Tim Barrus, NewYork Times

Tim Barrus, New York Times

I am a communist. Closure seems to be another American bugabuga designed to reinforce that illusive notion that articulates the rhetoric living is worth the work and the struggles of Being Here. Or Not. Americans think “Or Not” is a moral issue. You belong because we say you do. You belong because your blood and your granny fit the profile. You have to rope me up and force me to attend one more stupid funeral where someone else is reading my words but I do not speak if too many people are there. I cannot look at them. My words will be failures, too. We are evenly divided to the extent, most of us are dreaming the same dream. Only a few of the more marginalized among us Rituals are the worst. If you think vaccines cause contentious friction, wait until you meet with Mrs. Execution. The men want swift killing. A bullet to the brain is so Chinese. Every man is an island of his own loneliness as it exists in the darkness of the shadows. We are not afraid of the bullet. We are afraid of the loneliness that whispering (often in a maternal voice) means we must endure. Sometimes I have an agenda. Sometimes I don’t. Dying is compulsory. You are charged with hypocrisy what else is new. Cook me like a hot dog. Burn me. Dump me into a ditch somewhere. Let the ashes run. A ditch is where I belong, and a ditch is where I live today. Hotel Ditch. The road coils around the mountain but the ditch of diches cannot transcend It Always Rains. The road will wash out again. I want to run and never come back. Everyone seems to be dying, I am. Closure becomes a village thing. I do not live full-time in the village. It’s a small southern village like the people who live here are small, too. Stop the Steal is comaraderie The KKK is out there somewhere in the woods. Most are dead. All of them are armed. All of them are dying. All of them are sick. So are their dreams. As homo sapiens, all of these dead guys are failures. They have failed their country. They have failed their communities. On average, they’re making a bit more this year. Like a couple of hundred dollars more. The group of us who dig into grocery store dumpsters see our numbers increasing, and some of the first timers are people I know. We nod. So cut the spoiled part of the tomato off and eat the rest. Our ship has come in. Today, it was frozen fish and hot dog buns. How is 16K a year supposed to support any family structure whatsoever. Families set it all up to fail. Failure is the status quo. They have failed. They have failed themselves. I am with them. I am one of them. We are not feeling lost. We are the thing.