An Italian journalist pisses off George Clooney regarding Nescafe and the damage they have done to Africa. He will not answer the question. I cup my hands over my ears to hear a conversation that I do not belong in. I start crying when I think about Lt. Ellen Ripley and the symbolism in her actions through the first three Alien films. Beyond all that though, I walk to work the other day at the crack of eleven in the morning and I am confronted by a box. This little piece of cardboard is shaking to the left and to the right, a small rock a top of it. I look at it, perplexed because I usually expect that an inanimate object will not begin to move in front of my eyes and cause me displeasure on my usual walk to the L line train.
A guy, who is halfway through a cigarette looks at me and tells me it is a hamster. On par to a baby dumped into a trash can this little creature has been left outside Ridgewood New York's local pet land to be adopted and possibly resold and be mistreated as he so clearly was by being placed in a box. I didn't do anything. I imagined myself certainly picking up the box, leaving my god awful job and devoting my life to the happiness of this creature that breathes the same air that I do. However I ignored him and with fifteen minutes to curtain call, the pet shop would take him inside and plop him in a plastic run around where maybe he would forget his abandonment or always remember it and when an unsuspecting victim purchased him he would bite so hard on the little child finger that blood would fly, but all would be in the name of justice.
What if I was in the box. What if my landlord and his motley crew of well built Italian men picked me up and threw me in a box and then put a big rock on top of it. Considering what I have benched in the past it wouldn't have to be that big of a stone. I would wince and then when the the HUMAN store opened would they take me in, nurse me back to health and convince me that life was worth living again? I do not know. I am no oracle nor do I have the imagination to take it further than to say ,that the giant hamster that owned the store might wring my neck for my sake, or put me in the trash. I would be bruised. I would be in pain. However I would stand up and climb from the dumpster and collect myself. I would curse to myself and walk around and think of what to do next. Running from those that had hurt me, I would decide to despise everyone and not recognize why I might have been put in that box in the first place.
My feet would carry me to a train track, where I would wait for a Pacific railroad car to pass by at a sluggish rate and jump aboard like Bob Dylan may or may not have. I would just want to feel loved. I would want to be elevated feet off the ground in a soft bed and know that it wasn't going to last. I would savor the experience and appreciate the fact that I just wasn't worth it in the right time or place. I would think would the Hamster store owner feel a little bit differently if I was a cat or a little more savvy. Yet I somehow know I would end up in the Dumpster alone and tired asking anyone for pizza provided they could fulfill the need of holding me because the view out of my window just shows cars on the street and people who look tired. I go looking for matches and I find them for free yet I pay for my water. I push the top of the box and I cannot get out. I stretch out my body and still I feel ugly and I want to feel the inside of a woman and make her feel the same. To want me to be there, to stay even after it is over. But aren't I having sex my whole life when you sit in the shower in Lithuania shaving the hair from my pubes in hopes that in some effort that I will feel loved. All I saw though was a window with people outside of it in Palanga beating the every living shit out of each other. yet when I reached out to you you pulled away and that is okay. The credits start trolling and I do not bother to go to Ibiza because I have been there before. I have been to a club every single night because I live it over and over again, inside that silly little cardboard box.
I keep telling people to not let me fade away but I burnt out years ago. So who is this apparition. Who says he loves? Who gives compliments? Who tells people they are beautiful? your kiss was real and so were my lips but what about what was attached to me. Do I write this to be different or to find a place so I do not take a twine rope and strangulate myself. I watched him open a cab door on his own face and I still love him. I tell the story as if it is mine, and yet I know none of it is mine. Across the train tracks, and inside the center of Bergen or a screen with visuals it seems to exist outside of the hamsters and their cruelty but yet I cannot wrap my head around something that is so closely capped on top of me.
