It's like a secondhand reference, a quoted quote taken for granted so long it becomes one itself -- mama, mama, I'm tabula rasa, fill me up with your lies. I rise every day like a wisp from the sewers, breathe Caesar's last dying breath and expire it once more.
So people are born and people die; in the space of it all somebody, somewhere, shoves you up against a wall and screams something that reverberates around your skull too subtly to ever get back out, and that explains it all, or so they say.
If only it were that simple -- Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.
Mexican man playing an accordion on the side of the road -- polka, like a venom, courses through the littered curb. On the other side I see them walking with a purpose of their own, limbs and muscles powered by hamster wheels inside.
If I could freeze a scene like this, every expression of emptiness, each unspirited note, and let every sound die out into ether, I might know what's really going on behind the facial facades. But there's no reprieve, no olly-olly-oxenfree in the game of life.
Nothing doubles back on itself often enough to make a reality of sophistry and legerdemain. We build Babels to the wind and when the winds change tear them down. All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.
Less poetically, I feel drained by the vacuum of life, the wrold of conventions that lie like imaginary lines underpinning the very context of civilization. I kick the ground but my feet fall through, a twisted Emperor's New Clothes without any emperor at all.
We are weaned on tunnel vision, not told what to see but where to see it. We walk through crowds alone, chaotic bumpercars careening through a circus of circumstance.
It will all pass by, the accordion extinguished, the hollow smiles turned to hollow frowns, and I'll pass by too, my toenails still itching where they just can't possibly be scratched.
Keep walking. I've got nowhere better to go.
And then, when I see those chairs in the huge downstairs room of the Dental Building, it all starts to make sense. This is what we're here for. This is what it all means, laid out in hygienic aisles and seats of crumpled vinyl: Life's a cavity, fill it how you can. Dust to dust. Cavities fill other cavities; we are whole, we are holes.
We all ride dentist's chairs on the river of life, mouths opened wide. My appointment is up. Fill my cavities.