Suburbvision

1

Drunken, stumbling across the floor of a low-lit dive bar on a Thursday night — there to repeat the same hollow ceremony, compulsively raising one Budweiser to my lips after another, an almost neurotic fixation, an instinctive twitch against the tedious thick air of the same small group of friends, the same circular conversation, the same suburban air — I shoved myself inside the restroom, lurched towards the urinal and splayed my limbs in an X shape against the wall, pissing dangerously hands-free with my cock delicately balanced atop the zipper hole in my pants, maneuvering my pelvis slightly so as to orient the stream.

There in Sharpie by my extended left knee, I saw lit up like a flash of lightning:

Death is not to be feared, the only thing to be feared is the suburbs.

This was the last thing I saw before blacking out. The next day, I fidgeted and paced in my room refreshing websites, reading a few pages of a book over and over, feeling both empty and yet buzzing with a horrible sort of electricity which seemed to need to expel itself but was having trouble finding the exit orifice. I counted down the minutes until 5PM, the semi-arbitrary hour after which I told myself it was ok to drink kratom so I wouldn’t get addicted.

Once it was 5PM, I took my kratom to go and walked with it in a randomly chosen direction to the south while listening to Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor on headphones. I had never been this way before. I crossed underneath highways, past busy roads, through parking lots, along tree-covered shady lanes.

It reminded me of how when I was a teenager I would sneak out of the house at 2AM on school nights to walk across the silent, empty, blackened, tree-coated suburbscape. This was the greatest peace I was able to find back then in a life I basically despised. I was a little afraid of being caught by my parents, but one time eventually my mother caught me sneaking back in through the front door at 3AM, and I said I had been out for a walk and she simply understood. I would sometimes spend whole days wandering around, even through strangers’ yards if I felt like it, in cutoff shorts and an Animal Collective t-shirt. I would carry a sketchbook with me, but rarely use it — it felt good to hold, there was a potential inside.

I remember imagining what I would do when I turned sixteen and got a car — you could go anywhere. I deeply wished I had one just so I could drive half an hour to a completely random place and simply walk for a while along the side of the road, past Wendy’s, the Ford dealership, a strip mall, and Carl’s Jr, tracing out this particular lineament of the world just so the world could know someone was there. It was inconceivable to me that my friends had cars, and yet they never took the opportunity to do this. Of course, when I got a car of my own, I ended up never doing it either.

Now, on my walk, I once again felt a strange happiness, the happiest I had felt in weeks.

America’s streets are a blessing for the pensive and the melancholy — for practically all of America is a liminal space. Wherever you go, you are nowhere. You go out to a bar or to eat but you might as well be in the airport. The houses in front of me took on a deliriously stupid quality in light of this notion. The families living in these homes, with their front-lawn shrubbery, their political yard-signs, their porch decorations, were trying harder than anyone else to establish a sense of thisness, a sense of placeness. Yet they were coming up hilariously short, like a child building a Lego castle out of a haphazardly-colored jumble of bricks and placing it proudly on the mantle. The discarded plastic bags which would occasionally drift along the street felt more real, were more delicately placed by divine fingers, breathed and weeped more than any of these obstinate buildings. The trash was like butterflies in this unnatural Zen garden, the cigarette butts on the asphalt like polished stones.

I felt as if I was steering a sailboat across an endless beige sea of concrete and cracked glass, or of crumpled-up discarded newspapers written in another language, in inscrutable hieroglyphics from an ancient forgotten realm.

I was happy because I knew I would be leaving here soon.

2

I moved to New York City. I got a job making a lot of money and obsessively saved it, pathologically scrupulous in my purchases in a way my friends couldn’t understand. I did this because I had a deep premonition that, even though the work was ok for now, and I was happy, I was a person who would not psychologically be able to withstand clocking in and out of a job five days a week for more than a few years — certainly not the forty years or so expected of the typical person. Something in me would snap and I would do something profoundly self-destructive. Perhaps I would figure out where to find crack cocaine and go on a crack bender and drive under the influence six hundred miles away into the middle of the country, or something like that. 

The premonition turned out to be correct. After a little over a year working in the city, I woke up with a sudden shift in my thoughts and energy where I felt like I was under the influence of LSD, even though I wasn’t. It was as if sort of spirit had entered me and began carrying me against my will to one sudden revelation after another, laying bare the geometry of the universe. I paced around the neighborhood and barely slept, completely unable to will myself to do any other task. After about six days of this, I was ready to follow it anywhere, yet desperately yearning for it to end. Carried on by the pulsating will of this invisible presence, I drove out to the waterfront and stared at the ocean, hoping to find some sense of release, willing to do whatever it asked of me. I gazed out across the expanse of sea from Brooklyn to Manhattan, feeling the breeze against my back. It was then that the spirit finally told me what the point of all this was. I had to quit my job. I heard the sound of trumpets and the singing of angels. I broke down, laughing and crying in public. It was so simple. I wandered around a bit more then drove back home, feeling an immense sense of calm. So there it was.

After a few weeks of not working, though, I started wondering what to do instead.

I went to a yoga studio and asked them if they had any idea what happened to me. The yoga teacher said “It sounds like you had a little moment of enlightenment… good for you!” I asked him how I could find more enlightenment, since now the spirit which touched me was gone. “Just try to breathe and live in the moment, it doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.”

If living for the moment was enlightenment, quitting my job was the holiest of acts. I couldn’t figure out what all these people working were doing it for. They were doing it for the future, but what future was there? You would ask around. No one wanted to be in the city forever. They had some fantasy of having a house somewhere or other. Somewhere romantic and interesting, they would claim, but I knew what they wanted — they craved the suburbs. They wanted to put Halloween decorations on their lawn, holiday cards on their mantle, and magnets on their fridge. They wanted to reach the point where you would no longer need to even ask why you would wake, brush your teeth, shit, work, watch TV. The sterile repetition would simply be demanded and organized by the environment, it would be the very breath of the architecture itself.

I walked around aimlessly wondering how I could live in the moment. As I passed through the city blocks, I would play a game where I would try to see if I could imagine the city like William Blake’s mystical eye would see it, see the streets and alleyways and buildings as limbs and veins and arteries of man’s astral body. Looking at the trash bags dotting the periphery of the sidewalk, it was like God’s shit, like the droppings of a great ghostly squirrel on a trail. I felt my own sphincter relax in sympathy with the grand bowel movement expressing itself around me — I was in cosmic alignment. The exercise was easy to do.

The best thing to do around here was to let one’s eyes follow the patterns of the graffiti, which was on seemingly every surface from the sidewalk to the parked cars to the light poles. The cramped, clattering scribbles were the city’s nervously schizophrenic internal monologue. One could hear barks, whistles, yelps, grunts and moans emerge from the walls. All together, they merged into a beautiful sort of jazz.

A stupid, drunken euphoria overtook me, and decayed quickly into its own hollowness. Was this sort of appreciation for one’s environment what it meant to live in the moment? It felt psychotic and pointless.

I wanted to get a one-way ticket to somewhere in the Third World. Maybe India, or maybe an island in the Caribbean. I wanted to swim through crowds of brown people whose language I did not know. I wanted to sleep on a hard bed in a tiny room like a monk. I wanted to sit on a beach and not move for days on end.

But then I remembered how the only time I had gone solo traveling before I got horribly lonely three weeks in and was all too happy to return to America’s wide empty streets and air-conditioned interiors. It was better not to entertain my escape fantasy — there had to be another way.

3

Around this time, I had discovered the habit of listening closely to people’s words to see if I could find hints of why, in their opinion, life was worth living. I desperately wanted to know, but it felt strange and rude to just directly ask.

In their awkward motions, the modulations of their tones, the pauses in between their words, you could catch glimpses of how they felt. A solemn, pious litany of expression was always running like a film reel behind their eyes, blessing the things in its presence, sweeping back and forth like a dim flashlight on a highway road, touching upon and beholding moments in spacetime like a young girl picking flowers. Against this whispered chant, towering behind the hunched-over form of the torch-bearing homunculus-priest who breathed the homily into the damp air, there was an ink-black oceanic sky in which whales sang in ethereal hums.

Nothing made me feel worse than people’s nostalgia, the way in which through tortured mystical expressions they transformed a half-forgotten moment into a dead heaven. Conversations would circle around memories, memories and media, and media was nothing but dreams. All the advertising lining the city streets, promising eternal bliss behind various commodities, that too was essentially nostalgic in nature, I felt. And when people posted pictures on Instagram, it was the same thing — nostalgia for a moment that had barely even left. And there was that lofty tone people would find when they talked about their little moments of reprieve — nothing better than a cigarette on the balcony first thing in the morning, or whatever. Or what women would write on dating apps, how their afternoon cup of coffee was the joy that justified their entire day. Advertisements, all advertisements, sales pitches that were entirely unconvincing for a house unable to sell itself.

It felt clear to me that these people’s little act of blessings and sanctification were all tiny suicides, like taking Xanax or falling asleep watching TV. I had once experienced a similar impulse inside myself, and I knew how disastrous it was. All throughout college, I had been excited to get my first job in the corporate world, simply because I wanted to die. I would drive past office parks and imagine the featureless spaces and blank-faced men inside and want to become one of them. I would seek out the most sterile spaces on campus to do work in — fluorescent lights, stucco ceilings and beige carpet, because I did my best creative work when I felt like I didn’t exist. I would walk along the street and stare in wonder at passersby who seemed a certain type, a late twenties or early thirties man, dressed in business casual, and I would imagine what his life was like. He probably worked too long, he probably went back to where he lived alone and boiled pasta for dinner, he probably thought about how he wanted a girlfriend, he probably was browsing the dating apps with a shyly optimistic determination hoping the right woman would give warmth to his world. I wanted what he had, I felt like there was a completeness in his lack of completion. I was prepared to trade my active social life and rotation of hobbies for his life in a second — it was sad but perfect, a quiet heaven — God bless him. Eventually I did get my first job, and it was exactly what I wanted, and of course I was screaming inside.

All these endlessly churning thoughts echoing through me, I was sick in the head and I knew it. Live in the moment, the voice of the yogi echoed. There was an art which no one but a tiny few seemed to know, which was how to actually live: that is to not need to affirm anything but reality, in all its messy impossible glory. I knew that the godhead was everywhere and anywhere, I had even in some level experienced it. But I felt more and distant from an appreciation of this every day.

I logged onto Twitter and wrote “Hahahahaha. Hate life. Jk. Hahahahaha want to kill myself. Jk though. Haha”

A few minutes later I got a reply from an account named @disintegrated_instinct. “You okay?”

“I mean basically yeah but also not really tbh…. lol” I replied.

A notification appeared, it was a DM from @disintegrated_instinct. “What’s going on man?”

“Idk” I wrote.

“Shits just gay”

“😶 Yeah”, he simply replied.

“FSDIGWHSDISDGOSDIGHSDVSDVS. i can literally do anything or go anyhwere i want but what the fuck is the point??? Its all nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing”

“!!!!!!!” I added.

“Damn” he responded.

“Youre in NYC right?”

I responded in the affirmative.

“Theres shit to do in NYC” he said.

“Yeah kind of”

“Listen I know what will help maybe”, he said. “Go to 13th and 3rd on a Tuesday night, theres a bar called Automata. See if the oracle is there. She can solve people’s problems”

“???” I responded.

“Yeah lol it sounds weird but just trust me on this haha…………. Have fun!”

It was Thursday, so the opportunity to do as he said wouldn’t come for another five days. The messages stuck with me. Leading up to Tuesday, I paced around my apartment, took laps around the neighborhood, drank kratom, refreshed social media feeds over and over and read part of a book. I felt like a tangled ball of string.

On Tuesday, I took the L train to Manhattan at 9:30 PM. It was raining. I pushed my way into the Automata bar. It was fairly crowded, with only a few feet between the various silhouetted strangers, and darkly lit with a blood-red glow. I began to feel strange and socially anxious because I didn’t know exactly why I was there, or what I would say if anyone asked me why I was. I moved my way over to the bar. I needed a drink, if only to get something to hold. Fortunately I had already shoved back about five and a half shots of Jack Daniels before leaving which made me feel a little better. I ordered a Negroni.

A thumping rhythm stripped down to a distorted nothingness rang out from a second room behind the bar. I made my way over, gently nudging aside several whispering strangers. The other room was barely lit except for a small oasis of light a few feet in front of the DJ booth in which a rainbow of colors rapidly danced into being and disappeared into black, like fireflies moving in and out of a cave. I pushed my way forward towards the light. That was when I saw the oracle.

She was about 5’10 with a Medusa-like curl of red dreadlocks on top of her head and was standing there fully nude, oscillating her hips slightly in the darken glow, dancing slowly to a subtle rhythm which seemed to be completely alienated from the pounding unrelenting sounds coming from the speaker. Around her neck she had an overflowing heap of necklaces, including what looked like hundreds of dollar-store Mardi gras beads as well as a heavy iron metal chain, and a string of pearls draping dramatically down past her navel. Her body was stamped with tattoos in a way that resembled stickers on an electricity pole — a menagerie of glyphs superimposed on top of one another with no discernable coherence, including pictures of Bart Simpson, Pikachu, and Mickey Mouse, several Egyptian hieroglyphics, individual Chinese characters, what looked like a medical anatomical diagram of the human spine, and individual words in big block letters including LOVE, KILL, ENTRY, and FUCK. On her hands, there were rings that were lit up with LED lights, glowing in all sorts of colors. Though her body moved only slightly, her hands whirled around rapidly, weaving the gummy worm tangle of colors which lit up the room like a stirred bowl of Froot Loops. Her mouth twitched and contorted, enunciating muted phrases known only to her.

No one seemed to want to look at her too closely in her unabashed nudity, yet the crowd was nevertheless absolutely focused on her as the subject of attention through askance looks and furtive glances. It felt as if there was a shared sense of reverence — everyone was there in some way for the same spectacle, and everyone knew it, but the polite farce of a typical bar night of nodding heads and misheard conversation had to go on.

I waited there for about an hour and forty-five minutes, not knowing what to do or say, dancing tensely and half-heartedly, not willing to break the thick atmosphere of politeness. Walking up and talking to her felt impossible, for she was untouchable, but leaving without doing so — which at this point felt like my only hope for salvation — was a hundred times more so. One could not simply apprehend a fairy and walk away to forever leave it in one’s memory as an unbearable exception. The weighing back-and-forth of these two impossibilities ravaged in me for an unbearable length of time, each seeming like a more unthinkable option for the longer the agonous pondering lasted. Finally, the torment I felt was so great that I had no choice but to end it by choosing the only option that was ever really available to begin with.

I crept up over to her, positioning myself at a delicately respectful distance about a foot and a half away. I bent down slightly and yelled over the surging bass. “Hey, hello!” I yelled. She didn’t move so I yelled the same thing again. At that point, she turned about forty-five degrees so as to directly face me, her unblinking eyes (which I couldn’t quite meet) staring straight at mine. She continued to wave her hands in intricate rhythms even more frantically, forming what appeared as all sorts of Hindu mudras one after another in an endless kundalini code. I felt paralyzed.

A few infinite moments of tension passed, before I realized there was no breaking the ice — I had no choice but to do what I came here to do. “How can we escape…” I began, but realized I was too quiet to hear. I cleared my throat and yelled: “HOW CAN WE ESCAPE THE SUBURBS, AND FINALLY FIND REALITY?”

She slowed her dance, and after a few seconds came to a standing halt. She took two paces towards me; I stood absolutely frozen. She looked up at me and grabbed my face with her delicate well-adorned hands and pulled my head towards her. I stared into her eyes and saw the milky way flung out above a canopy of trees. Her lips moved up against my ear and I felt her breath gently caress my cheek like the touch of a feather.

“You fool,” she said. “You silly boy. Reality… is the suburbs!”

At that point she gave me the softest of kisses on my forehead right above my eyes, and pushed me away with a surprising amount of force.

I felt nauseous. I stumbled away across the dance floor and left the bar as fas as I could. There I stood on the street in the black-tan haze of streetlights, feeling every drop of my drunkenness. What had things come to?

I watched a schizophrenic man across the street, his mouth agape, his posture hunched, his walk slow shuffling and waddling. “None of you have any of that!” he yelled. “None of you! And none of you will! No one was talking about that when I was! And now look at you! Driven to hell!” He made a sort of flailing motion with his arms then spun around and stared straight at me

I broke my gaze away and started walking, not in any particular direction - I just knew I had to get somewhere.

In a few blocks, there was a park. I walked into the darkness away from the lamps and sat on a bench surrounded by scattered trash.

It was then that I knew that the pain I had felt, that had been growing in me the past few weeks, and had some sense been in me my whole life, was not going to go away. There was no magical moment of catharsis to wait for, no semi-conscious tension to simply release.

Realizing this, a great smile crept over my face, and I laughed to myself. It was a sincere laughter - I felt happiness. Yet the pain stayed, the pain was gnawing, eating my from the inside. Both sensations were there.

It wasn’t good. Bud pain is just pain, I thought. It can’t actually hurt you, really.

Life was fine. There was some comfort in having a wound to care for.