Thursday

Something new. Davey jumped up and said hello tonight. So, yeah, if you've been waiting with bated breath, well, shit partner, here ya go...


thirtysix

The funny thing about this place is that I don’t need to sleep. One of the funny things, anyway. Yeah, obviously there’re a lot of funny things about this place.

Maybe what I mean to say is that there’s this funny thing about me in this place, that I don’t need to sleep. Never. I don’t even have the urge to, never find myself yawning and thinking that it might be nice to lie down for a little while, kick off my shoes, get some shuteye. If there’s a plus to being here – and that’s a hell of an If – it’s that it always feels like it’s about an hour into what’s shaping up to be a really great party. You know, you’re into your second beer and there’s music everywhere and cute girls and people laughing and drinking and dancing all around you and you’ve got this sense that things are just ramping up and that in a couple of hours you’ll be having one of the best times you’ve ever had. It’s a nice feeling for a while.

Of course, the letdown is that things never quite get past that point. The party plateaued a couple thousand years ago and it’s been stuck there ever since. Everybody’s wild and beautiful and having a great time, but there’s nothing else. No sense of freedom from the mundane, none of that great breaking-the-surly-bonds-of-earth kind of thing. If you’re aware of it, and how can I help but be at this point, you know that the cute girl you’re chatting up will sleep with you in the wink of an eye, that the jocko homo type with the good weed will always be free with his pipe, that the DJ is always going to find that perfect track to keep things on fast forward. It’s all leveled out and you can’t help but think that everyone should just go home for the night and get some sleep and we can all go for breakfast tomorrow afternoon sometime and maybe just have a nice chat over omelets and mimosas.

Maybe that’s the problem; there’s not going to be a tomorrow afternoon. Or a tomorrow morning. Or a tomorrow. Everything is just here and now, the past has been washed out and the future doesn’t exist.

The Sheik keeps telling me that this isn’t Heaven, that Heaven is on the other side of the Big Gate, but I’m starting to think that he’s pretty definitively wrong. If you grow up way Catholic, you get told that if you’re good you’ll go to Heaven when you die and you’ll be living in blissed-out paradise for the rest of eternity. Drunk and stoned and dancing and getting laid endlessly fits that bill pretty nicely, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a lack of imagination, but I’ve got a hard time conceptualizing much else that would come off as paradise as well as this place.

Then again, I’m not finding it terribly blissful, right? Of course, I’m not dead and the rest of these schmoes are. They change, you see. If you track one of them – and, yes, I’ve got enough free time to do just that – you can watch them go from being a freshly dead sweet old grandma type tottering through Little Gate to being a slightly drunk merry widow leaning in close to an oiled surfer to being a sexpot milf dancing on tables and whipping off her top to ending up as one of the gorgeous, horny, scantily-clad cuties that cozies up to sweet old grandpa types as they come slipping through Little Gate. The crowd swallows up the new kills and makes them one of the mob. Lithe, tanned, perky, perfect…it’s like hanging out at a Playboy/Playgirl centerfold reunion. Wave after wave of embodied desire hitting you with straight-toothed smiles and smooth skin and delicately groping hands. It’s no wonder nobody ever makes it to Heaven.

I really don’t know why it doesn’t get to me the same way it gets to the rest of them. I’m alive and they’re not, I guess. I’m not malleable. I haven’t lost my gut or put on twenty pounds of perfectly sculpted muscle. I still need my glasses to see in any kind of focus. My pants are still stained khaki, my shirt a Ready Messenger polo, my shoes $20 Payless vinyl Oxfords. Whatever’s going on here, I’m still pinned to my place back home, have a slot back on ye olde mortal coil that I need to get back to one of these days.

But still, while I’m here I guess I get some of the fringes. I never need to sleep, never need to eat, to piss, to shit. I can rip out one hell of a belch if I want, and suppose I could fart like a backfiring semi if I was that kind of person, but nothing like that happens on its own. Never felt like I ate too much, drank too much, fucked too much. Everything even and easy and perfect. Every second I’m here I’m at the pinnacle of physical contentment. And it never ends.

This is why, if you’re still wondering, I feel the need to hop the wall and head to Mags’ place every once in a while. There I can sleep and overeat and feel my head go spinny after a few too many trips to the wine cellar. I can party with my girl and its great and then suffer for it the next day and have the variety of nausea and headaches injected into what’s passing for my life right now. I can luxuriate in pissing out a bladder full of merlot in the rose bushes out behind the house, of falling asleep after an amazing orgasm, of waking up and taking a bath and scrubbing away the sleep and feeling fresh and revitalized. I can feel alive. And you can’t know how much you can miss that feeling until it’s been taken away from you.

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