A LETTER TO ABERNATHY

 

Dear Abernathy

A golden disc floats in the space just above your head. Breathe deep and touch it with your index finger. Got it? Now bring it down into your skull (and the buzzing and clicking you hear should only prove this works) imagine your head turning to gold, a metal plating filling and overflowing out through the cracks that met when your soft-spot grew together, expanding and sliding across the surface of your face. Bring that disc down through your chest, through your sternum and stomach and intestines until you reach your crotch and think about that gold once again filling your lungs and making its way through your system, plating the waste in your digestive track, covering everything in your body inside and out, filling your testicles until they’re perched to burst. The sweat you feel is luminescent and beaming and it stands to reason that it is made of gold too, since it has filtered through you and you stand with your arms outstretched as the light sinks down your legs into your feet, gold meeting gold as it makes the rounds of your circulatory system and collides in your heart, looking like some kind of wonderful, tangible heaven in a candy coat of immaculate luster, buster.

Now you are totally far out. Whatever your peers at work think of you, if they could see you now in your living room like this, you know they’d shut the fuck up about you behind your back. Whenever they had free time to gossip, you, as the subject of ridicule, would become obsolete. You are golden. You are a beautiful child of light, a self made man springing from the underground well of knowledge, a little of you spilling out of the ancient and pedestrian tourist trap fountain that the public sees, while your greater gift lies undisturbed beneath the square and filthy city streets. Stoic and stoned and still, unmoved with feet like golden gravity boots, stop taking your pills and watch those around you crumble through the clay up to their hamstrings. Skipping over the bullshit like a stone "Why you act that way?" Racism, poverty, funding for the arts, the myriad of problems over seas and far and away, do you feel or care about them now? In a modern society where the ebb and flow of concern over the individual relies on how much he/she spends or how symmetrical your face is, when you’re suspended above it all like this, all golden and creative, does anything your girlfriend say make a difference? Do you really love your wife?

If our ancestors could see how much we pay the government and the state each year just so we have a place to eat, shit, and fall asleep every night crying, they would go back in time, kill themselves and cut out the middlemen. Both of us know this, but I think you must've forgot so I’m telling you in slow drawn out fashion and right now you’re floating on a lily-pad in a gifted child’s’ painting, in deep meditation, all yellow light and butterscotch gum-drops, while outside, art becomes more and more convenient, ultimately accessible and simplified into offhand gestures. Your shining thoughts seem like jewels to you, but they lie limp as fractals and numbers, words and meanings that will never see the light outside your head. because your depressed and being a pussy. So don’t you feel grateful for this exercise,something useful and solid and meaningful and not just words but actions, and detail, and visions that border on the brink of entertainment? A self made man, a patron of the arts, a bloated old windbag full of pisses and farts. I know what you think of yourself and how others perceive you, and for the first time anywhere in the world, they actually match up. But I love you.

Relax Abernathy, for no one else but you. Dilladano said he was over at your place and you were mean to him and called him a fairy. He’s had that coming for a longtime, huh? I recall one time when I asked you about a specific friend and why it was that you were so rude when he introduced himself and how I would make a note of it never to become your friend. You said that you didn’t need anybody and that friends didn’t mean shit to you.

Decades on and thousands of cut-throat decisions later and you turn pussy and break down in public at work, losing the waning respect you had among your workers. If I didn’t call they would’ve put you in the nuthouse. Look, I know things are rough right now and you feel blue. I feel blue too. Everyone does, Abernathy. remember the vacations we took, how high we got? we should do that again. amen to that.

Rest in peace and I’ll see you when you come back......

cocksucker.

Love,

Arthur