Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Difference)



Utopia,

I’m writing you from hiding, because I’m hiding I have crouched down and pulled a wet version of a cardboard box over myself, right beside a short metal pole, and I am breathing very quietly.  To be perfectly honest my pen may give me away and then where will we be. Like dragging a dead car across tin foil.  SCRITCH SCRITCH

But I’m not hiding because it’s loud, I’m hiding because I just killed a man, he had sweet soft jowls, his hands were full of rope, just like a cartoon of an old-fashioned sailor, yeah, but he recognized me, that big dopey face opening and then darkening and I saw the mouth start to come open to say SN…  And he did not finish his word because I killed him and then I got inside the box.

But I’m not hiding because it did not say a name, I’m hiding still, still here and still as all, because nearby someone is playing the harp.  There must have been a very nice harp left somewhere because this is no janky bit of twine and stripped buoy parts, it’s the real deal.  And before I saw that man I heard the harp, I said to the guy playing it, I love that song! because he was playing Debussy’s “En Bateau”, which is very fitting because this is a city about water.  He said, yeah, I bet you do.  It’s killer.  And now I was gonna say to him, hey play that more, did you see what I just did to that guy, play that Debussy, but he never stopped playing, and I am hiding because I truly cannot tell you if he ever was playing Debussy or if he is playing Jimmy Buffett’s “Stranded on a Sandbar”.  I get convinced it’s the Buffett, and that’s fine, because the Debussy was good when it lasted, and it was different, it’s still good that way, it’s like milk totally surrounded by glass that’s sitting next to milk that is just sitting out and smells like it.  And then I’m saying, no, it’s definitely still the Debussy, I was such a fool, a real ninny for thinking of Buffett, I’m in Venice after all, Venice where one most certainly does not think of Jimmy Buffett or any music that is made for people in shorts who play songs about people who wear shorts and smoke weed and just talk about smoking it and crumple their dicks in their hands and do the same with puffy dying birds and lead business seminars.  Buffett does not have four hands!  You do not think of Buffett in Venice, in fact it is impossible to think of him here, the canals block it out, like moats do.  Because Buffett never makes the music water and vice versa, he’s never played a note that shook itself off and drunken slid back in amongst the rest of them, without shivering.  Buffett just writes songs about all that.  He wants to tell you, I have heard there are those who do not crumble puffy birds, dying or not.  This song is a war on them.

But I’m not hiding from anything, I’m hiding because there is no more difference anymore.  There is no more difference between “En Bateau” and “Stranded on a Sandbar” then there is between a city and a fog these days, between a bear chock-full of maggots that aim to conspire to rise and fall like a bear’s chest and a bear.  There used to be a difference.  A difference between dicks and birds.  It was plucked out by the century.  Between my left eye and where my right one used to be.  Between a day with a few clouds and a night with many things on fire spaced at very even intervals.  Between a city and a fog that is shaped like a city.


 If I don’t make it home, at least you will know exactly what happened and just what to tell them, and you should know also that I always thought there was a difference between you and a century and I do not even care if that is true or not because it does not matter to have difference but it does to have had you.


Love, Snake

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