Faux Pas

Bajillion Peregrinus started his day off right today–with a succulent cobb salad and a couple of margaritas. Slippery slope, margaritas, but as a denizen of the night, Baj has always managed to avoid that whole “too early in the day to imbibe” faux pas. However, considering the depth of his late-night cavorting, he often finds himself breaking that rule by pulling all-nighters and keeping the party rolling well past dawn.

This particular day wouldn’t normally prove to serve Baj’s personal agenda, seeing as how he needs to knock out some domestic drudgery and then immediately tuck into a full-blown work shift. Not very much time to himself at all. Just another one of those days. It’s not like he’s not used to this kind of treatment; he’s become quite accustomed to it at this point. Bills and impulsive expenditures (food delivery and designer headphones) necessitate his daily drudgery–for the most part. The remaining part of the pie chart (as far as he could figure): his intense, immense sense of self-loathing, which he quietly carries around on his shoulders like a hobo’s bindle–not too heavy, considering the unbearable lightness of being, but always noticeably uncomfortable.

As far as he sees it, he figures that the self-deception is a byproduct of his unfulfilled human potential. Well, not his own perception of failing, but the societal norm facilitating the “us vs. them” mentality that sends the vast majority of rat racers into skill corners, where they’ll proceed to bang their foreheads against brick walls for the rest of their lives, restricting whatever semblance of freedom to a 15-minute meditation session sometime between breakfast and work (otherwise known as their morning commute). The mental elasticity of previous generations is systematically eroding.

Baj is rather sensitive and internalizes most everything he comes across; most of the time he has no idea how it will surface, since the nature of the universe is that of uncertainty and chaos. In the case of human devolution, however, Baj knows for a fact that people are losing their sheen at a rapid clip.

Because of all this, Baj understands that, no matter what he does, he will always come up short in a financial sense. Just as his mother and father had, and their mothers and fathers before that, and so on and so forth. He’s recently begun to trace back his lineage on one of those newfangled ancestor websites, all the way back to a point in medieval Europe where some sort of town fool or drunk owed a debt to the local magistrate, and the interest is still accruing to this day.

Running Low

Albacore dreams float soundless,
drop to sediment, petrify
and wash up:
broken empty shells
pulverized underfoot,
inflicting wounds at will.

All the lost blood
won’t collect
on the beach,
the sand gulps it and dives
into froth.

Burrowed in muck,
all the ‘O’s and ‘AB’s
reaffirm their common lineages,
summoning up a plume of sanguinary vitality
(luring jerky lurker sharks
near the shore to nip some ‘A+’
from a lazing boogie boarder–
that type’s always running low
for some reason).

———-

Original draft posted to WHARVED on 3/2/12,
entitled #130

Lucky Duck

Cheatersley Everington has never had much reason to spout drivel from the tip of his dorsal fin, mainly because he never inherited one of those peculiar things from his most recent mammalian ancestry. Perhaps a few hundred million years ago he would have still had a bit of a vestige from where he needed to propel himself through the water in a somewhat graceful way, but these days it would be silly to expect such an outdated mode of transport to have any trace elements remaining. But with all that aside, Cheatersley never made much of a fuss about the dorsal shortage. He would be the first one to tell you that such science fiction elements hold no significance in his day-to-day existence. In fact, he exists during a time in the “modern” human epoch when science fiction is not a term that people bandy about. He has been afforded a blissful existence of technological and historical ignorance simply because he happened to strap on his feed bag in what we commonly call the 19th Century. Lucky duck, basking in a world of intellectual stagnation and limited upward mobility (well, until he dies of dysentery, at least).