I'm sorry, i was thinking about Ryne Sandburg, walking along block 500 were i found a pot teh piss along the lilac laden houses, fleeting as miniature reminders of the shortness of life and the sweetness of breathe. A man passes, his skin stretched as ligaments must across too far a distance, holding in his secrets as a military state. He feels along the sidewalk with a thin stick sharpened at the point by the pocket knife that jingles along in his Cotton pocket, bouncing off his dusty balls and the shrunken legs that carry him slowly along the street. Sweat, a dusty sweat, pools on the bill of his baseball cap and falls in slow, saliva like drips. His eyes are tiny and secretive, like holes made in a paper cup with a sharpened pencil. Some glimpse of his truth comes as his eyes catch mine, momentary, but vanishes as he darts off as a frightened animal into the nearby parking lot of my building. A young woman is crossing the street towards me as I near Basset. At this distance she is alluring. She is carrying a red plastic bag of groceries in her dangling arm, swinging them along childlike. She holds a cell phone up to her right ear, wears over sized, bug-eye Hollywood sunglasses and bright blue rubber rain boots. As she nears and passes she takes no notice of my shrunken features pale and ghostly, she screams the opposite; I seem not to exist, she seems to be all that does. Nearer to my eyes she was repulsive, widespread, cookie-cut, and easily dismissed. Crossing to 400 and entering the parking lot i see the walking stick man doubled over into a dumpster near the front door of my building, riffling and preparing for the coming winter. He is taking out tin cans and greasy pizza boxes and torn letters and shit-stained blankets and packing them all into plastic shopping bags, attaching them as balloons to his nearby bicycle, to leave the shores of reality, to sail away. As i pass he scurries away again without an upward glance and visually loses himself quickly in the trees, unperceivable behind the passing barriers save the hurrying cadence of his wiry legs, his antenna-like stick and the Newton's Cradle-knock of his dusty balls. I've seen him before, his name is Gerald. I'm sure he knows more than that about me, that i prefer porters and stouts, that i can only get halfway through a tub of humus before it rots, that all my ideas are written on tiny pieces of paper, that my power bill is roughly forty dollars a month, that i change my cat litter every three days, that i still think about her sometimes when waking dreams force me to conclusion, the things i throw away, pathways to the things i don't. It's all there in my trash.
I can sense her on the wind that blows west past the capital building and finds me on my front steps. Her innocent smile and childlike grace, her wavering speech and short cropped auburn hair, her light steps and tiny feet, her hoop earrings and piercing fingers, her crooked humor her originality, her pinkie toes, her eyes, like god's, crossed, closed; all olfactory memories of anti-fruition, of rot and estrangement. I have no idea where she has gone. She could still be wandering the storefronts of Willie Street thinking about french presses and grind settings, or tramping the snow covered slopes of Colorado laughing among the early season snowfall, perhaps she is back in Michigan surrounded by those who know her best. I admit first i know nothing, but have found it is true what is spoken into microphones or whispered into empty bottles in the city of Chicago about Michigan Girls. With one last wayward look to the east, a girl walks down the sidewalk towards the Capital past South Broom, identical and widespread, becoming tiny as a plastic barbie doll and tossed away like a series of dreams.
I walk up the switchback staircase of my apartment building, as always feeling like Lee Harvey, like a Judas, vulgar like Steven J., angry like Tosh, seeing myself reflected in the stained white walls and ancient red hotel carpet, quiet, solemn and misunderstood; terrifying greatness hidden in all the glittering gold. I see it in the faces of the Forty year old woman, faces painted, caked, ageing ungracefully into the years. I see it in the cupboards of matching orange plates and pans and knives, bottles of EVOO. I see it in the magazine racks i pass on my way to the H section. I see it on every television channel and every billboard along I-90 and every teenage face. I see it in the lipstick stained identical paper coffee cups collected into trash bags i, greenstrewn, throw into the dumpster each day. I hear it in passing state street conversations of traveling suburbanites. I smell it on the canvases of passing girls with bottled smells. Confronted with this stride towards a universal carbon-copy idea of beauty and rejecting it finds me banished behind secret doors, scampering. I escape it in seedy dark rooms where music is played, in sandstone cliffs over owl canyons nigh the dark Illinois, in mountaintops silent as graveyards, to sail away. Entering my third floor abode i hang my keys and toss my sweater, tear at the sash and then washing, a sense of comfort and calm. All over America, inescapable, i've found.
I look out my apartment window, exiled, ghost-like and discarded, onto west Main street, seeing a pale reflection in the pane of indecisiveness, cold and lifeless at the heart of the beast.
-Mark Christensen, May 2009
