EVERYBODY IS LOST BUT ME

EVERYBODY IS LOST BUT ME

“EVERYBODY’S LOST BUT me,” I thought. And I puffed away at my cigarette and sipped at my tea. It’s good tea; I got it form T2 – you can just go right in there and get some. It’s called fruity something. I dunno, I just told the clerk I wanted something fruity tasting with goji berries and she handed it to me. If you buy two boxes of tea they do a deal and you get this really great flask.

Anyways, where was I. Oh yeah, being lost. Well, if ya dunno where you’re going I guess all the paths lead to the same place but let’s not think about that now. I took another sip of my tea – "tea is for the living!" I proclaimed.

Then there were several people standing around me wondering what the hell I was talking about.

"I’m talking about being lost" I said.

"You’re inside the Church" said a person sweeping the floor

"BUT NOW I’M FOUND!" I proclaimed… he walked off.

I liked to go to the churches on my lunch breaks from work. It was the only quiet place where I could find some peace in the city. Transactions. Signs. Advertisements. SCOMO IS A PEADOFILE APOLOGISER written on corrugated iron in spray paint.

It was all too much.

Now where’s that tea. Oh yeah, I was on my way to buy it but for some reason I felt like I already had it when I was at peace. Sippin’ that warm tea in bed. Or preferably by a fire out of a tin cup in the forest is what I wanted.

I didn’t even smoke – I dunno where that came from.

So, I walked out of the church and sat down on the cement outside in the sunshine. The bricks dug into my back. I’d worked in a brickworks once cutting brick like those. Conveyor belts. Stacking. Looking at the clock. One guy there had it down like clockwork; he'd roll exactly the right amount of smokes on each lunch break to get himself through to the next one so his hands were always free to press a button and crack those brick in half. Goggles. earplugs inside earphone. Limestone. Cement. Water to make the bricks cut easier.

The job I had In the city was the same kind of factory only now I advised the factory owners. They were all actually worse off than the people they employed. Red faces. Fat. Worried all the time. Lost.

Where was I again? Snakes? Lucifer? Michael? The Ouroboros? A CIRCLE? My head felt like a circle, a spinning wheel; no big deal. Except, it was the biggest deal. The biggest deal to the man I was advising and more importantly; my deal was that I was more important and no amount of money was worth more than my own wellbeing. After the thing was settled I put a cheque for $120,000.00 in professional fees on my bosses desk. One week of work that I did. And I had a lot of other things on the go. I asked for a pay rise and he asked how much I was getting.

“Sixty a year”

“are you going to quit?” he said.

“No.”

I liked hearing the conversations inside those buildings. One morning I walked in and my bosses desk was broken in half. He yelled out to the account to have it fixed immediately. There was blood streaming down from his right nostril. Glistening blood; magical blood probably, I thought.

Anyways, the accountant got the people who got the other people who got the desk fixed and walked out and looked at one of the young assistants who was wearing a fresh new fake tan.

“Any blacker and we’ll start having to giving you land rights” she said, and walked off.

I quit the next day and lay in bed thinking about tea and wine and singing, and anything else but…

“HEY YOU!” a man yelled and suddenly a cinder block was thrown through the front door. His name was Simon, after I asked him he was quite polite. He just wanted his photos of his children back from a girl who lived in the back room. She’d cut them all up and turned them into ART. She lit candles and smoked in her room and probably stared at those candles all night for all I knew.

One morning I woke up to take a piss at 3:00am and she was just staring up at the stars on the back deck.

“I haven’t slept in five days” she said.

I left the next day.