Hello [Insert Town Name Here]!

How strange.

Do you see how much that poor creature has in its hands?

And yet you’ve never known anyone with emptier arms.


Look Closely: This Picture Is A Metaphor

Is anybody alive out there? Would you care to show yourselves or produce some general murmur to announce your presence?

This darkness is oppressive, and surely more blinding than light. I can’t see you, and I have no true way of knowing that you exist. Thankfully, however, my presumption apparently knows no bounds. I’m willing to presume all manner of foolish and seriously misguided things. This trait, I suppose, is a sort of protective delusion. I’m not sure, frankly, that I could live without it, or at least without some equally pathetic variant of it.

There are, I’ll admit, occasionally spells in which I like to imagine you –and first, of course, I have to imagine you, which is no small feat– huddled out there in a great, or even a rather modest, sea of bodies, pressed together in the darkness or even just scattered sort of randomly about, and holding aloft cigarette lighters in mass –or minor, or whatever the opposite of mass would be– tribute to my non-existent gifts.

I shout things like, “Hello, Minneapolis!” Or, “How’s everybody doing out there tonight?” Typical things, really, but I’ll also sometimes find myself yelling more atypical things along the lines of, “What am I doing, and why am I doing it?” Or, even more ridiculously, “How am I doing? Does my hair look okay?” Or: “Is there really any reason at all that I should carry on with this nonsense?”

And I can tell you emphatically that as blinding as the darkness can be, the silence is positively deafening. It’s unnerving, to be completely honest with you (as if, of course, such a thing were even remotely possible), and some nights it just flat out makes me keen myself red-faced and hoarse.

I wish I could say that this was somehow cathartic.


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