Ned Ryerson

An arcade cabinet is not the same it was 30 years ago

Once dirty and dark and like New York City before broken windows policies

I was wandering through, and out the back of an old one last night.

emergency exit door opened onto a brick pathway.  The bricks were not umber, but were the color of a grapefruit in New England in April. Yellowy and jaundiced – little babies with low bilirubin counts.

walking this path toward a village of sorts.  They were fungal blossoms burst forth from rain and clean dirt, but sure enough some bodies lived inside and I was welcome there.

This buzzing.

Stop this buzzing.

Rolling, I glaciate my way to the silver box with the glowing hands and single rouge plunger.

When I drink at night to excess.  When I drink the way writers drink. When I drink the way Mom secretly drank - in the bathroom and hid the bottles under the sink for clean up day. When I drink this way I can’t figure out that red button. Is up On or is down On? Is it like a light switch where if it were up when I turned it on, then down is the new On and I might need to click it twice to activate it.  It is all too much like math class for me.

I’ll go shower. It is not cold feet touching wood floors winter or wake in a sweat ruin the lighter sheets with pools of stain summer. As such the water cleanses but doesn’t try hard to soothe. Coffee will be made. The ritual will be followed. Clothes that have small ink stains. Clothes that have small holes. Socks, the right one usually, the right one usually has a dime of material missing just a few centimeters behind the middle toe toward the heel.

I might spend the day thinking about that hole.
I might spend the day thinking about the mushroom people.

I might spend the day and the night and the next day and the next night – I might spend them all.  Might just as well spend them. I don’t have a retirement account of time that I can bank.

But time also isn’t linear and like my dreams, I can be pulled from revelry or confusion or distress by a buzzing call from elsewhere. Erewhon may haps.

On the widest roads, at speeds unimaginable, bodies fling through space are all thinking of their coffee and their dreams and their sock holes and not much of it seems too important.

Why not fill the day writing words.

Sometimes writing the words helps.

Fills gaps.

As text fits the page, they each – each word – each each is saying

These words do not matter, but what does?

Finding out is as good a way as any to fill out the time slip.

I imagine I’ll keep writing and showering and coffeeing until it gets figured out.