Horses don't stop.

Visiting Hyena in Providence, Rhode Island.

Visiting Hyena. We’ve only hung out five times in the entirety of our knowing each other but they’re still the friend who lingers at the front of my mind. Growing up in the same town and attending the same high school builds a rapport that can make its way out of the Reply-Guy pit. Now we are tried and true friends despite the fact that every time we’ve hung out we’ve watched a movie at the movie theater. That will change now that I will be visiting their apartment in Providence, Rhode Island. Movie theater to sleepover. Friendship is funny like that.

Hyena has an ear worm, or an dizziness-vertigo kind of thing that means when they look too quickly at Wendy, “YEowcH” and clutch their head. The fact that every human in this is anthropomorphized means that Wendy is actually not a human. Wendy is a cat. For some reason Hyena decides that they will go to work loopheaded. Now this would be well and good if Hyena worked on spreadsheets and things of that sedentary manner but Hyena works in a theater company as a stagehand and a carpenter. They climb a twelve-foot ladder regularly. Heavy vertigo and a shift at the ladder factory.

Hyena has no car so instead of carpooling with a coworker I drive them. After dropping Hyena off at work I finally have a chance to eat my LGBurrito because this is Rhode Island. Hyena bought themselves a breakfast wrap called the George. Could be a Costanza reference. Who knows?

Standing outside the theater, gnoshing on my LGBurrito, I spot a blanket fallen from a homeless woman’s hand. I grab it, call out to her and return it. She takes the blanket from me and begins to burst into tears. She takes a seat on the curb and I join her, finishing the last of my burrito, which is immortalized for the day with a stain on my jeans. The homeless woman tells me she has just been robbed and has very little trust for anyone. She tells me this is the third time her application for subsidized housing has been stolen along with all the rest of her personal effects. She tells me she’s never been robbed as much as she’s been robbed in Providence. She has been robbed so many times, had so many credit cards replaced that the bank has accused her of bank fraud.

Kindness is very easy. Kindness is more often than not choked by discomfort. are halfheaded when they feel discomfort and because of this they shy away from anything that could deprive them of half of their head, not knowing they are wearing only half themselves. Humans have internalized comfort into paragon. Some things do not just come your way. They do not know they can be the reason why someone has a good day. She was filled with scorn, that hatred that felt like the only thing she truly owned. I do not blame her, I expect in the conditions she described to me it would be difficult to wake up with anything other than a discomfort at the crick in your lifes back, there had been a time when I felt like I was walking around with my head chopped off but at least I had the comfort of a roof over my head. Sometimes it is fashionable to be a vagrant, but has never been fashionable to see a vagrant. America would rather flush the innards of their working class down through the sewers then give them the human dignity of a place to rest your head. I felt an intense companionship as she told me about how hard she was trying to get her life on track, how hard she had been beaten down.

At some point she took a pause to complain about how they’d even stolen her cigarettes, how she bought some brand, I’ve forgotten which one in particular but she bought it because it was “so cheap” and every convenience store it was so cheap and look, she was still robbed, even of her cheap cigarettes. While she was sleeping. She kept repeating this. I concurred, telling her the obvious, that there’s no point in robbing a homeless person because what could they have that you do not. I tell her I have cigs in my car and she looks at me and asks “would you really do that for me?” and I of course said yes. I stand, crossing the street to my car, fetching my pack of cigarettes from my bag. When I had put them in the bag, some half minute before putting myself into the car I had said to myself that “even though I am trying to smoke less someone may need a cigarette and who knows, it may be me?” which is something I’ve been hearing an echo of recently, as just in case means that somewhere, there will be a case; operable.

I talk as she lights her cigarette. “Yesterday, I was at a Palestine rally which I was skirting around the side of because my friend had given me his camera after saying he would not take his own pictures because there were other people with cameras, with their own pictures. I had looked at him funny because why bring a camera if you do not want to take pictures. They cannot see what you see. What I see now through the lens of a camera. I walk along the sidewalk, not the block that they’re holding it at. I’m walking and there then I. I hand a wad of cash, wad, because I am always anxious about giving money away, which means I hardly look at my wallet when I do. I only carry bills larger than ten. I handed the wad to this homeless man along the rally’s marching path, and he looked at me in shock, so many marching for a cause, so many walking past those who also needed help. We can help everyone.” We should help everyone. She tells me about how she loves her sons and how they’re such sweet boys and doing so well for themselves. I asked “where do they live?” she says “they live in Providence.” She says “You’re younger than them but you still remind me of them”. I wonder what they are doing letting their mother stay out on the streets. After an hour of talking we part, having exchanged an embrace, forty dollars and three cigarettes.

Feeling odd in a good way I wander down the street into a coffee shop Hyena recommended to me. Inside the default tip 25% coffee shop Girlfriend is posing Boyfriend in front of the wall of chupchicks and oddities. Kitsch wall, someone put a lot of thought into what all of these items would be yet they are still pale. Very nice to take a picture of. Boyfriend smiles and Girlfriend reaches out and twists his chin to angle it sharper. She takes the picture and smiles again, they embrace and kiss. It’ll probably be a slaughter one day. There’s no way this stands for eternity. There’s no way we’ll all make it out unscathed, all make it out unharmed. Even the wall of Kitsch will fall.

A professor next to me is drinking his espresso molasses slow. He squeezes the lid so it creases down the middle and stirs the espresso with it, paper grading.

Hyena’s roommate works at this coffee shop as a baker. I can’t speak for the coffee, the baked goods though? The baked goods though. Shuffling past the BoyfriendGirlfriend is a homeless person. I cannot tell if they are man or woman; nonbinary homeless dude in the coffee shop. They shuffle in and ask everyone, person by person, patron by patron, and I only know this because while I had noticed them before I hadn’t noticed their asking, only after they asked me “you have any money to by me a pain au chocolat?” politely saying no, or “no I am approaching my credit limit”. Partly because of credit and partly because I gave all the cash I had to a different homeless woman. Inconclusive results on if lying can be kind.

I check my bank balance with my debit card dead everything I’ve bought has been on my credit card. My mother feels uncomfortable mailing my debit card in the mail. Connecticut has me crazy, loopheaded, Dramamine state, wall to wall highways, every town a pit stop. All the cows go to graze on what’s left of my half sided brain and I go mad.

I’ve visited Hyena to see a play. I leave the coffee shop with the entangled, endless, enmeshed, remains of GBIORYLFFRRIIEENNDD. Hyena will stand as proud as his crew work twelve feet off the ground and however many feet the Dramamine adds. A head turned gasp like Disco Elysium psychic damage.

Theater-wise, I’m an idiot. I would not exchange my idiocy for anyone else’s. Only thing you need to know about this play is that it’s a Reagan-Gorbachev Yaoi kind of thing. Completely false, but if you see it you’ll know it. I am tempted to lie up and down on the duvet cover, cross myself up and down after that. It’d mean nothing as I am not Christian, I do my best to ignore all of this carnivore behavior.

After the show I drove Hyena home. Hyena wanted her sister to visit but the sister is in Boston and Hyena is Dramamined and cannot take the train, the sister does not want to take the train either. Hyena asks if I want to spend another night sleeping on the couch. I shrug about it because it is still the day and we haven’t even gotten lunch.

Lunching with Hyena’s coworkers at this millennial bar where the spitting image of AOC is having her upper thigh trawled by the spewing image of Gavin Newsom’s hand. I get a Modelo Negra and text a man in Ireland that they do in fact taste different then Especials. Food-wise I’m talking to the waitress saying “get me a Sloppy G.I”. I wonder what Vietnam would think. America’s very weird “Yea sorry for bombing your country we’ll name a sandwich special at a bar in Rhode Island after you guys!” There are many such cases of this kind of franchised apologies and pseudo-sympathies. We recycle them for all kinds of events in the American psyche, “Geez that happened and it Sucks! But uhh, at least Kissinger is dead this time?”

I eat my thing with a gusto that the thing itself is missing. Go home G.I. The onion rings are good. The bits I’m coming up with left of right are better. A coworker of Hyena’s takes note and antes in. Sarcastic, very sarcastic and I am responding with even more sarcasm and Hyena begins to regret sitting between the two of us. Hostility in bit form, Hyena tells me afterwards that the coworker didn’t mean to be rude and I tell Hyena that I didn’t find any part of the situation rude.

I have secretly made up my mind to sleep on Hyena’s couch. I want to spend as much time with Hyena as I can so when Hyena asks if I will stay the night I shrug. Hyena asks if they have bored me, if they are a bad host and I, a disappointed visitor. I laugh them off. “The way I see it my visitation hours with are so sparse that I’ll take whatever I can get” Thankfully, what I get is the company and companionship of a friend who I would, and I tell no lies in this, no embellishment and no perjury. I would die on the stand, could die on the stand if the judge finds me wanting and all would be meaningless, haphazard and quite damnably silly because being next to someone who I love is enough, even if they are sleeping across the hall with the door cracked to let Wendy tramp up onto the bed.

Sitting next to an Irish man I met on Instagram dot com four years prior, his face new, his clothes worn, he gave me me change for the bus and change in my heart that maybe I hadn’t been insane the whole time I’d been twiddling digital thumbs, only insane for a brief period that I then crested and figured most of the odd ends I’d picked up out.

Friendship exists though, friendship can make some things lose their caution and be simply put, understood. Be friends with people. Let it exist in flesh and blood. People beg for friends. People cry, covered in snot, squelched faced, wishing they would have something they think of as a friends. Idiots. Be a friend.

I have learned it is okay to be lame. To lay around. To give time for larger walls. Part of the process.

Someone steals my jacket while I sleep over because I leave my car unlocked. When I return home I realize I actually did not bring my jacket and it is laying on my bedroom floor.

It’s Hyena, Hyena’s roommate and I; the aforementioned baker. She is called by all of manner of names that are not her name but for the purpose of censorship we’ll call her Goose. Hyena has a third roommate, but they are elusive, hard to pin down, I see them maybe half a bakers dozen times in my stay there.

Warning for legibility in this next part, shit that should have gone at the start. this next part I talk about Geese the band and Goose, what I’ve renamed Hyena’s roommate. Goose loves the band Geese.

Deep chaired I talk on all manner of eras lower than the chair, things I talk about because Hyena is taking their medicine and Goose a fascination with Geese, the band. Goose has wanted to meet me since they learned I’ve met Geese which is a glowing recommendation of my social skills or lack thereof as one of these times is when I cornered Cameron Winter in an open field in between picking up trash off the ground to cover the cost of my ticket to Bonnaroo. I ask “Can I get a picture with you please?” he walks unrecognized across the festival grounds except by me. Cameron, hazily replies that he remembered me from the night before. That Night I was one of two people to stay after Geese, the 3am set. Somewhere south of four am, I am talking to all of Geese, getting all their autographs, telling guitarist Emily Green that I came all the way from New York and Cameron chimes in that they’re from New York and I go “I KNOW!” because I am very excited to be meeting my favorite band. I am sweaty and shirtless, and I probably smell like a hog, but they entertain me. I speak mostly with Emily. She seems real honored that I’m talking to her and I’m real honored of her listening. A year before they explode in popularity, six months before Winter drops his solo project Heavy metal. Geese are not yet known. I am talking to one of my favorite bands. I don’t remember much of the conversation, I remember vague outlines of New York City, music, the South, life, Hatsune Miku Tomato, ten minutes. It really meant a lot to me. Those folk are about two years older than me and at some point, in the conversation, I realize how ages work. I get real emotional about it as I walk away, buzzing with adrenaline, feeling half real. I see myself in them. New York City, underwater. I wake up at 6am for my 7am shift. I toil again. Toil toil toil. Who up toiling? In that toiling time I stumble into Cameron Winter and the loop closes. Goose listens rapt and I do the same, as if entranced by my own words. After stumbling into Cameron, I find the entire band waiting outside of a makeshift church. They are about to officiate a wedding. I gawk, fanboy from afar. I am on shift and had not yet learned that I am allowed to hangout and ignore the fact that I am working.

Hyena has returned at this point, they’d returned far earlier but I was relishing the story and had not noticed anything other than putting the words in the right order. We start Superbad. In the first twenty minutes of Superbad, Goose falls asleep, 5 minutes later she wakes up and declare she will go to bed. She has work in the morning. Two loaves over each hand. Forty minutes, Hyena falls. Curled. I commit a common joy of finishing the entire film no matter how sleepy I get. I cannot pause because maybe they would wake and be unhappy with that pause and I cannot wake them because it is their right to sleep and it is my right to stay awake, finish the whole film and report back to them. Within the last ten minutes Hyena wakes and says “oh shit I missed the whole movie.” “yeah you really did” and we agree “Jonah Hill is one of the most miserable humans put to screen.” Not in a good way. Hyena bids me good night after we talk for some time.

Hyena’s set the couch up in the sleeping position for me. I like to sleep in my own bed. I go to long lengths to sleep in my own bed each night. Yet on that night I looked the other way when I lay my head down to sleep, I pointed my ear towards the stoplight out the window. The sirens called me to bed and the honk, screech music and machinery were the softest of lullabies, I drift off happy. I’d love to live in a city again. It is nice to know there are other people around.

Various bit actors with roles as “convenience store worker with dull looks behind eyes.” are making millions, that kind of sadness is built on experience and cannot be pantomimed. Not everything is suited for a different flesh.

Hyena has no interest in an echo, all of Hyena’s sound is from source. Sometimes howling source as they turn their head too fast. I drove home that morning grinning. The next week is miserable because I miss the city.

Hyena invites me to their Halloween party. I tell them I’ll make it if I can.
I can.

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PART TWO. THE HALLOWEEN PARTY.

I steal away to Hyena’s room to write, I balance my word processor onto my knee in such a way that I need to be typing for it to maintain it’s upright position. It is amusing to be such a stranger to so many. “I’ve been living in New Haven doing work for labor unions.” “I’m in Queens, professional gaffer.” I am lying about things people wouldn’t know the first thing about and calling my own bluff to double the lie up.

Years wind by and cigarettes wind up a devotional practice. Wide eyed they scope the patio from the window above, sights set on finding a cheery cherry that’ll beckon them to a sooty lung. They quibble, deciding if it’s worth running into something they so desperately want that it is sold at every corner store they’ll pass on the way home. It’s a cigarette so everyone is okay with pretending it’s godly or ritual or whatever they say. People will go great distances to justify their lack of justification. All nonsense to me. Keep your gods away from me, I have my own. I toss them a cigarette and tell them go crazy. They wide-eye candy-shop smile, and invite me to join, I decline. Let them have their fun.

It all must become devotional. Some something needs to be given the time. Between all of the dull meaningless things we populate our lives with. Something must buffer between it. All of it is wonderful. All of it is devotional, in a fine toothed gradient that hums like a razorblade from one side of the week to the other.

Vapid conversations and meaningless advances, meaninged or vapid I am always unsure and uncaring because what is my business is no one else’s until they make it my business to be in business with them. I am reminded of a quote from Conte d’Ete by Eric Rohmer where the protagonist, a matty heally looking fellow says “I likes luck to push me, I am not strong on conquest.”

Hyena scares themselves, drunk and saying some offhanded personal detail that comes off as endearing. Hyena realizes that one of the people in the group does not know Hyena and “I’m sorry that I don’t know you that well and I apologize if I subjected you to myself-” which is a ridiculous thing to say because Hyena is wonderful and to be subjected to them has never been an issue. The stranger says it wasn’t an issue and Hyena walks off to reconfigure. A room full of tape.

A day after the Halloween party I show an actress in a short film I am gaffing on the word processor and she says it’s actually kind of brilliant and I respond that I should be napping because last night at 3am I was sitting on a futon in Rhode Island writing about devotional practices and now I am sitting in a field with the actress and upwards of ten thousand dollars worth of gear waiting for a body to regain its motion.

Costumed liars tell uniform truths. Though the uniforms make a couch for those lies, constructed to hold those facts in palatable frames because the last thing I want to do is explain that I am still young. Still attending something I feel no use in finishing. Hyena knows this, Hyena knows all of this and more and my trusting them is itself uncommon because I do not trust most people though this is not for any personal reason. I suppose I find myself distrustful. Of little influence on the knees of the giants I swing my fists. My fists do not connect and I do not need them to. I only want to swing.

Men at parties often don’t know who to talk to so they find someone with a beard they approve of and try to find their approval. I admire that straightforward attachment to masculinity that I could never aspire to. I ape it for their benefit, nodding along to their Brooklyn apartment, the four walls dreaming of children learning how to sing and dance and act.

A lot of it feels very middling. Very demeaning to listen to. One must go into a party hoping that the people who are designated drivers are designated for conversation with each other. I am not supposed to be listening to the dreams of the rich and reckless Brooklynites who find themselves in Rhode Island for a Halloween party. I am meant to be punched in the face. It makes me anxious hearing about the ease of another’s life. It makes want to uninstall the video games from my desktop and the applications from my phone and start every day staring at a blank wall that will be filled with something new at the end of it.

I could find a way around this, find the proper course for threading the camel’s eye, could acknowledge that there is no need for animal cruelty, no need to walk across that stitch and hope it does not rip as it has so many times before. One could simply unravel what has caused so much tension and go about it that way, with threads hanging neighboring ankles. Breaches of trust lies like ankle weights against my wrists. Unbound; more room for trysts and trys of other things, things I’ve already tried. An opening of the cacophony of starting nothing each day because you feel there is nothing to start.

One day it will change. I think I have been waiting for one day and not going out and finding it. I need to be punched in the face again.