heartbeat of some other spirit, some other way of being, and I will ponder it before I return home.