Solidity: Rourke's Routine, Chapter 2

Others feebly try to convince themselves they won’t succumb to cancer. If something were to be a miss it was something to be fixed, with haste. A more favorable outcome, amongst comrades in the sociality of optimism, is that there is something wrong with normality. It’s a sad state of contradiction that the true optimists are those that acknowledge what’s wrong with the world and ignore it. In their eyes there’s always something more to do - something bigger to fix. These people, who I’ve already referred to as most people, have deceivably convinced themselves that they experience what is, as would be defined, a verifiable happiness. These are the beautiful people. These people, however, do not understand solidity.

Rourke, as he will forth still be addressed, unless you’re one who believes that he is me, is someone that now shares this common deception with most people. Rourke would fall asleep every night to the relaxing sounds of free form jazz as played from the elderly dark complexioned man, Jasper, who would without fail practice his love for this art form at 23:11 every night while residing in the flat above. He would almost compulsively make sure that everything was in order down to minute scale before going to sleep, even if only to wake up, and he would order the objects on his bed side table to have a certain arranged composition – he would look upon aghast objects which, after being ordered, would appear to now flow freely and have an unconsciously liquid presence about them. If he had left Sal, who he had just seen in the milk-bar an hour before, at around ten past the hour, on a bright and seemingly empty note he would heave a sigh of relief. This life wasn’t striking him as normal, and it made a great muse. He would rub his eyes and take three quick and stubborn glances to make sure of where he was leaving. Rourke’s situation was different to most peoples. Rourke wouldn’t dream. But then, what is dreaming if you’re Rourke?

Jasper, however irrelevant he was to Rourke, as he was only the melancholic sound that he would fall asleep to, could have been seen as a polar opposite to Rourke as he did not care for solidity and he understood that solidity wasn’t attributed towards him or what was left of his life. Jasper had inherited a southern fortune passed down his a pre-generation in his family decades ago, and all the while, keeping in mind that this fortune was dirty money and had been largely accredited to his distant relatives trading themselves off as slaves and sacrificial carcasses for the white man’s tyranny, Jasper didn’t have a problem in spending the old money so he didn’t have to work. For the final forty years of Jasper’s life he had not worked a day and had subsequently become a night owl. He would sleep all day, having dreams and terrors reminiscing of oceans consistent of insolidity. He would finally awake when the moon was lucid and florescent, which, with insolid as Jasper’s life was, was at an immeasurable  time around ten hours past the stroke of midday, and yet, despite wavering, he would always finish a tall bottle of whiskey by 23:11. Just when Rourke was drifting to sleep.