The Abandoned Station

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Names, Dates, Receipts

-sometimes they can leave you but keep sharing the same bed.

That's not it exactly but I think it gets the point across. It feels clear in my head because I can remember sitting on the pale blue couch and hearing it leap out of the television with a roundhouse kick. The feeling of a roundhouse kick as Rupert Morrison illuminates Jessica Harlow on what their relationship has truly become.

Nothing terrible, but nothing worthwhile, either.

I came up with that one.

Cred where cred is due.

I'm staring at the faces and the asses and the shoes and making kneejerk judgments and it all gets a bit dismissive and cold.

I'm holding a box which contains pieces which properly put together would create an acceptable and unremarkable wooden stool.

I could be bringing back so much more.

She wanted to keep the unmade steel and glass end table thing.

Then as you have all the brown boxes lined up beside your front door and you have to gingerly walk by it and start thinking about the future and see empty rooms and other places and imagine these chairs and desks magically made and sitting there, trying to make the upheaval just a bit more noble and emboldening.

And you picture actor A doing this on set B for the fortieth take, and it's better than you can ever try.

Shadowing staged success and aping it poorly.

Making saccharine television part of your breathing, flexing, decision making.

Art imitating life imitating art imitating life.

Western decadence.

I sometimes think that. A more diffused type of guilt that’s easier to live with at the moment than other types of guilt that shall remain nameless.

I see a series of switches running along a red velvet wall at shoulder height almost endlessly. One or two ups and down and everything's different.

Red is blue. Dinosaurs endure. I'm still there on our couch.

Committing to an organization that ran out of steam, electricity, gas, nuclear, power, photosynthesis.

An episode of classic overkill.

One I've seen a thousand times before.

The script is like the back of my hand or the shaft of my dick.

I've seen this happen in other people's lives and now it's happening in mine.

Epiphanies in the returns line.

Realizing that personal freedom comes with an emptiness and a responsibility to fill it. Acting like a proud dog who figured out the latches on the leash (but still could use a good set of thumbs for doorknobs and utensils) and then realizes the size of the yard.

I need all these analogies because you always want to take this shit from and on the side. Head on right now is just going to end up with me staring straight ahead doing everything in my power to find the next necessary and death valley deep breath to keep all my cells from dying.

Which is acceptable in my empty hallway or car with the ignition off but no good in public.

A matter of staring problems.

A new name in forgiveness.

Just a collection of names, dates, and receipts.

For the low, low price of the time takes to get over this hump that feels like an endless plateau.

Thinking too much of the money. Comes creeping up on you. It wasn't a factor until it was. It didn't matter until it did. All those useless bits of tautological, ouroboros truths.

I couldn't explain with words. It wouldn't be long enough. I need you to feel the time to understand. The monotony is the only way to experience the glacial decay.

The soil erosion of a relationship.

No one would ever bother to see it, hear it, feel it.

I wouldn't and it's what happened (what’s happening) to me.

We'd have to cut it.

I've been here before or have seem it five to six times on some sort of show or series.

Not me an actor playing me.

I think. It's so familiar.

I'm emptily impressed at how well the production crew and the cast and the director is able to

jiggle the right reality keys and nail down exactly what I'm feeling now and what I'm supposed to feel next.

I'm doing a line by line reading.

Scene re-creation from the public's favourite cultural touchstones.

Love rekindled, new love found, you can't stay down in the dumps for too long. Terrible for box office and ratings.

And this would be the perfect spot to set up a shot. The wide open, dry orderly expanse of the formerly quirky now rote and overly familiar furniture store. Plenty of space for a three camera set up and right over there you can get some craft tables and a costume rack. Nice big parking lot for the trucks.

And now I'm not sure if I'm looking around to kill time, because it makes for some good business, or because I'm breaking through four, five, or six walls and looking for the camera crew.

Don't laugh or cry or ask for the line. Stay in the moment. Be a professional.

Wait for the music cue.

Montage courtship.

A couple clever standout lines.

-did I come on too strong?

-I didn't know you were coming on at all.

We're locked in a naked embrace rolling around and lost in blindingly white sheets (easy representations of purity and innocence).

Laughing at something walking down a moonlit street in a friendly part of town.

Then one of us staring out of our kitchen window, perturbed.

It's raining because of course it is.

Now the score's strings are swelling like a panicking tumour.

And then it's a cut back to me in the store. Trying to stay as stone-faced as possible as all these memories are going off like fireworks. Don't let the storyboards and the director pitching you the scene an hour before in your trailer get in the way. Stay in the moment because there's only the moment, nothing is real but this moment.

And then the line shifts just at the right time because the extras got the cue from PA and the dashing but heartbroken leading man holding a tangible part of his past goes up the counter where a tiny, bespectacled quirky blonde is standing with an endless smile.

-I wonder if you can help me...

END