Flash Friday 6-27-14 Carnival rides, after hours, smoke in Flash Friday

If you keep still you can see it or feel it, it depends on how you experience things; some folks thoughts are like a carnival ride, everything all hurky jerky, wind and the flash of lights. It’s not just in a crisis, it’s all the time, like, for instance, ordering a coffee; their eyes darting on the board from white chocolate mocha to macchiato and they get up to the counter and order a Chai Tea and some pastry made from flax and chia seeds.

“You know that grows grass hair on clay trolls?” I’ll say.

A the roller coaster of their thoughts plunge downwards and take a tight curve, their hair almost blows back, and their cheeks almost ripple from the g-force and they’ll say “What? Oh, yeah, heh.” And look away from you, forcing their hand to the counter to take their drink when it wants to wave in the air and scream for the next plunge.

They’re the main prop of an after-hours club, too awake to slow the ride down, and like some ancient curse; ten bourbons will never stun them, ten arms will never hold them, ten hearts will never fill them, ten tears will never lose the sorrow, and ten days inside their own personal carnivals will never entertain them.

I know this because I’m always there, I’m one of them, I’m the one that’s always there, outside smoking, a cool nod to the red eyed cats, arm draped over the shoulder of some cool chick who hasn’t slept since the Reagan Administration; ten black beauties will never wake her up and ten benzo will never put her down, and for all the cool, all the junky chic, they aren’t leaving the after-hours club to fuck, they’ll sit in rooms with drawings right on the bare walls, murals in perpetual progress, and try to shut the carny down by quoting someone else’s poetry or putting on someone else’s music or smoking someone else’s cigarette and wait for dawn to be tired for another day.

And they’ll eat hot-dogs and cotton candy and it’s hard to tell the figurative from the literal that way, if the thoughts feel like shit, and the food tastes like shit, the world looks like shit and lights and wind all moving impossibly fast, than it must be shit, an easy but profound answer to every existential question or coffee order.

And there’s the fear, the ever dogged fear, that if the tilt-a-whirl stops and you have to walk away you’ll never get your land legs. Mostly, though, it’s the freak and narcissism of the fun house mirrors and trying not to confuse which is which; it’s an arbitrary choice. Not a choice at all.

There are some folks and then there’s other. I don’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing or even how they got here. Try the cheese Danish, it’s like half a croissant with cream cheese frosting.