My Girl, My Girl, Don't lie to me.

I don’t look a thing like Jesus… and I do talk like a gentleman… I guess that’s a bit depressingly average really.

2 weeks until I’m 18, folks. Just two. Then I’m coming for you, inebriated and free, gnashing my way out of mundanity… for a while.

I will soon relate tales unto thee, and you shall laugh, and weep, and wonder. These are the best kind of tales, the ones you wish I would tell again, or another before the children must go to bed. The story lingers in the air where it has been spoken, and people cling to these strands of air, these invisible characters still vivid in the wisps of non-existence. We must restrain them, and tie them to the floor. But before such a narrative, we must consider the cost. I ask a very minor fee, barely a snag in the straining sail of the earth, blown on the galactic trade winds. I ask that you simply Google Raymond Pettibon, in an image search. Go.


Gone yet?


Back?, good.

We tear open the shrouds that guard our world and spy a small barge, floating wherever the solemn and sensual river takes it. The deep brown shards of wood are loosely bound, and splinters of a low bronzed red jut out, laying trails of tiny redirected water.
Perched upon this romantically simple vessel is a man standing proud, in the full gold-buttoned uniform of your imaginings, staring out upon the river and the city on its banks as though he owned every inch. Today in the sun and in his glowing sunny mind he ruled this land. These tiny fish, they swam for him and the markets by the water bought and traded as he wished them to.
But he was just a lowly barge rider, and his happiness is no prettier through tragedy or sympathy. His story was the story of many a happy man, strangled in contented adoration of a new possession, or woman, or some medieval mixture of the two. Why he grins is of very little point, he may have been told of some new position, hence the uniform. He may have stumbled upon a note of great currency, or a currency note of great worth, who cares!? Some things take no expansion, and one of these must certainly be a happy man surveying a world that is momentarily his.
The waters grew troubled though, around the bow and some subtle shift in the atmosphere brought a rumbling chill to the warm air. Maybe a cloud partially darkened the sun, maybe a bird swooped for a fish, and the gust struck at a new angle, maybe it was nothing but literary conceit.
No matter the concerns of the physical fake world, a great burning image is about to rise from the turgid symbolic depths and wreak cataclysm. From the light and breezes comes a burning, turning fish so mighty I will forgive my readers for thinking I merely made it up, or stole its metaphor from some other story of a great fish and a small man.
As this broadly scaled beast split the veneer of the picturesque, our man grew fearful. No doubt he had too read tales of water creatures devouring whole persons, or of epic battles, and feared his own was ahead. But even big fish are not so big, remember, and eating a man whole is harder than Jonah would have you believe, for his own purposes. Instead, leaping cold-blooded barrels of life rarely do more than leap, as this fish did soaring not romantically over the barge, but just past it, spraying bed-grit on the man’s shined buttons.
Suddenly imposed upon this friend was a jarring burst of a world that was not his at all. He had seen the most stunning display of the world, he had been blessed by a closeness to the spiritual than ever he would again. He had been stroked, he had been hugged by whatever force your belief upholds, he had been loved as a single life for a moment by something greater, and he grew saddened.
Such simple pleasures that I had posed as the causes of his euphoria were stripped, and in beauty all he saw was the raw, ugly, unrestraint sheer chaos of it all.
Woe! He screamed, so loud that the river banks and buildings shook. Take me back to my own embrace! I am not able to breathe.
And, gasping, he sat upon his low strung wooden barge, floating towards the sea, and he drowned.