The Sad Carlotta. Five minute sketch.

The Bitter End

Times like these, I feel like I need to explain myself. I realize my standing still is contrary to everything I preach, but sometimes I can't move for all the burning. And the idea that I failed to find someone to tamp me, haunts me because I always said I had to do it alone. If I let you, you would have been a splash of cold water to calm me down, to wake me up, to put me out. But no, and now I just stand fast, raging like a structure fire, in the last place I will ever be. Something red and screaming itself into ash.

Addendum.

When it dies, we all become little bloodhounds. Sniffing around old haunts, clutching old clothes, breathing through them. Trying to get one more wiff of something gone forever. We drag that corpse around with us, just so we can smell it rot.

You are here.

The first instinct is to seek out a landmark. Something familiar that can help you get your bearings. Like the strip mall bowling alley sign, or the birthmark on her inner thigh.
Now you know where you are.
You realize you've been here before. And will slowly remember why you left. You begin to look a little to the left of the people talking to you, trying to see what's past them. You're already on your way again.
You are here to leave.

Remember when

you ordered another drink and turned back to me, exhaled a medicinal vapor on my neck, and with those big, fogged up eyes threatening to squeeze out one single tear, you reached back into all the song lyrics of your life and pulled the most poignant to tell me how much I meant to you?
I don't.
I was so fucking hammered.

'Over the weekend the vultures got into the Presidential Palace'

This place is dying for carnival. We need to get away from the clergy for a while. Build up some good old-fashioned sins to confess. Seasons change, and with them come the smells of the past: The lover you put down on the hood of your Olds, the fight you won by virtue of your bowling alley friends. We were gods once, and indifferent. Uncaring in the meager light of the neon signs. But now everything seems so important. Infants crying in baskets. Taxes and mortgages. The slow motion apocalypse of an economic meltdown. It's hard to remember that time when our revolution would not be televised. There are those of us that ache for something real. The promise of our childhood cereal boxes, that perhaps, one day, we would be relevant. If not, then not. We have screams in spades, and we're warning you...

Rigby

Something has crept back into my head tonight, crawling like kudzu up the back wall of my brain case. Tumoresque, it's got my senses hot-wired and misfiring. I smell coal smoke and rotting leaves. I can hear the creaking ghosts of assembly line machines; feel the heat of ten thousand bodies writhing to a beat that hasn't stopped pounding since the lights came back on.
But what's got me wild eyed and pacing the hardwood more than anything tonight are all the stories; the rumors and little legends that make up the foundation of this place. How there's a two block cold spot near Sutter Wharf where a fisherman once netted what he insisted was Vincent Price's skull. How there's a girl in Faders 6 who was born with wings and sings prophetically in her sleep. That there's an antique store, locked up and forgotten, near 5th and Wickerman, filled with clocks that only chime when a good man dies. I hear it's the quietest place in town.
I'm humming at a familiar frequency tonight, tuned to the whispers coming from all these unmarked graves. Rigby's calling, and it feels good.
I almost forgot how it feels, always smelling like fresh dirt.