Amaneurosis
Anaesthetised night no longer twitching and telephone poles are acupunctural in the bloated clouds. My hand is pressed hard against the window, and I am looking at the bloodlessness of my fingertips and the soft cracking off-white paint on the wooden windowsill. My other hand is hovering in front of the electronic pencil sharpener, but my fingers are too big, I think.
Fuck that sounds like shit. There’s a loud beep from the tape recorder as I click it off. If I had a pencil sharpener I would really try to fit my fucking fingers in there. It’s clearly not working anymore, but I used to like the tape recorder because it makes you look for good words because there is only so much tape. I write that down in my notes app and I append it with “PHRASE MORE ELOQUENTLY”. While I type, I think of the three bulk boxes of cassettes I ordered during a post-Black Friday dead stock sale.
The tape recorder sits, a sad stray dog as the phone swallows the morning and me, both half-naked. I get out of bed eventually because I need to shit eat shower, but really because the battery is shot and I moved my charger to the far wall two nights ago to make myself more productive. My phone stays in bed, noising up the windowless room playing the same reel over and over, all broken-record-stuck-tape-street-preacher; yelling “This is all there is!” over amen breaks and atavistic shots of mountains and forests that are rubble and logs by now. I take the tape recorder with me to the bathroom, my emotional support puppy. I shave my legs at the start of my shower and think about whether the tape recorder is making me better at finding good words and doing its job like a good emotional support puppy should, or whether it should be sent to the farm with all the other old things I buy to make me feel better about how much I love new things.
I am picturing how good it would look in the family crypt, right next to my copy of Confucianist Kabbalah and the yet-to-be-started Ancient Grains Today, when I get caught in the thought of one last day together, a big one: a walk in the park where I can really watch its wheels run, a bar of chocolate, my hand wrapped around its cool metal snout as I ruffle its buttons, and then a slow heaving cry as that last shaky breath leaves and the whir of tape fades, goes unrecorded, hardly hangs in the air before it atomises, that comes from nothing and returns to nothing, that is itself, nothing.
I start washing my armpits but forget that I’m still holding the razor, and now I have a monastic bald patch on my left armpit. I am very grateful the tape recorder is off because I am not saying good words at all. While I dry myself, I focus on words that I might be able to say today, like aphoristic and quotidian and gizmo. I imagine scenarios I might be able to use my good words, like if the coffee shop stayed open later than 2pm and a barista looked at me all pretty and their eyes had little bits of light in them but not in a city-like way more like a tangle-of-fireflies way and I could say to them a small flat white please and by the way your eyes are bucolic and I would record the whole thing and the little silence that follows my speaking would be the sound of pure human connection without any of the fat that clouds experience, and the whole rest of the day would be the shadow and the cradle of our life together.
I put on a singlet, and before I look in the mirror I remind myself to take my meds and fantasise about having enough energy to jerk off. The singlet is alright aside from how it exposes my balding left armpit. I pick up a hoodie-toupée off the floor, and the tape recorder fits snugly in the right pocket next to two cherry stems that I failed to tie into knots with my mouth and one piece of gum in its wrapper that I successfully chewed with my mouth.
Aha! Phytogenesis. I take the tape recorder out and press the button once it is close to kissing me and say one two three check and then pause to say phytogenesis before I click it off. God I feel good, real good. I lace my shoes and think of the word demiurge. I see it in black sans serif over a white expanse and trace its syllables with my tongue. My socks are mismatched but it doesn’t really bother me.
It takes me a while to lock the door because I’m shaking with excitement and clutching one hand tight around the tape recorder. While I fumble with the key, I think about words and I think about getting a diary; one that I could use to begin drafting blueprints for a device that connects via Bluetooth to the brain stem and uses a series of graph isomorphisms and matrices to imbue a goodness metric onto the linguistic subspace of thought and does some sort of modified Dijkstra algorithm to find the uniform-most-good word. Or I could use the diary to write down an exhaustive pro-con list of the quarries in my area based on both the accessibility and price of semi-hard rock and somewhat-harder-than-semi-hard chisel, so I could use the two to slowly and painstakingly etch a body for the words that stick out thumblike to me. I debate the two vigorously and dialectically while carefully jiggling the doorknob to make sure it’s locked.