horizontal, duped

I came from somewhere. Then I was going elsewhere. In between was the other. The other seemed bored. He sat on the ground, knees close to his chest, counting beedis in his hands. His pocket was lined with a woven trim of many colors, and he didn’t notice my going from somewhere to elsewhere. I don’t think he cared. I am not sure if I cared. I rarely take care. I treat most things as Frisbees.

If a Frisbee had two ends rather than an infinite number of ends, and if I threw it towards the sun hard enough, I’d like to think it would fall down to the earth and split it open, and there would be red magma underneath, thick, viscous, and engaging, murmuring in warm tones and inviting me to have a taste. If you throw anything towards the sky hard enough, it will fall down. In Australia they have boomerangs. But those are horizontally inclined in terms of their interest in seeing you again; I’m not terribly interested in the horizon because it doesn’t exist anyway. The world is round, the horizon is a scam. I always wanted to ride that ship off the end of the world with those Spanish zealots, but it’s just not going to happen. So to hell with that shit. People who are down with the horizon are just getting duped. Fuck that. I’m into the up and down.

Our perspectives bind us to the curvature of the earth, rendering “straight” or “to the left” really boring because nothing is really straight anyway horizontally speaking. But I can understand what a straight line means if I look up, because then the line never ends, it just goes and goes. It’s nice to think that it might hit something eventually. I’m waiting for affordable nanotechnology to allow me to build a tower straight up to that point, like an elevator. Straight down is the centre of the earth or hell depending on your rationality, both of which seem appealing. If I go straight down enough, down becomes up. So that way a straight line never really has to succumb to horizontal distortion. A straight line up and down doesn’t have to take any shit from anyone.

This person saw me when I walked by. He glanced at me. I glanced at him. I drew a caricature of him in my mind last night, I’m trying to render it here. He was wearing a towel bound around his head. If you were to take the fabric and hold it towards the back of your head, it would be longer on the left hand than the right; you’d take the longer end and wind it around your head until the two ends were of approximate equal length on the right side of your head, and then you’d tuck one end inside the other. He was wearing sandals made of a tire. His breath smelled like pesticide. Once, I saw him contorting on the dirt floor. He could switch from being supine on the floor to standing on his left two feet in an instant. After standing he would being to sing, but would fall off balance due to his bad breath. He got a new mobile phone. I added my number. Then he left on his motorcycle. This person is a composite image. He is comprised of many layers, transparent in the light parts and opaque in the dark parts. He stands straight up and down when he has to, falls off kilter when he is drunk. And he is drunk most of the time.

When he sleeps he succumbs to gravity and dreams with perspective intact, though if you really wanted to observe him lying you’d have to tilt your head ninety degrees to look into his closed eyes. He might dream of me. I’ve dreamt of him. He’s always around.

He has a state sanctioned identification card. He showed it to me. It said he is a land officer. I really like this person. Everyone does. But he’s always falling towards the horizon.