The Real Stuff

Sunlight - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

The past is pathetic, and the future is uncertain. So this is where I idly sit; in the present, the here and now. Call it what you want, but it's a certain kind of purgatory. The days fall in, the nights fall out, and the only place I can move is up and down a list of wines that I've compiled through dinners with friends and lazy evenings in bed with lovers. The e-mails asking me where I have been are starting to fill my inbox, and the web traffic intensifies. Each day the pressure mounts to say and do something meaningful. The several hundred visits I am getting a day seem to have frozen me into a paranoid state of mass exposure. Who are these people? And what are they looking for? I don't think I can satisfy their appetites any longer.

Piling my way through packed bars with mardi gras beads around my neck and an orange colored band on my wrist, Carl takes us through an endless parade of clubs filled with cross-dressers wearing leather and chain mail armor. Dancing in the middle of a medley of feet that are pounding a hard wood floor, drunkenly slipping my hand down the pants of a young girl from Yellowknife in the back seat of a car while getting a ride home, kissing a woman that I used to work with at a used clothing store in the upper balcony of a hometown institution, singing karaoke in a private room downtown with a big button in the middle of the back wall that calls the waitress to bring drink after drink; there is your hero, screaming into the microphone like a possessed maniac, spitting all over the screen that provides the words to Iron Maiden's 666 The Number of the Beast.

This is a place. It used to be mine.