The International Writers Magazine: Closure

Closure, The Modern Way • M.J. Clews Another gun-metal morning scrapes itself over the break of day. The wilted trees, bare and vulnerable like rape victims, line the courtyard I gaze out towards. Bleak days.

Karen’s death drifts further and further from my mind, yet I feel worse with each day. My only comfort at the moment is Spinoza, my french bulldog. His intuition is zen-like, understanding the slightest of vibes like they were tidal waves he were on. He is firmly grounded in Substance. Whilst I stare out towards the courtyard of my apartment complex, he sits his ass down right on my foot – whether he is being friendly or his ass is itchy I can never tell. He is the only thing I seem to have taken care of during these troubled times. Amongst this shithole of stench and decay, he sleeps and eats well. The only thing he has been missing of late is his regular walks- my appearance not yet fit enough for public viewing. I fear that I may lose my sanity in this apartment.

There is only so much thought and reflection one can handle. It is best in situations like this to get hammered – and this is what I’ll do. I wash my face in my crude and vulgar sink. The water is ice cold; a glacier trickles down my face and I’m filled with the image of a sheet of ice breaking over a valley, plummeting down my body to a place to hold its weight: my metaphysical stomach for my thoughts, dreams, fantasies and so forth.

Inevitably with every form of production, there is waste. I’ll soon need to take a metaphysical shit out my mouth, contrary to established logic, not out of my ass-crack. This usually comes out of me, drunk, in long social and philosophical diatribes, staining any poor fool willing to listen to me, with the stench and consistency of bullshit ideas. I’ll hit a few bars in the Little Quarter … may as well start out in the best of circumstances … it gives the illusion of rock bottom being at a distance … yet after ten beers and countless whiskeys there’s no distance between the Little Quarter and Žižkov
.
Number 18 tram to the National Theatre … walk across Legii Bridge over the cold Vltava. A hassled, determined manner to each footstep, planting hard and malevolently … the castle perched on the hill, lit up with a Cezanne palette- postcard perfect … seems too beautiful to be real, like a holographic projection from the engineering mind of Mother Nature herself. Winter’s piercing breath giving the sky a pale ash of gentle purple, shading the peach walls and red rooftops a melancholic luminance. Up along Karmelitska, the parallel urban vein of the river … peering into lively windows looking for an unnoticed spot, some quiet table in the corner to drink and watch the night unfold. I settle for a bar frequented by artists and punks, at least amongst these folk I won’t draw too much attention to myself. The lines are long on this exceptional night. I get an ESP vibe of a self-destructive nature tonight. Perhaps it is merely the joy of excess rather than the masochistic intents of self-destruction- but the song of Bacchus can be faintly heard drifting from the moon if one listens hard enough to the frequencies behind the frequencies.

Once I shove my way to the front of the bar, I order two beers to save myself the problem of having to queue again so soon. I manage to find a little corner next to a British and an American girl. An infuriating choice. I gulp down my beer and attempt to block out their conversation by trying to simply think of nothing. Yet this would be quite something to achieve.

I knocked back my beers and went for two more. The two girls, to my relief, had left. I felt like kicking their asses out the door, back to their lands of celebrity magazines and cookie-cutter conversations. Empty vessels I thought to myself. The beers went down real good. That golden, bubbly Czech juice certainly knows how to ease a man’s pain. I had the whole table to myself and just like in my apartment, I ruled the roost.. Perhaps I have an unpleasant air about me, dissonant gestures and whatnot, hell I don’t know. It’s impossible, so far, to get an objective perception of how you deal with the world physically, in your mannerisms, expressions and so forth. I believe, however, in the not so distant future, that this blind spot of the self will become a thing of yesteryear. The ravaging advance of technology and its subsequent invasion into our private spheres will undoubtedly bring about a revolution of identity of some sorts, where every intimate detail of ours will be able to be displayed to anyone in the world by the click of a button. There will be websites and cell phone applications dedicated to inside people’s asses, to one’s morning shit, to watching someone watching someone watching T.V. Technologies main motif it seems, judging by it’s intent of progression, is to rape us all while filming it. The doer and the watcher simultaneously. So for now I choose to enjoy this human privilege of being unaware of how I really seem to other people.

The seal needed to be broken. I looked around me suspiciously trying to gauge if anyone had been eyeing my table. It seemed not. I gave the room a filthy stare none-the-less to make sure they knew this was my spot. Up some shitty, wooden steps, seemingly about to fall through. Another bar upstairs. There looked like there were some persons of interest in this vicinity. One femme fatale too many for my likings. One was enough for a lifetime. I don’t play with fire twice. I went into the toilets. As always there seemed to have been some kind of piss tsunami that hit just hours ago. The poor indigenous souls who were arduously working on their basket weaves in the third and fourth cubicles must have been carried away by the torrent of acerbic piss that by some act of God, had formed into a monolithic tidal wave of yellow acidity- sweeping them away and destroying their livelihoods. Of course they were nowhere to be seen. Another charity gig for Bono.

By now, the bottom of my shoes must carry the DNA of thousands of Czechs, Russians, Slovakians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Poles, Italians, Americans, Brits, Macedonians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Bosnians, Croats and God knows who else. Yet this was always somehow an enlightening experience. You feel dirty but a new perspective has been reached and therefore it was worth the unpleasantness: like fucking a girl on her period. You almost feel humbled and therefore a little holy.

The urinals weren’t appealing. Green scum lined the bowl, filled with micro-syphilis just waiting to take the waterslide down my urethra and set-up camp. I went into the cubicle, the previous workplace of Manu, the master basket-weaver, now just a shitter. I’ve always had an appreciation for witty toilet graffiti. It is somewhat of a hobby of mine to take note of the clever ones. Most men have a little black book or something similar, mine is used to take note of the writing on piss stained walls, not too dissimilar to the interests of the archaeologist. The denizens of this bar employ a certain intellectual wit. Nothing to match mine however. The black marker, el gato, comes out and my hand, almost of its own will, scribbles down my stomach bile.

When I got back down the steps, some rat-faced drunk had taken my table. My beer and jacket were still there. I questioned the fucker and pointed to my stuff. He looked at me nonchalantly and shrugged his shoulders. The indifference of strangers. Fascism. I chugged the remains of my beer, leaving the dregs at the bottom … grabbed my jacket and tipped the dregs onto the table, promptly leaving. I grabbed a couple of quick shots of tequila for the road at some family bar next door. They weren’t best pleased with my unorthodox gesticulating. Petrin Hill loomed to my right, filling me with mystery and the violence of a dark forest. On to somewhere else, some other neighbourhood, some other street, some other bar, where the beer will be crisper and the women more lurid. On to somewhere else where the trail of myself get’s left behind in the ghostly wake of another unforgiving night.
© Matthew Clews August 2010
mattclews at hotmail.com

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