A Town in the Distance

Farewells are in order.

A town that evoked Peter Pans and existential fans deserves a proper goodbye. A shack where cards were dealt and egos were dealt with. The fear was all around us, the loathing in the mirror. All the characters we met, invented, insulted, I thought I would make them a typewriter graveyard. You stole a dead woman's diary, and her blue dishes next door. We smoked to kill the time; to watch it leave with the smoke and the daylight. While you rarely listened, when you appeared with a Tarot card tattooed on your chest, I supposed I was somewhere in the ink. We were a treasury minting phrases and memes.

The sweat, the bikes, the whiskey, the smokes. We lived well. We observed the strange and the sycophantic. We committed crimes. Switchblades, narcotics, psychotics, the absurd panorama of the fore-granted, the theatrical and the fleeting. LSD, christmas lights, foursquare, beer by the case, piss, public pools, parents, parties, perversion. Each one deserving their own eulogy, let's call it a mass grave. Let's call it a pizza. Let's call it even. All of us were present, all of us gifted.

Sad to see the giant tranny who loved Electric Feel and Edie Sedgwick's wardrobe go. Sad to drink coffee alone. Can do without the sweaty scene hangouts with the accompanying photography, the Hep C positive guy who smoked crack on our porch, the bottom rung of bureaucratic employment. Will drink to the architects of this emotional fallout shelter, the shrapnel still on the battlefield.