Burn down the room when I'm asleep
Out into the night, moisture hanging in the air like cotton, causing little beads of moisture to produce on your furrowed brow, as there you are, walking with two wobbly legs out in front of you, into the wide open abyss of the world which is growing darker by the minute. Thunder coincides with your entry into the night air, crackling up above. It sounds like they’re conducting some kind of shock and awe campaign two towns over, and what you’re experiencing, actually, is just that. You find yourself ducking almost, when the air masses rub together, exploding in the sky, as though you’re going to be hit by a bomb. But then you’re not, and you realize: that’s just old man nature messing with your head, making you look like a dork. Some kid I went to high school with incidently got hit by a lightning and never was the same thereafter, always sporting some docile look. And so it’s that same fear, more or less, that has me lurching forward and into my vehicle, which is the safe haven in the wide open parking lot of the abyss.

It is with no reserve of self-congratulation that I find myself arriving at the gym tonight. The day looms large like some kind of Homeric Odyssey, and going to the gym is like literally tacking a marathon on to the end of the day, just because. It’s these kinds of behavior patterns which have me contemplating my actions, and wondering if I should try hallucinogenic drugs. But then, that’s not entirely necessary, either. The world, when looked at from the appropriate angles, (or really, just looked at at all) provides you with the succubus energy of others radiating out into the atmosphere, as you try hard to dodge and weave, not getting any of that on you, like some sort of nuclear radiation. It really is quite enough. Changing out of my clothes in the locker room today, I overhear a conversation. Two guys, probably about my age, are talking things over in the rank atmosphere which only a men’s locker room could facilitate. “My wife,” one guy says with an almost reverent sense of awe, “she can eat whatever she wants and not get fat. Me, though, man: I eat all the right foods and still, look at me.” The other guy thinks this over, perhaps contemplating his friend’s figure. “You’re not too bad,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.” Still, the guy with the not fat wife is unimpressed. “She eats McDonalds, Burger King, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I just fear the day that I’m going to wake up and there’s going to be a complete stranger lying next to me.” I don’t pick up on what this guy is saying until a few moments later, when I realize. What he is talking about is not some one-night stand scenario, where he actually would wake up with a complete stranger lying next to him, but the day when his wife’s body changes. When the years of frivolity have caught up, and all of those Big Macs and quarter-pound hamburgers consumed result in the aforementioned description of a stranger lying next to him in bed. I almost cannot believe, but then there is no end.

Out into the actual gym. People are hustling in from the outside, as a storm warning is in effect, and the signs of that warning are manifesting in ominous gray clouds that stretch across the sky. The weatherman gesticulates wildly up on the TV monitors up above, as the warning repetitively flashes onscreen below him. We are on exercise bikes and treadmills and various artificial mechanisms for increasing the heart rate, watching the television monitors and simultaneously trying not to fall off of our stationary machines. And then, above the music, you can hear the rumble outside, and the onset of the storm. Suddenly, something overtakes me, as here we all are, looking in mirrors and contemplating our collective form, which really is so bad. I hope for a power outage that would turn this room to an ink black nightscape, little cartoon eyes hanging in the dark. Or maybe even something worse: A total blackout that would leave us all—you, me, and the two men in the locker room—reeling in the darkness of that particular illumination.