Kafka 2000

COME ON, KAFKA, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

   You know, my ex-best friend's sister is this girl who grew up under different shadows. Her brother is a scarily intelligent loafer who burned through stages much too quick digesting the symbols of the era as if they were the real meaning of things as opposed to just icons and representations. His passion for beauty is so superficial that it allows him to pass as profound when there is nothing shallower than dark waters that refuse to discuss the undercurrents of the ocean. Her mother is a brutal elementary school teacher in a small town where nobody cares if she spends night after night downing spirits with redoubtable acquaintances; she used to be an embarrassment to her children until they were old enough to ignore her with protection from the law. Her grandmother is an old-time prostitute who made her bones and paid her dues and left the life to live dutiful marriage with a warm-hearted mechanic who passed away before everyone in the humble household was ready to accept death as a legitimate factor in the equation. So this girl used to write beautiful long and dark poems about her adolescence from the point of view of an isolated person tormented by literature and yearnings of a freedom unattainable in the clean air of the mountains. Her older brother got her into psychedelic mushrooms long before she could conjugate the word virginity in the past tense and the world shown before her eyes in those ecstatic afternoons in the pine forests when the rumble of the river soundtracked her stimulated imagination became a reality far more desirable than the early curfews and the evil murmurs of her backroad neighborhood. She somehow quit writing and started spending much too long seeking consciousness expansion and stared more than advisably at the flicker of the bright light at the end of a non-existing tunnel. She was seen in different places of the town talking to staircases and blessing stones and rocks in the main square. Her grandmother restricted her outings and one time she spent a week in bed getting up only to use the bathroom and then returning to her slumber. Concerned yet late investigation around her bed revealed a large number of small glue vials that she had been sniffing for an entire week. Her nostrils were raw and her speech was so garbled that anybody could have said it was a different language. She was committed promptly to psychiatric institution where she suffered several psychotic episodes separated by long periods of mutism.

   The guy who started this merry generation on the path of hallucinogenics is a Chemistry major who used the laboratories of the university to synthesize mind-altering substances and studying the best weight/dose proportions of different drugs. He's good party and has a sharp intelligence. He got together with a girl who came from a small town too and liked to get down hard with alcohol, so she figured it would be very much the same to take the next step toward chemical drugs and self-prescription. One night, at an apartment party featuring a small-time drug dealer whose biggest score has been to move a kilo of cocaine in between cities using public transportation and has plugged three guys over price quarrels and bar brawls, a proud homosexual whose cynicism has convinced him that caring for other people and friends in need is a sign of weakness and a buzz kill, a skilled electrician who one time opened the house door to pay the Chinese food delivery guy wearing nothing but an empty tube of toilet paper around his dick taped to his pubes with scotch tape, a red French Poodle leash and black mascara dripping from his eyelids, and a small town ladiesman who has no qualms about sweet-talking twelve-year-olds to give him a blowjob in the bathroom of a shady arcade joint near the church and made a bar go bankrupt by drinking the entire profit of two months in a week. So, the Chemistry major's girlfriend was taking part of this amphetamine binge and popped seventy-five pellets of the stuff while no one else in the room did more than fifty pills that night. The ladiesman went out next morning at nine and left everybody wired to whatever their trip was and arrived at his job as a security company route coordinator only to receive a phone call a couple of hours later transpiring that the small town girl had passed away and they were all going to be subpoenaed for the investigation. Lucky the ruling justice system is a joke so everyone beat that rap. Everyone but the girl.

   This woman who has been appointed to conduct the preliminary interrogations about the craftsman’s death at the mercy of official weaponry and manpower has no decoration whatsoever in her office. Her walls are bare and there isn’t a shred of human emotion to pimp her desk like a family photo or a Christmas card. She sits all day in the incubating room and types away the same gibberish day in and day out. She’s in charge of deforming the discourse of those filing a lawsuit from emotionally meaningful to bureaucratically standardized and ignore completely the use of conjunctions and or the heavy burden of legal jargon so, she contemplates very little the idea of easing the load on those bereaved. Orthography is not an asset to her and her only smiles are worn as stipulated in her job description. However, I can’t picture her kicks at all. It would be easy to dump her in the cabinet where working wives get home before the sun is down and never think of going out to admire the sunset; it would be mighty easy to lump her with all the obedient citizens who still understand beauty through a slim cathode screen and truth through a thick smoke screen. One could simply imagine her pleasures are as trivial as her job, but for all I know this woman could be into bondage and whipping, leather and dirty talk, scat and fisting. What the hell do I know. And she is in charge of a process to indict the armed forces of the government for the unlawful murdering of a thirty-one-year-old rolling stone who once crawled out of his cradle and onto the window sill to reach the clouds in the sky, a boy who took a beating from his father when he failed thirteen subjects in junior high and then became a loose cannon, a man who in the last week of his military service waved around a burning shirt and torched an airport to the ground, a man who was very proud of everything that surrounded him and of whom no one was proud.

   You know what I’m saying?

FEDERICO AC.

16.05.2KX1