The Urban Soup (Part IX)

This is the point in my life where series stall and all the threads come undone from the gestalt whole? What do I mean by "urban soups"? Where is the continuity? Who names these posts? Is it A.D.? Or is is autocompleted by blogging software eager to please? (Which raises issues about the limits of the "self" and other faux-profound impostures.) I am still trying to adequately characterize the soupiness, the thrown-ness, the diffusionary nature of what we urbanites do. We plod and find our ways into strange hallways and the corners of derelict kitchens and we talk and mingle with come who may. Very much like miso soup's little giblets making Jupiter patterns as you stir and drink. I wonder: is it belittling to the people I encounter that I cram their impressions into an overwrought metaphor that somehow spawned a series? But enough metacommentary. Nobody needs it anymore; no lessons are learned; no insights are to be had; nobody will be saved; nobody will be lost. At least not today.

It's a party. We've gathered here to furnaces turned up too high, to cigars and cigarettes and booze and pot and other things, I'm sure. We're here to stand in the hallway for a while awkwardly until the drugs can give us some approximation of a hive-mind mentality, at which point we'll be glad to spill our life stories to strangers, to talk of the end of the world, of twisters beyond the horizon, about our respective social work so as not to appear like degenerates, about the latest "noisecore". We reach the point where your humble author is pouring perfectly good wine on the floor in honour of those who could not be here today: his one ritualistic imperative, like the totemic Buddha imperative, like the don't-step-on-the-craks-or-you'll-break-your-mother's-back compulsion, like the desire to wrap up the conversation so I can take blond dreadlocks dude's wine and the impulse to clarify the different etiologies of mouth cancers and throat cancers even though by this point I'm deep in the well and just want to sleep. But there are people to talk to and tasks and pathfinding phenomena that emerge. But eventually we get onto the street to spectral playgrounds and big 3 a.m. slices and friendly winos and even some members of my alternate linguistic community. Arguments at the trees follow: alienations of memories and geodesic domes under the constellations quite like stonehenge.

I'll hedge my bets that the ambulance operators could caryr my stretcher to the emergency ward from here. Mercifully, that will not be necessary.

Consider: "Is your religion real when it costs you nothing and carries no risk? Is your religion real when you fatten upon it? Is your religion real when you commit atrocities in its name? Whence comes your downward degeneration from the original revelation?"