10.20.2012

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Scottsdale, Arizona. September 2011.

"Jesus, I wish you were here. The desert is beautiful and at the end of the day the sky's on fire but the
air is strange and the city is a flickering mess of flat hostility. The casino I'm here to shoot allows
smoking so I've been down there playing the penny slots and losing a whole lot and chainsmoking and
watching all of these miserable people getting fatter and losing their money and if you were here I bet
you'd laugh and when you did I'd see your teeth and the way your eyebrows raise a little and I'd be
happy for an instant, an instant I wish I could live in forever... anyway the beds here are comfortable
too, I bet you'd like them. It's hotter'n hell but there's a huge pool and you could just float while I went 
to work, if you were here... the horizon is so far away, the landscape is all weird colors, kind of pink,
the mountains in the distance are comforting in that unmoving hazy way of theirs and I woke up in a 
pool of sunlight and had coffee on a balcony again and one of these days we'll do that together in some
nice hotel far away from everything and I miss you and your little smile and the way it moves your ears..."

You wake up with a sore throat from smoking too much. Your clothes stink.
The bed is bathed in sunlight but all you can see is how dirty the window is.
There are phone calls you never made and there's someone floating away from you
there are things you should have said that would come naturally to you if you'd just let them.
It's already too late
you're gambling, more than pennies and nickels
pretending like you don't have everything to lose
you've been lost for so long you've stopped trying to find your way home
keep drinking
pretend you're not anyone at all

Sometimes you fantasize about doing that clichéd thing you see in movies
where you fall in the pool face-first wearing all your clothes
preferably a tie and dress shoes for maximum effect, and you float around in slow motion
having an epiphany or something down there

It was tough not smoking, but with no store around for twenty miles, what was one to do?
Each time I felt like smoking, I thought about her and her ears. Compared to everything 
I'd lost this far, losing smoking was trivial. And indeed it was.”
-Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

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