Once upon a time there was a winter that would end all winters. No other season could ever be this barren, this silent, this lonesome. The cough that had settled in his lungs stole his breath and he could not walk from his bed to the bathroom without stalling in the hallway for air. The house had almost no furniture in it. Any sound that found it's way in would echo around the rooms for a long while before finding some unused corner to settle into and wait for some inopportune moment to jump out and scare him while he tried quietly to get up the nerve to walk outside and check the mail for the news of his reprieve. Even on Sunday he checked that mailbox, the loneliest man in the world hoping God had finally called him home. The mailman became a lover to him in his mind, and his most hated enemy.
The letter he was hoping to receive was not a specific note from a specific someone. Just a letter from out there where he had burned all of his bridges asking him to return, to help repair the damage that the world had wrapped around itself since he had last had words with it. He just wanted to be asked. Instead, he waited alone in his house and watched the sun creep shallow angles across the wall, never staying long enough to warm the air before retreating below the horizon again.
Standing in the middle of the room trying to move his hands and mouth in perfect time with the crossroad blues coming out of the only speaker that hadn't been completely blown out in the screaming days. Swaying in the drunks clown walk, tilting almost perpendicular to the plane of the floor (not an easy task in a crooked house) then around, balanced on one leg to shuffle step sideways, never missing a beat. Later on he would practice a hobo strip tease to Sharp Dressed Man, still keeping the drunk in his limbs, following the clothes as he pulled them off with movements that always seemed on the verge of collapse but magically resolved themselves into balletic accidental grace. Elements of the old Rat on stage in the back of his mind kept it just dirty enough to be sexy- Ratty pistoning the whole piano back and forth with his legs, arms out and SERMONIZING his songs; the piano falling over on it's back as he stepped lightly to the floor. Destruction and beauty in one simple movement.
The urge to create is a destructive urge. He knew this too well. It disassembles reality and sets up a chaos in it's place. Thoughts tumbling through one another with out care for rule of law. Whole universes blown away with the sweep of a pen and new ones thrown up in their place, only to fall themselves at the whimsy of the devils of creation. And why? Just to make room for the endlessness of dream. Dream which cares for nothing and abhors permanence. The unending flux that only leads to confusion and misdirection. The constant tossing between one world and the next that unchecked eventually unbalances the mind altogether.
If one wanted to make a new beauty in the world, he would need to tear the old ones apart to gather the raw materials needed. How far could this be taken? At what point would he too broken to be put back together? All the kings horses and all the kings men were drunk in the bar and not a bit interested in what one bad egg was doing in that witches shack he called a home. Care would have to be taken. It was certainly not being given.
He often to forget to eat or to use the bathroom, sometimes for days. Shouldn't this be a sign? His mind running in circles like a long gone dog playing with itself and forgetting all else. It sits inside of itself and creates while the body falls to pieces.
He would do long convoluted math problems on the walls of his room with an old grease pencil he had found in his pocket one morning after some horrible three day binge of sleeping in the backs of pickup trucks and on abandoned porches who's house had long ago fallen away as a way of making the time go by.
He was fascinated by numbers and would kiss the clock every time an interesting pattern would show on it's face- important dates in his life, numerical palindromes, random combinations that appealed to him for no reason he could fathom. Eleven-oh-one was a lucky time to wake up, one one zero one being 13 as expressed in binary, or one-oh-one which was five, an important number in his life. He would add together the digits of any number he came across to reduce them to a single digit to decide if it was lucky or not and would sometimes have to sit staring at the clock for a minute or three before doing anything to be able to start on a three or a five or a nine. Sixes were very bad, sevens somewhat less so depending on his mood, as were eights. Fours and twos could be neutral or unlucky, but never good. Ones were always evil, which could sully the joy of seeing eleven-eleven on the clock. It was a numerical palindrome which was good. But it also added up to four which could go either way, and it was a string of ones each one upsetting him more than the last. And then, it translated as 15 in binary, which was three times five and therefor good, but also reduced to six which was terrible. The whole thing confused him horribly and he would get unsettled if he happened to glance at the clock at that minute and fidget and mumble until a more propitious number came into view.
All this damned waiting. And for what? Waiting to figure this part out so he could get back to the very serious business of slowly drinking himself to death in some anonymous bar back down in New Orleans.
~Click On the thing that says The Residents to download some Residents~
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