These are not stories.

Out on the town. Drunk late at night. Though, not as late as it could be. And not as drunks as we could be.

The animals are out. Chaos in the streets. The captors are out roping up those that run alone, the lone wolves. No one cares about these wildlings. The rest hoot and holler in their masses. Tribes rule the earth. Come at one, you come at all. They eat, they imbibe, they wreak havoc on the masses. Eat the young, prey on the weak. The weak don’t care, they don’t need to survive, they do nothing for the rest of us.

Crossing streets en masse, the cabs stop short of running over the stragglers, only because they feel sympathy for those left behind. The leaders show no compassion for the majority of the herd, only those who keep up and remind them why they’re the leaders. Eat the meek, fuck the weak, words to live by or die by if you choose not to live by them.

There’s a homeless man wearing an orange safety vest. He stares at me while I stare at him, each of us wondering who will make the first move. Neither of us wants to budge. We stare at each other across the tracks, taking sips from our respective beverage containers. He has seen more shit than I have, but he doesn’t know it, and fuck him for making assumptions about me. Where’s my sympathy? I’m just trying to survive as much as he is.

Another man stops next to me, offers his pen. His pen is better and smarter than mine. I wave my hand as a show of appreciation, and he wanders off.

I get on the train, I get in with the animals, the heathens. They talk of food and drink and this great band they saw earlier in the night. And when they ask what band it was no one can remember. Two hours ago was two hours too many.

We sit here, trapped in this metal container, burrowing through concrete tunnels underneath rivers carved by the gods.

A lady slides close to me. She senses some sort of artistic connection. She thinks I am her tpye. Who is this mysterious creature chewing his gum and writing in a paper notebook with an ink pen amongst all these heathens? I’m going home to my lonely room in my lonely building with no one to write me poetry and tell me how pretty I am. And she wants me to be the person to do these things. She thinks my writing will save her. She doesn’t realize that my writing won’t save anyone, especially me, for whom I do the writing. I don’t want to save lives, I don’t want to inspire. I just want to read my words, to write my words, to think my words will somehow save myself from suicide, to give some meaning to the void that is all of our existences. We have to figure out what to write in our own notebooks, in our own time, at our own speed.

“Christ, I must look so fucking cool,” Jimmy thought as he considered putting the final period on the writing he was doing. He looked around and no one paid him any attention. They were all in their own worlds hating their own lives. The couples all looked tired. They just wanted to be home sleeping. But their fucking third wheel of a foreign friend was in town this weekend, so they felt obligated to entertain. “He’s your friend.” They sit in silence the rest of the ride home.

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