IT IS TIME TO CELEBRATE WITH RUM AND DAIQUIRI MIX, W00T W00T.
ALSO, DRABBLES FROM LAST NIGHT'S VERGE-OF-EXHAUSTIVE-SANITY-CHAT-WRITING:
"Tennis shoes aren't meant for tennis," Ilia says to Zelda one day while they are drinking on the deck. She is thinking this is something new, to say out loud what is otherwise assumed. Art is just mimetic speech in conceptual tongues, and Ilia is no artist, but she certainly is here to tell a story.
"I don't park in my driveway," she muses on another, "But I drive on the parkway. How crazy is that?" The world is sideways, backwards, upside-down and she hates it.
"Broken ankles are just God's way of saying high-heels are accidents in wait," just like snakes in the grass or falling in love, and she cries recklessly over back alleys and Zelda's perfectly scandalous, naked ankle draped over the bed.
"I don't think I'm in love with you anymore," she says and walks out of the door -
- and
out
of
her
life.
--------------
"I haven't thought of you at all," he says to the walls that seem closer every day, like old friends who can't stay away. The world curls around him like a fist, and Link knows - he knows, he knows, he knows - he must get out of this empty place, but where else could he go? Forever, he is Nothing here, and Nothing has nowhere to go but here.
Where else could he find Nowhere but in something, somewhere? He is No-Name and No-Face, and this is Nowhere Land, a place where people pass through time and mean Nothing more. Objects in motion, he thinks once, and then never again, because Nothing is no easier without a fate.
"I haven't thought of you at all," he says to emeralds and sapphire and ruby-locked doors to places and worlds that teeter on the edge of a sword.
But what lies beyond Nothing? (More Nothing, of course!)
---------------------
"JESUS CHRIST, HOW MUCH DID WE DRINK LAST NIGHT?" Link screamed maniacally, poking ("ow, ow, ow, ow!" the chorus went) at his newest set of ass antlers, which had settled themselves pluckily against his left ass cheek in perfect union to its right ass cheek sister (in-law) and SCREAMED in a wildly frictional fantasia of cheap tattoo ink, "PROPERTY OF PURLO: DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200 UNTIL DADDY HAS A NEW CIRCUS TENT."
"Personally, I think it's HOT," Purlo yelled over the racket as Aerosmith rocked this way over airborne frequencies set to the high-pitched octave of HEAVY METAL and AND IT'S TOO LOUD, YOU'RE TOO OLD, MAN and Ilia rolled her eyes like Las Vegas jackpot dollar signs and waved emphatically to Zelda, who was 10.213 feet too far away wrapped up in serious meditation to the old school sound of Bob Dylan and obnoxious plaid print of an old couch.
"THERE IS TOO MUCH Y-CHROMOSOME GOING ON HERE." She battled Steven Tyler and came to a draw, and made a circular tumble of legs and body and drunken wheeling to the perpendicular heaven of 70s upholstery to curl like a cat against Zelda's side. She lifted a head phone and yelled, "WE CAN'T STAY HERE, THIS IS MAN COUNTRY."
"JESUS, I KNOW," Zelda and made a half-circle of petticoats around them both. "BUT THERE'S A WHOLD WORLD OUT THERE WITHOUT ASS-ANTLERS AND BOB DYLAN AND LESBIAN COUCHES, SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO GO?"
So they didn't.
-------------------
"It's called smooooooth liquidation," he says swaying toward her like a tiger on vaseline (better than David Bowie imagined!), dancing forward in a jaunty, ungraceful motion of inebriated hip thrusting and un-rhythm, the kind that would make music unwind to see it, but fuck sound-motion, fuck lyrics - all it does is make her laugh and that is something worth singing about.
He skirted the edge of bed and its jutting sword sides, ready to cut hips and bruise egos, and collapsed into the pile of her pillows like a sack of lively, drunken potatoes. "I'm trading in my MG for a Chrysler Lebanon - shit, how did it go again?!"
"Hell if I know," she says, all downward motion, like a toppling Shiva - all flailing arms and feminine wile - collapsing with cement-brick-heavy on his chest, and that's all the weight he's willing and ready to bear right now, dizzy like a spinning top filled up with bubblegum rum, and he giggles almost like a girl when he feels her fingers preying on the tangled laces of his trousers while wishing for Shirley Temple cherries and martini olives.
music fumbled in his mouth along with her hair and something that wanted a voice but didn't have one. It might have come out as "I love you," but Cake rambled manically, "I want a girl who cuts through ribbons with a machete - "
"I have a pitch fork," she grinned against his navel.
He knew that, but goddamnit, he wanted that machete -
- but alas! -
(he falls in love with her anyway).
---------------------
So why do you think they wrote "here to go" on that birth certificate, boy? You think it some kind of joke, a trace of divine trickery that you are here and they aren't, and you've got the save the world now, won't you boy? Do what Daddy says, what Uncle says, what God says, what the ecclesiastic flesh of that goddess in heavy petticoats says (naked in your mind, where you always knew her best) - do it, and never wonder if you had a say, and what would you say, boy, if given the sword and any sense of uncertain footing?
There's a world out there full of dark and heavy things, and the people are calling for A Hero (TM), a noble sort that's short of thinking, shorter on time, and here you are here to go, dressed for battle and dressed to die, ready for the sense of readying that nobody is really born ready for (but they'd like to make you think different, wouldn't they!) I raped and pillaged in my day, but what have to you to your name but empty script and a binding truce to sword and coffin?
So go on, boy, keep to your divine duty - prophecy is writ in your skin, in your mind, and that angel is waiting in petticoats, waiting to be unbound, and that's what you're really going for, aint't it boy? Let's be honest now, that's what you've got is honesty now; dead man tell plenty of lies, and they have plenty to say in your name when you're gone (that you never quavered, never feared, never were), but that's not the lesson you're wanting to hear
because:
In the scripture it is written, "He who lives by the sword, dies by it" -
- but I suspect you never listened well, anyhow.
-----------------------------
On the third morning of the third month of the third year of their marriage, Ilia awoke to find her husband speaking in tongues. Like strangers passing by, each word lingered in the space of her conscious, acknowledged but dismissed, heard but unheard in that slippery way of mistranslation. The world had changed somehow, moved forward with the aggressive forward motion of clocks, and here she sat in the middle of the torrential downpour of ticking like an idle hand or a broken gear. She felt unmoved: her hands bound, her mouth stitched shut, her words - if she had any - clumsily crossed space and time to fall on deaf ears. She was in a world without eyes or ears or self, and she was alone.
On the third morning of third month of the third year of her marriage, Ilia awoke to find traitors in her midst. Her children stared at her with hungry eyes, speaking in false tongues and wanting love she hadn't wanted to give. She was filled with a worthless wrath that had no tangible facets, no channel, no form - an all-consuming sense of having been unwittlingly shackled to little hands and little faces and little loves that had carved out a place in her all-too-crowded heart, leaving no space for her loves that felt altogether too little anymore.
"I do believe," she said in her mother-tongue, which hadn't purpose or a means in this foreign world of linguistic undoing, "that I have made a rather big mistake."
And she wants to be forgiven for sins she hasn't quite committed to, but she has a sense that this is nothing worth forgiving if she has no regrets, and what does she regret? but all the things she hasn't sinned for yet! Like the typhoon striking forests and putting castles to ruin, she is bound to leave a empty place in her wake, but she's been sure to fill it long enough, and now it's in her, brutal and excising and making empty spaces of her that she can't bridge with the Mother Directive (marry, fuck, fritter away), and it's all sorts of wrong inside and out, waiting to corrupt the Ilia that existed somewhere between the mother and the sin.
She fashions herself the new language of Smothered Selves - she found it somewhere in the bottom of empty rum glasses, amber and fire sweet - and that is something more like the girl she was meant to be, the woman she never was, the empty womb, the piecemeal heart full of fire that goes down easy - so she chases that golden directive down again and again and again and again -
- and again -
- and again and -
- happy.
