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Expecting the Worst Doesn't Protect Anyone

         So these two firefighters walk into a bar-
         Yeah, yeah, it hurt, I know. Be quiet and let me finish.
         So two firefighters go into this bar-
         No, I'm serious, it gets better, will you let me finish?
         One firefighter says to the other: "Never quite seen a fire like that before."
         And the other one replies: "Yeah, must have had asbestos in the walls or something, to have not spread like that."
         And the first one orders a drink and says, "Shame we couldn't save anything there, though."
         "Yeah, everything was destroyed, it's a real shame," his friend says. "Which is funny because we had just started dousing it when it went out. Just like that." Snaps his fingers.
         "Like that, huh?" and he snaps his fingers too. This isn't part of the joke. It gets him another drink, though.
         "Ah, who the hell knows, right? Flames are an unpredictable beast. Never quite know how it's going to go." The firefighter laughs. He thinks its funny.
         "At least no one was inside. That's something."
         "Yeah. That it is." This one hasn't ordered a drink yet. The bartender is waiting expectantly. Everyone knows firefighters tip well. No, I'm not joking. You didn't know that?
         "Though, I did hear something sort of sad. Someone, I don't know who, was telling me that the people who lived there, all their insurance got cancelled the day before. Some form wasn't filled out right." A nod of his head brings him another drink.
         "Wow. That's terrible. Talk about bad timing."
         "Talk about it. But at least they're alive, right. That's all that matters."
         "You got that right. It's a damn fine thing, being alive."
         The bartender interjects: "Can I get you anything, buddy?"
         And the firefighter says: "Sure, I'll have a soda."
         What?
         No, that's it. That's all.
         You find that funny? You're chuckling? Why? You find fires and people suffering hilarious? What kind of sicko are you? Deriving amusement from this kind of thing. Hey, look someone ran over a cat in the street. Maybe you can go and laugh at that, too. Pain's just all fun and games, right? Especially when it's not real, right?
         Sick bastards. All of you. Just sick.
         I hope someone has the decency not to laugh in your face when this happens.
         But what am I saying? You don't care. You just want to be entertained. Nobody cares.
         So why don't you just move on.
         Yeah, that's right. Get out. Move on.
         Nothing more to see here.
         Go.

Shut Up and Hold Me

om looks the same and it is the same room the same walls the same floor the same oh God its the same goddamn coffin but somehow everything looks different maybe because its the daytime and its all supposed to be brighter in the day I remember one time when my mother said to me that no matter what you're afraid of in the dark it doesn't matter because eventually the sun comes and scares all the frightening dark things away but one night I had a dream that my mother was dead and I woke up and the nightmare didn't go away so now I'm here again and my friend is here and he's dead and so now all his living friends and his living family are here and we're all getting older but time has to stop now because we all have to say goodbye but nobody wants to I can see it in their sunken eyes and in their hollow faces and so many people are here the girl next to me is shivering and I know if I ask her she won't be able to say why but when I woke up this morning the air was crisp and beautiful the sun made me squint and the world felt so wonderfully alive that you didn't think anything bad would happen on a day like this but here we are inside where the curtains are drawn and its dark but I can still see the coffin I'm sitting down but the people in front of me aren't tall enough to block it so I can see it squatting like some dark beetle with its legs retracted just sitting there feeding off all of us I'm thinking of my friend and I want to think he's whole in the coffin and I know he's not and I don't want to think of him in the ground the dirt pressing down forever and the worms and the bugs crawling in to find a feast and then there won't be anything left at all maybe there's nothing left now after all memories aren't enough you can't hold a memory, you can't rotate a memory and make it laugh or rerun it one time we went to the shore it was me and him and his girlfriend and she ran into the water and he followed and they fell and when she came up her hair fanned out and there were glistening droplets in the air the sand on skin made her sparkle like a diamond and he told me he said God I can't ever do better than this but they broke up a month later when the summer ended and now she's sitting over on the other side of the room and I can't think of a damn thing to say to her why do we cluster so close together we build these cities tighter and tighter until you can feel the breath and taste the sweat of the people who live next to you but when it comes down to it we might as well be miles apart these people are only specks and we call to each other but we can't make out the words and the gestures might as well be futile maybe he tried to call for help before the end but all he heard was his own echo mocking and jeering telling him that the final step was the only step oh God why did you do it the days always get better even at my worst I knew it had to get better some day how can you not just keep putting another foot forward and another and another and then you look up and its all okay how long could it have been bad a week maybe two thats nothing thats nothing at all why didn't you just look beyond the day and into the future oh if I only could have told you the future would have been so wonderful it was only going to get better one day I stepped forward into a dream where the world was covered in towers like gossamer, a lattice reaching for the stars and we had reached out our hands and found company and discovered that we weren't alone all those things there aren't words I remember riding a comet seeing the planets turn into golf balls like a grammar school project and everything that we ever knew could fit into a shoebox into my hand one day we'll discover that the sun has colors we don't even have names for and that you can touch gravity and that the end is not the end or even the beginning but something entirely different and maybe you wouldn't have been able to see any of that but your children would have and thats wrong to deny them thats the gift parents give to their children the ability to experience the future to see it with their own eyes and marvel that they're here that they made it but that won't happen with you because you stepped outside the river opened the door into oblivion and closed it on the rest of us and I don't understand why there's a priest here now and he's opening a book that's supposed to have all the answers but only if you ask the right questions and he's saying the words that are going to make everyone feel better but my stomach is turning and my throat has sandpaper rubbing up against it over and over while the girl next to me keeps leaning on me like I might be support but that's not going to happen it's not possible and the guys they look at me and this one guy he shook my hand so hard I didn't think he wanted to let go the priest is still talking and his words are so final this is the only funeral you will have this is the only time people will speak in your memory its too early the day is still young and yet you're two days gone the sun is too bright and too nice its too nice a day to bury someone but there is no right time the last time I buried someone it was raining and your feet are slipping in the mud and you can't tell exactly where the wetness on your face is coming from and all you see are umbrellas with wet miserable faces wanting to be anywhere else and its just depressing he's closing the book now soon we'll be going to the church and it'll be another step gone another shade handed off to the netherworld I wonder who will speak your mom or you sister or some friend it won't be me it can't be me but I don't want to hear what anyone has to say because these speeches, these words they don't speak the story they don't give a picture of you not the way it should be I remember times when you were an asshole somewhere in the past you still owe me fifty dollars to fix your car and everyone should know that and everyone should know how you asked every girl what you should get your mother for her birthday but nobody will say what needs to be said because its all smiles now fragmented terrible rictus grins of false happiness saying he's in a better place now but what the hell does that mean are you saying that its better to be in the ground that its better to even be with the dead when all you know and love and cherished was here in this room on this earth spinning through the stars in five thousand years you can touch a man and know him intimately and instantly without shame but now we won't ever know what drove you our best guesses are little more than crossword puzzles missing half the clues the letters are there but the feelings are not there's something missing you are behind me I can hear someone crying your sister has a face like porcelain another blow might just crack her in two when I saw her she smiled like it hurt and I bet it did but she couldn't meet my eyes and the priest has closed his book and he's giving us instructions because death is a ritual that has to be observed a certain way or else they won't stay dead and everyone is going through with it because deep down they want you to stay dead that's right no one wants you to come back and say exactly why you wanted to quit this life they're afraid you might blame one of them and maybe you might be right but even worse it might turn out that there's no reason at all and you made this terrible mistake and now all our praying and wishing can't bring it back last night I took a step backwards to the night you were born I stood there at the window of the room with the newborns screaming to be put back in the womb and I saw you all pink and fleshy and crying and as I was standing there your dad came up to me and I wanted to cry because he looked so young and happy and he said to me he told me thats my boy there and oh God the story is that much sadder when you know how it ends life shouldn't have a finale it should just go on and on and on and now I look at your father and there's just emptiness in his eyes oh God how could you that's not how it's supposed to be you're supposed to let him die first and remind you of your mortality and now you've gone and reminded him and I keep thinking of when you were born and I see your sister but she wasn't there she'll never know how happy her parents were when you were born that's why they had her because they didn't realize they would love a child so much and they had to have another and now its only her waiting for us to pay last respects in this room I file past with the serpentine mourners and this isn't the end its never the end time isn't straight it follows a knotted path and we have no choice but to perceive its absurd linearity I tried looking for the girl to meet her to see her to let her know maybe I don't know I ran down alleys of the years and from thugs of endless mortality but she was nowhere to be found time is a funny thing and its too easy to lose yourself one time I looked in a mirror and I swear it wasn't my face there's an infinite number of places where this never happened but there's an equally infinite number where it did I'm sure in one place it takes me twice as many steps to reach the car but in that infinite number of places I do and this time I'm not driving and I'm glad because some days I don't think I remember and the girl with me is talking she can't stop talking some people cope with silence some try to fill the silence with words but you can't talk a person back to life and nothing you say will ever mean as much as a person did stories and words are only copies people and their actions are the originals and even when the original has degraded to a cheap dogeared piece of garbage it still means more than anything written or remembered or said but in the end sometimes its all you have and I'm watching his sister and her parents get into the first car and they're moving so slow dressed all in black like executioners but its too late we've already terminated the felon and he's beyond our jeers and beyond reach and we're driving with our headlights on in the daylight I can see them in the rearview mirror I can see them but not my face and I want to ask the girl if she can still see me because on a day like today I just don't feel real someone has taken my insides and scooped them out like a pumpkin and I'm sitting here waiting for the neighborhood kids to kick my face and smash me in and let the world see how hollow and empty I am inside how I smile my useless grin even when all you can do with my head is light a candle inside and watch the glow I saw the sun set on the pyramids we used to talk about the wonders of the world and how those were the only ones left and I went to see them all glittering and shining the sun set them on fire driving a chariot down into the bowels of the sky I thought of you flaring and burning out but goddamn I couldn't remember the other wonders so I just wandered a ghost out of time with the sand crunching under my boots and your death three thousand years in the future in the future they'll enclose the sun and the planets in a crystal sphere live in the interior in the empty space and there will never be reason for crowding ever again I've seen these things I jumped the queue and saw it before I was supposed to you pushed to the front of the line and died before you were supposed to now the rest of us just have to wait our turn we're driving past my youth I think I see myself playing in the street standing there and watching these silent cars who are so stupid don't you know you're not supposed to turn the headlights on in the day all these dark sad cars with their grim sad people going to the place nobody wants to go we're all driving here and each time we leave someone behind forever I want to shout to this kid that might be me that he won't have to worry about this procession there won't ever be one for him before he knows it he'll have forever all he has to do is lose his parents and his friend and slowly watch everything he knows become chipped away bit by bit when the last person I know from these days dies I don't know what I'll do won't know who I'll be anymore but I won't be myself because the people you know define you and where they're gone so are you a man without an outline a person without boundaries I've gone to the point where all my friends are dead a hundred years from now and I know where they'll be buried but oh God I couldn't go to the graves no matter when I go its always snowing and I don't know what that means after all how do you face someone when you know how they'll end up I have to take it one step at a time or else I'll break and we're at the church now and we're going inside and its even darker in here maybe because it's so bright out all these people their faces are beginning to be scarred by tears we move slowly against the resistance of time the coffin follows us in sliding past I think they asked me to be a pallbearer but that might have been another place maybe it was for my father I carried his coffin and it was raining and the drops beat on the box in time with our steps the heartbeat of this planet of this life beats for all of us counting out a time that we can't possibly hear because its all around us the girl with me is holding the hand of the guy next to her and the unbearable pressure is on them all I can slide under the vice I can go sideways but what good am I if I can't take anyone with me can anyone tell me what the point is then except I knew the rules when I entered and I have to be quiet in this holy place even though you have nothing more to say to me maybe with you dead there is nothing more to say maybe silence is your final and eternal word on the subject the priest is talking about you but I wonder how much he really knew you but he's using the right words like tragedy and taken too early and I want to be angry and I want to be bitter but a day like today I just can't because everyone else is angry and sad but all the people you can blame are dead or not here and nothing this man can say will ease anything but it's not his fault that nobody is here to listen we're only here to get through this day and the next and this moment is just standing in the way not letting us get past but now he's saying his last words and making the signs and I keep expecting someone else to speak and no one is or maybe someone did that's the problem with permutations the possibilities are too endless and why can't we be somewhere where you didn't go all I know is that I'm at the coffin now with people who I don't know except for one guy across from me who once his dog urinated on me and I had to borrow some clothes from him so I could get home without stinking like a homeless man but he probably doesn't remember that anymore and right now it doesn't matter its getting brighter again people are filing out behind us and oh God you're so much lighter than I'd thought you'd be even with the six of us carrying I thought it would weigh so heavy but each step is light and its too short I want to try to think of words to say now before you're gone forever I wish I could film this and take it back with me a few weeks and show you how much people cared to see that guy over there who you used to play football with he's biting his lip and trying not to cry and that girl over there has to sit down because she can't take it anymore the air is too sodden with emotion it makes it so hard to breath and the guy behind me is breathing in a ragged sort of double time but this isn't exertion its just life and when life becomes an effort that when you know its time and someone meets my eyes but its all glass and marbles its all glistening and distant everyone is trying to pretend that they're somewhere else but the tears and the feelings are rooting them in place even as my actions are in the present and forever free nothing impedes us nothing stands to halt our purpose and the jaws of the hearse are waiting to swallow you a long time ago my cousins had their grandfather's casket in his pickup truck and goddamn if it wasn't the most touching thing I ever saw even more than when I watched Rome burn all the spires and all the palaces and the building that used to threaten the sun with their brightness all aflame I watched simple men tear down the capital of the world they raped a woman right in front of me and I think she saw me because she kept shouting words I didn't understand but she was the one who didn't understand as they kept holding her down and laughing like spiders running down your throat you can't change the past or the present or the future because they're all linked the most we'll ever do is observe but even the watching is enough I think its so sweet to see the people and breathe the air and know that you've made it where billions never will and that there's an endless line of billion ahead waiting to tread in your unwalked steps we waltz in a straight line ignorant of the currents twisting all around us and that narrowmindedness keeps us alive and keeps us whole one man stepped too far into the current and I swear he kept seeing things that weren't there he stared at my best friend and kept shrieking and asking why he had brought a young girl into this world and didn't it bother him that he was covered in blood and he said I was shaped like an hourglass which I found only slightly flattering and the glass was full of sand so full that none of it moved it just hung there sparkling eternally never flowing never running out I said it was stagnant but no he said it was so beautiful and then he slammed his head into the wall until his memories ran down in streaks down the wall and onto the floor my friend said some people might be able to read the future in the patterns but he never understood because he's never seen that nothing ever repeats everything is new there are no patterns and there are no preferences we make of the present what we desire but the choices are already decided I wish I could understand it but if I did I'd know why I'm loading a box that holds what used to be my friend's body in a dark car with a stuffy stifling interior on a ride that will be his last a ride he won't even get to enjoy in this cushioned comfort he'll ride and we'll be following again we're all standing outside and the invisible fingers of the wind are ruffling my hair and my face feels numb and the guy next to him he's looking at everything but the car and I swear to God that I hear a train whistle howling in triumph somewhere in the distance and some girl gasps far from me I think she hears it too I think I can smell the clogged stench of steam and coal I've ridden the boxcars with the hobos along the highways of the world with the stars glistening like suspended ice in the sky I've seen the sources of the sterile ancient photographs that they send us and I will never be able to deny the beauty of this world around me its cracked sidewalks and grey skies the houses built when the last war ended and passed down from generation to generation at night we used to walk down these roads and marvel at the Christmas lights one guy put so many lights on the house that it became red and green daylight and it was a magical wonderland all silent like we were the only people in the whole goddamned world no sounds but the crunching and scuffling of our boots on the packed snow and our breath expelling our souls into the air and the cold biting into our faces minute by minute but we didn't care let pneumonia take us let the common cold rot our lungs those things meant nothing sickness was just a word you got better from an excuse to stay out of school for a few days but sometimes you can't treat the sickness and you can't see the signs and the medicine that they could have given you hasn't been invented yet and even then if you didn't administer it to yourself then it wouldn't have done any good once you pelted me in the back with a slushball and it ran down into my pants and I spent an hour convincing my parents that I hadn't pissed myself where did those days go I can visit them but I can't bring them back not even if I cracked the eggshell of time in half the clay we dwell in has hardened and can't even be molded again and the girl driving the car is crying now and I want to touch her I want to tell her that its going to be okay but I can see her hair whitening and her face aging and the wrinkles cratering her face like obscene tributaries these bones will one day wither and break that muscle you call a heart will one day break and not a man alive can repair it oh God she's falling apart in front of me and there's nothing I can do how can I tell them it's going to be okay when the day will come when we'll make this trip to the cemetery and I'll be the only one driving this drive is too short history is made of these little jumps by people living these pitiful spurts of life and in fits and starts we creep inexorably toward progress when I watched the first craft shudder toward the stars I couldn't stop crying because we had made it and my friend's daughter was there and she said to me this is all out of sequence isn't it and I said does it matter the gates of the cemetery are wide open and beckoning and the lump in my throat just won't disappear as we drive right through without impediment without a stall in our neat little lines we have no choice but to soldier on toward the end ah I've been here before together the two of us walked in the abandoned pathways of an empty planet in the shadow of giant machines and relics old but not yet born and the air will be still and hallowed and somewhere ten thousand years from now everyone will leave and never look back and let the forests grow and in that pastoral paradise the clock was turned back and we walked among the artifacts of a civilization we'll never know and wondered what it all was for oh God I think I'll make love to her in the grass untouched by boots untouched by man and these distant memories will be shunted into the back closet of my head maybe I'm there now remembering in the warm air my vision haloed by shafts of the sun poking into my eyes through gaps in these verdant trees the grass at my back tickling and reminding me of just how lucky I am because I got to see history how there is no ebb and flow or cycles just forward just time carrying us all along into the graveyard littered with the memorials of the fallen all around us the signs of people who tried their damndest and just didn't make it footsteps rustle as we all walk in silent unison the girl with me is holding her arms and if its cold I can't feel it anymore and I can see the hole its already dug oh God are we that eager to get rid of him just push the damn casket in now why don't you damn you all he was my friend and your brother and your son and we should all be angry that he was taken from us but goddamn he did it to himself and it was a failure on his part and a failure on our part and now the changes are too far gone you're too far gone the priest is staring at us all with solemn eyes and I think he's looking at me and he knows and maybe he even envies he might get heaven but I have time itself and a ceaselessly unravelling ribbon of wonders lying ahead of me he's speaking these last ritual words now to bind the dead and seal the coffin and make sure that you never escape dust to dust he says but we'll all be dust in the end and I'm standing on the shores of a husk of a world all that is good and living long gone the sky filled with a swollen sun about to go into his last convulsions and its the saddest thing I've ever seen even though it hasn't happened yet but each of our shuffling steps that brings me closer to the coffin also takes us closer to the moment and in that moment even our dust of our long gone bones that has seeped finally into this world that raised us and killed us even that will be gone and we'll be swallowed and cremated by the one eye we could never close we're laying roses on the coffin now friends first and I don't want to say goodbye and I can't not now why can't let me come back in a hundred years when these prying eyes aren't here and I've finally accepted it but no the time is now and my thoughts are blank and empty as I lay this precious flower down someone behind me can't stop crying her nose is running clear mucus down her face and I don't know why I assume its a girl five hundred years from now I will tell my wife that one day she will die and I won't but don't be afraid because I won't ever leave her until the end and she'll look at me with red eyes and she'll ask me why and she'll say it doesn't matter and she'll run out into these rainy future streets where the air hums with information and the roads are paved with light and I will lose her and never see her again yes I think that will happen to me some day the coffin is behind me and there's no faces looking toward me I think I'm already gone moving ahead and past these people its like they're standing still I see the men with the shovels and the pulleys ready to perform their magic trick of making the dead disappear just when we stop looking and I don't want to go away and I know that I will and oh God maybe we'll see each other again I've tried to find the end of time they say its a loop and it runs back to the beginning and we all start over again but I've gone as far as I can and there's nothing but a wall at the end of everything and not all of my efforts will make me go any farther I'm walking away now and someone might be calling my name but it may not be now and I'm trying to remember the roguish glint to your eyes the last time I saw you but all I hear are the words to a song that won't be written for fifty years and the air whispers at me a quiet bitter wind and I can't feel my hands and I didn't want to turn my back and walk away I hope somewhere you understand all you people with your weary faces and somber complexions we're all walking away but to me you're all standing still and in the end its only me moving forward its only me vowing to never forget and knowing that in a million years this memory will be a gleaming gem filed on a shelf somewhere in a room without doors and without end and I know these memories will pass and this day will pass but that doesn't mean now I don't care and I don't feel now and oh God its so acute and sharp that I can't imagine it ever fading but I know it will the moment and the present are what really count and in the end the only thing I can do is what I'm doing now is keep walking off the shoulders of the world off into the the places you could never even imagine and if I forget God forgive me you forgive me because I will and I have to let go and you have to understand that I can only honor you and these poor flickering sparks of people in the only way that I can by doing what you weren't able to do by taking these poor stumbling steps farther away from all of you everyday I hear your voice a little less and maybe its no comfort to you in but there's nothing else I can do I hope you know there's nothing else I will do except stay alive and in the end it may be the only thing that makes a damned bit of difference and even if it doesn't its the only act I can think of that makes any sort of sense and I'll cling to that so hard they'll have to saw off my fingers to tear it away oh you don't understand how beautiful it all is until they try and take it away and I'll face those venomous hordes without fear and with all the anger seeded in my bones and I'll declare to them over and over until the years drain away and the world is silent and empty and there's no one left to listen but me with all the defiance in my lungs I'll shout I'll whisper I'll scream I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive