Please let me be lonely tonight
My ye olde housemate/caretaker is cooking something including onions right now, causing my eyes to water and tears to stream down my face. I don’t really cry, I don’t think, having done away with tube socks and emotions ages ago, and so am confounded by the watery solution coming from my eyes today. Oh, man, I think, what is going on here? And then I realize: it’s the onions.

It is occurring to me today, for the one millionth time, that the city I live in blows, and it will continue to blow, forever (the greatest, most all-time crushing Albany moment I’ve experienced thus far, outside of some ludicrous/ embarrassing moments which hold little to no merit on account of the fact that I was too drunk to actually remember them, was looking at the LOB on Madison recently and being sent into a full-throttle depression over its scale size and color. The sky was some wasted ink cartridge color gray that day, stretching out interminably to nowhere, and the building and sidewalk parodied that color below, their mimicry taken directly in through my eyeballs and related to my synapses, sending me down. The architecture itself depresses you, and I knew the people inside of those buildings were doing something unnervingly depressing, making it a full on shit storm of depressingness. But then, maybe it’s just me, like usual). I was attempting to explain this same feeling to someone the other day, but I don’t really think they knew what I was talking about, impervious to the dour worldview of architecture and downward spirals.

Two enthusiasts of the rap music genre have recently moved into the apartment next door to mine. I encountered one of these individuals recently, on coming home one day. “Oh, you moved in next door?” I ventured brightly to one of them. “My name is Ryan,” I said, shaking the new neighb’s hand. “How’s it going,” said neighbor said. “My name’s True Master.” I took this in, thinking it over, before True Master disappeared behind the door of his rental compartment. It was a striking name, you had to admit, out-classing my own rather pedestrian name by twenty furlongs, which then (obviously) elicited some rapid fire succession of “street names” to replace my own. I was stuck between two, when the phone rang, snapping me from my reverie.

It was hard not to get caught up in the proactive nature of the new neighbors, planning events and shows, right here in the courtyard of our building. “All that’s really respectable,” I told El Smell on night, “but in the end I can’t help but think there will be some inherent futility involved with all of that. I mean, even if something really cool is created there will be no one to fully appreciate it, so it seems like a total waste of time. I mean, we’re living in Albany, after all!” I said, as some rhetorical punctuation point. As I said this, I thought simultaneously of a car signaling into a drive on a desolate country road, signaling repetitively into the night to no one in particular. But, when it came down to it, in the end, whatever ended up taking place, I knew I would be there. Which pretty much seemed inevitable- I lived there.

Everything blows, but what can you do? It seemed logical to try and have as much fun as possible, even if you were surrounded by lame ass motherfuckers at all times. Springtime couldn’t be too far off, I didn’t officially have a job to go to, and El Smell was making that onion dish right now. It wasn’t much, but it was something to hold onto. To keep yourself from spiraling—to keep yourself from tears.