American Mythology

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Speaking through sensitive teeth, I insist that, because it’s rare to unearth a dinosaur skeleton in its entirety, museums will often fabricate any missing bones out of plaster, affixing these prosthetics to the specimen so as to create the illusion of completeness.

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I feel this as loss, palpable and untamed.

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Taking my lunch at Taco Bell, I claim that two tacos had been missing from an earlier (fictitious) order. As such. I demand that the missing items be replaced, until eventually, after speaking with a manager, I’d eat for free, there in my car, engine idling with the AC on full blast.

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I'd go on to loiter in the parking lot, connected to the free WiFi, streaming Miles Davis’ “Some Kind of Blue."

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I had 25 minutes left on my lunch break, so, not knowing what else to do, I began to peel-off the colored stickers on my Rubix cube, only to replace them, grouped by color, so that the puzzle would appear to have been solved.

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On my way back to the office, I noticed a bumper sticker ahead that read, don’t drive faster than your guardian angel can fly:

 

This folksy expression, extracted like a dead tooth from the mouth of rumors, boiled overnight, again and again, heated in the centrifuge of American mythology, is perpetuated by fear and faith.

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Back at the office, I found myself utterly unable to concentrate and so, instead of logging on, I pilfered a handful of candy from the glass dish that sat atop the receptionist’s desk and went around, drinking room-temperature coffee and asking my coworkers, “if Vincent van Gogh were alive today, do you think he’d be posting to Instagram?”

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And that's who I was until I got home:

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After opening the garage, I stood next to the lawnmower, huffing an ether-soaked rag, pulling chemicals through my nose until I began to sweat through my Dockers and the ill-fitting, off-the-rack dress shirt that I’d worn again, for the second time that week.

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I then went on to stagger around, devoid and faithless, like a hybrid strain, surrendering to the off-kilter sunlight and its golden wings, like a migrant passing or consciousness augmented, I went plunging into the ellipses of time.

 

And so, let me tell you:

 

I’d look in the mirror if the lighting wasn’t so harsh.

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I’d treat myself more kindly if my every evolutionary impulse wasn’t at odds with modernity.

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I then sat down and poured myself a drink, one after another because, when I add all this all up, it sadly amounts to very little:

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My existence squandered like a sheet of origami paper - crumpled around a piece of used, flavorless gum -

discarded and waylaid, tossed in the wastebasket, never becoming.