RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Flicker

There’s a flickering fluorescent light in the bathroom at work. Flickering fluorescent lights are like magical portals into despair and isolation. Not the despair based on a singular tragedy like violence, torture or war, but the despair brought on by the slow erosion of personal dignity. Their flickering serves as a metaphor for that grey area between the death of hope and the fear of death. One props up the other, until at last they consummate in the final breath of ultimate resignation. The flickering stops.But anyway – I’m actually feeling fine. To my readers, my fascination with the invisible, shuffling souls I call living ghosts is something rooted in observation more than subjective experience. While empathic tendencies pull me towards the romance of this sort of darkness, it’s really not something I desire to exist in.

But as a person and a writer, I’m absolutely in love with the lady high on crack who wandered into a bar with a 6-pack of beer under her arm and tried desperately to take me home. In real life, I kept a safe and healthy distance, before walking home quickly and alone.

What I enjoy is the idea that the distance I maintain is as artificial and as fragile as the illusion of civilization. Imagine an empty city and the strangeness of its existence. Or imagine a city of rubble full of people and the strangeness of its broken structures. Some of the most powerful photos in the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina showed abandoned stores, floods of Wal-Mart goods lying in dirty gutters. Ruined houses reduced to shards of wood, mud, broken glass, and religious idols – but with a family portrait hanging crooked on a crumbling wall. The hurricane broke all illusions.

Maybe it’s impossible, but I hope the things that draw me to these thoughts and feelings aren’t entirely selfish or condescending. I am after all, on the other side of that imaginary line. Illusion or not, the perspective comes with the full gambit of comforts, choices restrictions. I may have once lived on the line, but I decided long ago not to cross it.

Even so, when I stand under a flickering fluorescent light, the experience is transporting. The flashing is enough to make me feel unhinged; the arrhythmic strobe of pale light throwing dead shadows over a closed room can take me to any invisible place… a gas station bathroom on some oil-soaked highway somewhere near a desert strip-mall, or last call at a neglected center city diner’s cocktail lounge. These places are invisible to people lucky enough to be unaware of their existence. They only come alive after people like myself lie down to dream.