Shadows for Breakfast

Embracing the difficulties of communication

by Wes Biggs

I think I'm going blind from not seeing anyone. I've been running into walls, making telephone calls, writing out my will in dry-erase marker on white board tombstones if I should die before my wake. I've been squinting at myself in the mirror but not feeling very bright.
* * *
Internationale Situationniste: "But we have different reasons to despise the student and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his complaisance in the face of the misery of others. For him, there is only one real alienation: his own." Discuss.
* * *
See, I'm losing my senses. I'm gonna pop my eardrums, I'm gonna bust a drum. I'll be deaf at 22 and dumb at 21.
And I wish I could tell you it wasn't my own fault. (Falter? I hardly know her.) I'm for foresight, but only in hindsight, and it's all behind me now, lurking leerily like a hungover shadow waiting for the midday sun to let it overtake its prey.
If this is the sensible world, give me artificiality. I want to smell your bourgeois perfumes, scents in the breeze from the strangers passed by. I want to see your bubble gum stains on the sky-gray concrete path. Motorola! Coca-cola! Aureola! Parabola! Consumer culture! Grass and leaf mulcher! I'm going shopping for bimbos! Buy one get one free!
It's not that there's nothing to see. Sights of beauty seldom pass, but when they do I feel an ass. Not literally; I lack a lass. She's a vision, but I just can't seem to get her to focus.
* * *
Internationale Situationniste: "A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking." Discuss.
* * *
I wish we could see eye-to-eye. A formula: eyes<+>2eyes. Reduces to eyes<+>3. Ice cubed. Fridge-id. What would Freud have to say?
When the truth is found to be lies, yadda yadda. You might think you're slick, but you don't have the grace to pull it off.
Waking up is a surrealistic pillow fight. I eat surreal for breakfast and pace the halls playing charades with myself, trying to make sense of these sensations.
It comes down to this: I've got attraction marks on my veins. I'm on a heroine kick. I'll see you in the ICU. I need you intravenously.
I've got a new leech on life. Can you keep a secretion from one of life's little lesions? You're a cut above.
* * *
Internationale Situationniste: "(The student) embraces every available contradiction and then mutters darkly about the `difficulties of communication' from the uterine warmth of his religious, artistic or political clique." Have another beer.

(SI. references from "On the Poverty of Student Life." c.f. http://www.nothingness.org/SI/. Identify all the puns in this column and win a special prize. E-mail wbiggs@scf.usc.edu.)