Second Coming

It is those nights when you stayed up well past your bed time, with only the hope of hearing from a friend or seeing something on television that will somehow sooth you – will somehow be a little bit familiar, takes precedence over sleep. You take solace in the fact that your nighttime routine, as late as it is, has become mildly predictable, and it is easy to mistake this predictability – the Mexican man on his nightly walk at 12am, the bespectacled man across the street on his laptop with the blind open on the second story, the shirtless teenagers playing basketball in the street four houses down – for something that offers security. The heat of the night lingers and the humidity of the rainless day refuses to break, and everyone looks at you outside smoking late at night with the same since of security. You feel it is time to disappear; you have become predictable.  

Every morning is so much easier to live with regret from what was not done, the small things and things large, from the day previous. So much to fucking change! So much to improve upon! And you come home and take solace in the memorized programs of television, and begin to think you’re culturing yourself with watching yet another episode of Anthony Bordain while sipping $4 bottle wine from the local market. And you admire the works of others – you watch Bordain’s travels, you read Keruoac’s “On the Road” while on the toilet, you listen with enthusiastic ears when you hear the new song from Brand New that your friend posted on his MySpace. And that MySpace becomes the extent of your individuality.

And the security blankets of a complacent but not content daily routine – something you rallied vivaciously against in your youth – only increase until you are suffocating. Fucking suffocating. And you fail to realize when “it” is not enough, when the job you’ve been working at for three years is dead-end and full of creative-sapping routines and monotony and only the most boring of people, and that it has been a year and a half since you stood in the waves of the coastline you once couldn’t live without.

You fit right in now, lamb; and your youth will rally against you.

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