Shock Dog

My mouth tastes like garbage. I love it. All the liquor and the cigarettes and the bad food have accumulated to produce a fetid mixture of filth, a noxious odor only I can appreciate. This is what it means to be alive.

I can still taste the dirty martini I drank last night. My bowels are unstable, quivering like a plucked guitar string. My hair is a confession of orgiastic guilt, standing straight, obedient children placed in rows aboard a rusty train car. I'm wearing an undershirt backwards, and it's possible I crapped my pants, but just a little.

Time for breakfast: SPAM from the can, eaten with a fork. Green apple soda. A Budweiser. Life is full of simple pleasures. Lucky me, Point Break is showing on cable. I fucking love Point Break.

I'm hearing impaired. But that doesn't mean I'm deaf. I just have this condition where I produce an extreme amount of ear wax, usually when I'm asleep. Every morning I awake to a silent world. Since there's construction going on across the street, starting at six, I like to think I've evolved. I've beaten the jackhammer. My next feat: the B-52 bombers that fly over my apartment.

You look so pretty in your frilly blouse. I bet it's made of satin. I'm right, aren't I? The gloss on your lips is as shiny as a chrome bumper. Your eyelashes are splayed wisps of heaven, the closing curtain every time you blink and deprive universes of creation with your blue irises. I'm staring at you, your supple skin, your teeth's bleached enamel. And then you're gone, replaced by an insurance commercial.

Solictitors again, just as I'm about to take my mid-morning nap. Two sexagenarians in militaristic garb. No, I'm fine, thank you, I have a religion and it's NFL football, so I'm busy Sundays. At least the Girl Scouts sell cookies. Good-bye.

I'm in the Soviet Union, hunting game. An elk. My buckshot explodes and punctures fur then flesh. This is adventure; this is what it means to be free. I want to kill, cut, carve. I want to burst into a hail of spectral-colored sprinkles, drenching populaces with my epiphanies.

At noon I wrest myself from the sofa and go to Burger King for a Whopper and a large soda. On my way back, I buy some gum. White grape. Sometime before I was born, the entire population of Earth tricked itself into believing certain grapes are white, even though they're green. Also, "red" wine is burgundy.

Now I'm drinking coffee. Starbucks, if you have to know. Black, like my soul. I thought a centipede was crawling up my forearm but then I looked and saw that it was just my dog's tail wagging against it. Close call. I'm wearing socks, a clear indication I'm going to do some nifty vacuuming in a minute or two.

It's close to four o'clock. Three fifty-seven to be precise. It'll be five soon, and then I can forget the mundanity of the day, look forward to a new one.

The sun is amber, crying through my window in shapes and sounds and pretty glances, until it drowns itself under the mountains, swallowed by large green humps of moss.

Six o'clock is approaching.