September 28, 2010...

Life on the road—coin laundries, cashiers and manufactured food. After sometime the locals recognize your face, but no one knows your name. You are another necessary inconvenience in a paycheck. You sit in your room and feel the bittersweet of memories replayed in your mind over and over like a black and white movie. The reels get worn and spaces of film go unaccounted for and the picture begins to pop and get a little grainy, but soon you find you need that hit of nostalgia—an addiction to your own memory.

You just discovered that your new hovel, in addition to the faint acridity of stale cigarettes and the pungency of cat urine, has a closet, which you mistook for an access to an adjoining room. You organize your life and tell yourself that it feels more at home now, but the truth is, you can organize a kitchen drawer or a janitor closet, but it won’t make the inside feel anymore like home.

You feel like tears, but they’ve been replaced by apathy. You check your creativity at the door as you go to fill the most productive hours of your day with mindless work, robotic and brutal. You try to pick it back up at the door when you come in with the sundown, but your body is scolding you so loudly that you can’t seem to remember where you left it and so it sits at night and collects dust next to the old box a/c until you see it the next morning, too pressed for time to use it.

The check is good though and every time you doubt yourself you remind yourself that you need the money. You trade your dreams for a transient and inconsistent currency. You become conscience and designated driver to a group of men you would probably avoid on a street corner or in the lobby of a cheap hotel, like the one you are sharing with them. You hear more variations of f*** then there are cloud shapes in a day.

You’re that guy that gets rolls of quarters. The son that rarely calls home. The boyfriend whose schedule and fatigue make him absent. That guy in the checkered shoes that comes into Panera everyday and never knows what he wants. You are a paradox.

You are the familiar stranger.