​The Quilt of Hides and Fibers

It was a late freeze in January. The days had been rampant with dust infested breezes, the nights fell to a whisper and the town was a low frenzy. A mash of triumph and tragedy, chaos.. and (dis)order. A whirlpool of luck’s many shades. Latency in our ability to connect naturally… The fear of being natural. Off the range, and willfully in a kennel..

This evening was met with a sequence of pops in the air, a festive hustle and bustle like kernels over an open flame. Suspicion, a lingering mist suggesting opportunistic malice dancing to the rhythm of this celebratory transition. The purpose of it all had lost its claws years ago. It was a time before I was alive to witness the travesty. Seemingly, it was one of many frigid slap fights with members of the same species. Divisions caused by differing idols of representation, which were just as chaotic and nonsensical as our own. Ever since then, we slowly became… well… a concrete plantation with a defective billboard to the attraction. A spectacle where if the proletariat of patriotic delusion didn’t sing and dance for the scraps of hollow guarantees and mislabeled freedoms, then they were destined to become part of the charade of conflicts through decimation. “Another day in paradise”, the submissive obliged would proclaim with stained grins of shit-eating compliance and deteriorating posture, living out their reductive ambitions. Labyrinthine games with no definite rules, but only for a chosen few, were never for those that oversaw and conducted the performance. The confusion of roles within its confines were free to disregard, but never evade. It was all starting to burst at the seams as the starving became ravenous, desperate, and overgrown with agitation. The metamorphosis of a social experiment gone awry, and we were the subjects of a mundane and intimately impersonal chokehold. Chanting was echoing through the illuminated shroud of night, a unison, the occasional form of order timed annually, when all conflict ceased for a single breath. The cacophonous rhythm was brief, a burst of revelry followed before the “business as usual” flow of fermented tri-centennial chaos ushered in another run of redundancies and sweet nothings. A car show took place by the nearest stream to commemorate some shallow ideology of belonging, a showcase of overpriced manufactured hunks of scrap made in places of vast bounty, places where the tarnished hands are denied access to the fruit of their labor. It was a reality that wept from within the vessels. If you listened closely, you could hear pleas falling on deaf ears, an echo chamber of misery singing a familiar refrain… broken promises. Winds of cool assurance that usually eased into the early hours of the new day flowed with punctuality. A brief relief to a façade we tell ourselves is *fine*. The reality is, we lost communal trust when the bright distractions took over our focus and loyalty. The Borg. A collective of polarization. It was to be a demanding day, 6am shift, just after sunup. It was fortunate that I didn’t have to go in for another 4 and a half hours. It was fortunate that I didn’t take to the traditional dance with my former demons. A commendable and condemnable gesture depending on the spectator. Freedom in a nutshell, this tightrope above a pit of venomous creatures… Self-loathing projectors… It was a statistical symptom traversing to the other side, only to find a solid wall with a mural of fabricated hopes and dreams illustrated among a shroud, a quilt of hides and fibers.

Now that the bombs had dissipated into the echoes of a memory, it was time to prep a pot of coffee and have a power nap. Yet another workweek of being the Energizer zombie.

-The Preparation

Impositions of mechanical gurgles and steadily sporadic droplets of stained water cascaded into the glass receptacle. An aroma of a hopeful glimmer painted the air with the yields of Brazilian roasted distress in a can, bold and smooth, as the glow of a bright morning blessed the kitchen’s blackout curtains with promises of opportunity.

I never enjoyed mornings. It was all an imposition of the senses and the mere thought of it was enough to get my heart racing. The impatient commuters, blazing sunshine, chipper beings born for these hours, missionaries of positive vibes gifting their verbal sentiments like watchtower pamphlets. It was an amalgamation to put an extra strain on the worn and inefficiently charged batteries of socially awkward internalizers that surfaced from the realm of nocturnal meditations and solitude.

The machine broke the silence. “Drink your fuel, you peasant.” It beeped. Sounds of early morning workers of hungover proportions, spectral walks of life, revving their contraptions to expedite warmth, the humming penetrating the old seals of single-paned windows.

There was a time when this was a noble endeavor, a time being a malleable moron, days of existential infancy. A time when every hand was a guiding one regardless of what it held in its grip. There were enough scars remaining to know better, a diminishment of brain cells left from coping with the pandemonium, difficulties to react on a whim. A seemingly fair trade for a cynical old soul. A fair trade for consideration.