DromedaryLights

Men work outside of the glass. Inside is a living dreaming immaturity. Inside is pungent and ill-lit. A damp reek of agoraphobia. Piles of discards, various things half-smoked, half-eaten, twice-worn, and a crawling of insects in the general manner of a burial. The Dreamer, half-conscious, feels himself a spectacle.

The Workers appear coherent within the overarching social order. They have hammers and they build things that are useful (or destroy those that are not). They have a radio and some soft-drinks. They drive pickup trucks. Their consumption is fashionable (within their idiom), and it clarifies the syntax of their purpose in the great machine.

The glass is an imaginary privacy, like a fourth wall.

The Workers have been hired by the condo association to remove a rotting, and in light of this purpose, the dreamer is like a human objective.

His psychic landscapes depict various disappointments. They indulge his lust for various major cities -- for the things he thinks he might mean in a youthful urban context.

In the physical world, there’s a shelf by the headrest. It’s stacked with philosophical, literary, musical, artistic, and cinematic affectations; each article existing in a different stage of partial digestion. James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jean-Michelle-Basquiat, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, and Thelonius Monk. Their creations are fashionable consumptions within a certain idiom, and he is quite attached to the idea of them, but also given to wonder if he likes the things themselves, or merely the idea of being someone who likes these things. Although, in Sartre’s existentialism, the distinction between the idea of a thing and the thing itself is meaningless, and yet…

Well, he’s probably remembering it wrong anyways. He’s better at remembering the names of books he’s read than their contents.

The Worker’s radio is yellow. It plays Nirvana. It plays country, with the same backbeating snare on every song. With the gender stereotypes and the myth of normality. With banality, predictability, and telegraphed end-rhymes. The radio plays Meatloaf. It plays advertisements. The radio plays that song that goes “put me in coach, I’m ready to play” (today)

And the Dreamer plays his guitar with too much reverb. He plays untuned. He plays it with a cello bow, not because this sounds good, but because he’s a pompous jerk. And because he knows he’s a pompous jerk. He plays an untuned reverbed guitar with a cello bow because he is a caricature of a pompous jerk performed by an even more pompous jerk.

And what bothers him isn’t all the things that he knows makes him pompous, what bothers him is that he may be more pompous than he knows. It bothers him that he can never know how bad he might look in the eyes of such as the Workers -- him all unemployed and sleeping. All pretense and pseudo-intellectualism.

All trying to annul his spoiled vanity by acknowledging it in short little post-modernisms that end abruptly in a childish mashing of keys.

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zeeby

this is one story that i actually read beginning to end and enjoyed it. The thing about your style is, its TOO thought provoking, convoluted and ambiguous. I appreciate the poetry in this, but you have to find away to break away from your technical style to maybe write something less introspective and more reader-friendly

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Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey

DromedaryLights

Thanks for the criticism Zeeby, I truly appreciate it. I think you are right, although, I have great difficulty writing anything that isn't in this general vein of selfish crypticism. I find I'm at an interesting point as a writer where I'm capable of recognizing and laughing the immaturity of my work, but I'm still having trouble moving past it and writing stuff that's better.

It's difficult, because the prosaic obscurities and excesses, I feel, represent my honest voice at this point in time. I couldn't really abandon that without betraying my own artistic (or un-artistic) sensibilities. It's sort of unfortunate really. This could just mean that improving as a writer would require some sort of personal growth on my part. But, until that happens, I'll probably continue being convoluted and ambiguous.

Still, I think being less introspective is very good advice for me. If I could combine this style with subject matter that's easier to relate to or some actual story telling (*gasp*), well, that'd be a step in the right direction I suppose.

Anyway, thanks again!

zeeby

Another piece of advice, despite the fact that your vocabulary is obviously extensive, its unwise to be too over the top with it. Keeping your style simple and, again, not so convoluted would make your work easier to read in general. If your writing for yourself, it is understandable that you would write however you wish, but one critique I definitely have in terms of your style is that your overusing your vocabulary. Sometimes those types of words are perfect for sentences, and can even help the flow of your piece. When you use them too much though, you'll find it makes the sentences more choppy and difficult to read. Its pleasing when a reader can cruise through a piece with complete understanding of what the author is saying without having to stop to pull out a dictionary. Don't force words where they don't belong, you got some good thoughts in that head.

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Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey