Youth

Their compact was inherently simple; that the world as it presented itself to them, and all those that inhabited, their compact consisted simply that it was a parody. That was how it began. As two youths they knew too well they didn't belong, and it went without saying, though it would be said time and time again. There is great creativity in youth, and it is to that particular time and place where the foundation for all future endeavor resides. It is to that place your spirit turns in times of great travail or stagnation, it is those ghosts that will invariably carry you down the road when you go astray. They didn't need to be reminded their peers and their superiors were full of shit, it might have stemmed from that peculiar Saxon aversion to Norman tenure for all they cared, but it was up to them now to carry that ambivalence to it's evident fruition. There was great creativity in destruction. Alfred remembered distinctly coming across Daniel on that uneventful day, High School Orientation, and remembered not sleeping all night, he had played pool by himself that night alone in his parent's basement, dreading the occasion. Yet when he met Daniel they had decided to rendezvous later on in the day. For in those days the battle lines were crystal clear, there was a very vigorous distinction, and even in Middle School, a tight cadre formed, those that diligently traipsed glibly into the arms of them that barked authority, and those that refused, and it was incumbent upon acceptance of the refusal to tear down the universe as it existed up to the point of severance, to kick in lockers, and shout down the murmured halls mocking and distorted gestures, mimicking their confinement. There were those that diligently volunteered for the lobotomy of which they were to receive upon graduation, and those that resisted. It was all very simple. Daniel carried a list on him which he kept track of all the impersonations he was capable of performing, and after this was to be broadcast, where and how they had yet to discover. Such is the case, that upon destruction of such a vivacious totality, the two of them were left with the sudden prospect of propping up something wholly contrived in the wake, the means and the clear unperturbed path out of the wilderness was not so forthcoming as had been imagined.

Referred to simply as the Bench, their Parliament was located in the wasteland behind a shopping complex, the mid-point between their two houses, an illegitimate scattering of curiosity shops and front companies for ambiguous money laundering operations, a desert Bedouin encampment, where scarce trickles of water were hoarded by the horse thieves and camel traders occupying the desert oasis. Occasion had lead both Daniel and Alfred to this sparse confluence, with the to be guessed at intention that as an ensuing riots would unfold, their presence would go unnoticed by these delirious uninhabitable nomads. At some point we can begin to reconcile ourselves to the loss, and see the moronic figure of what we all once used to be, to see him or her with something less than disgust, with something less than pouting homicidal rage. That there once was a time, after much chemical persuasion, when they were all driven around this town like cattle, the old neighborhoods, from Downtown then south to the Suburbs, where they could imagine themselves fortified in some vague demesne, where the sojourns, the walking to and fro, time and again, would take them to feudal limits. Is it some indefinable need to find our way back to this tipping point? A place by miracles of flesh that had been actualized of itself out seething contention of sustained experience. To run afoul in an infancy lasting no more than seconds, were they not all trying in their own different ways to get back?