Breathe

The tequila goes down smoother, the wrung husks of lime floating in my glass like twisted socks in laundry water.  I'm staring at an obnoxiously bright computer monitor trying to eke out witticisms and laser guided insights to the very depths of humanity's collective soul for some self-conscious attempt at a blog. Some electronic validation--a message in a bottle--sent out in the oceanic void that is the internets. All the while sipping silver agave tequila, lubricating long-lost fist-pumping passions all deeply fossilized by years of cubicle mundanity,  clouds of resigned sighs and the quiet lip-tightening acceptance of life's rhythmic dry humping against your leg.

What the hell do I have to say? I'm a forty seven year old refugee from the pouting generation that went grunge when fashion dictated mullets, flannel and passive-aggressive hippie ideals; An art school abortion who now plies his trade coding websites for clients who are like the apes at "2001: A Space Odyssey" guttering at the enigmatic obelisk that is their websites. I live on an island that millions idolizes as paradise but in actuality a pimple of urban crawl, where the locals would rather take a scythe to anything that smacks of sophistication and intelligence and revel in the seventh level of "Jawaiian" music hell.

What the hell do I have to say?

My iPad plays a My Bloody Valentine track from my Oh You're In A Pissy State of Mind playlist and sends my fingers groping for my sweaty glass of sipping tequila. Mind you I'm not one of those Hemingway-Hunter S Thompson wannabe alcoholics plying words from alcohol fueled  abandonment looking to romanticize my bourgeois angst . It's a three day weekend and, fuck, I've got nothing else to do on a Friday night. I can afford a hangover. My butt is deeply ensconced in the butt-imprint of my couch and gravity has me as its prison bitch for the next hour or so.

What the hell do I have to say? I don't know. I think about the last words I had with my son and wife thousands of miles away in the November chill of Chicago during my nightly Facetime sessions earlier. "Goodbye. Love you and miss you", their granular image stuttering on my iPad. My fingers trace my wife's jawline and absently tries to brush my son's bangs against the screen as he regales me how he kicked ass in the new Angry Birds. Their presence, their corporeal mass, is sorely missed, a fucking black hole of sucking gravity I can feel pulling on the hairs on my arm in towards my skin....love I miss you all. Fingers, hand, wrist and fleshy palm grip my glass tighter as I hoist it towards my mouth, bitter, sour fire pouring down.

I curse the fact I left cigarettes I'm supposed to give up at my office. I'm supposed to quit. I can feel the charcoal lining grating against my lungs lately even though that metaphor isn't really true as fuck. But I've been coughing phlegm like a ticker tape on a Wall Street gentlemen's club and thought best to leave it. I take a deep breath. Ionized air sweeping in from the ocean fills my charcoal lungs. Breathe. The hole that shapes itself from the silhouettes of my wife and son is temporarily filled. Breathe. The frustration of work, island rush hour traffic and isolation is blown in circles inside like  emotional dust bunnies. Percy Sledge plays on my playlist and his voice carries what longing I had down ribbons of musical harmony. Breathe. Am I really that bad off? Breathe. I'm a bourgeois  middle aged self conscious self pitying clown who needs validation. Breathe. What do I have to do to say? What the hell do I have to say to justify you reading this?

Breathe.