A tree f…

No.

A rock pillar tumbles down into the Speed River. No one is around to ignore it.

“It never existed in the first place” thought the weary dilettante as he ordered himself another sludgewater local brew contaminated by years of neglectful kegline maintenance.

As he swallowed back what could be best referred to as “Smelly Dog Pilsner”, he blows out his ear drums – or whatever shreds of it remain due to years of reckless thrash – an another acoustic act, amplified to a very unnecessary level of pain.

“It’s one man and a guitar. There’s no need to make the floors shake!”

He exits the cramped bar area and slinks his way past a couple of nineteen year old social crusaders engaging in a heated debate why Bird Bird is a racist and grabs some air on the heated patio, ironically engulfed in a fog of second hand Menthol number 7s, and he sits. He sneers. He realizes he’s on his very own. No one looks his way, no one returns his glare.

“This town,” he thought, “this fucking stuck up town”.

He catches a glimpse of another sad looking man, singly occupying a rickety rotten wood table, complete with beer stains on his white shirt and a dead, and haggard look in his once-clear-sky-now-cloudy-grey eyes, and a body burdened with a massive debt that gave up on exercise years ago. This man stands alone. And although publicly proclaiming to profess solitude as the prevention of all things woeful, he starts to wilt from the inside out. His black heart seeping out of his half-agape, yellow-toothed mouth, devoid of anyone who would ever break what’s left of that burnt black beating sack wedged somewhere in that ribcage underneath years of leftover chow mein and hops.

So staring this demon of a man face to face down, the tired dilettante sheds a tear that rolls down all the way his hangdog face and drops onto his broken and scuffy dress shoes. Without hesitation, he strikes the other man, shattering him into a thousand tiny glass shards, shattering all the over the sticky patio floor, and into his bloody knuckles.

The patrons fall silent. Shocked. Afraid. The dilettante remains just as quiet too, as he’s escorted out through the front door, being told never to return.

A tree.
A rock.
A monument.
An idea falls from a great height into the Speed River, and he insists that no one should be around to hear it. He doesn’t exist. He never tried to.