XXX THERE WILL ALWAYS BE ENOUGH EYES TO SURVEIL US, BUT THERE WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH MANPOWER TO SEE THROUGH THEM ALL. XXX HEADSHOTGATE IS REAL XXX THE NEWS WILL SHOW YOU THE FUNNIEST THING EVER AND THEN EXPECT YOU TO BE SAD ABOUT IT XXX IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW MANY PEOPLE DIE. XXX THINGS WILL ALWAYS GET WORSE XXX HAVE YOU EVER DREAMED ABOUT WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO DIE? XXX

“Are you a vampire?” A Jamaican man once asked me, during a period when we were forced to share a housing arrangement with thirty-something other men, tightly packed together on metal bunk beds, with nothing to our names but what could fit in padlocked metal boxes which stood at our bedsides, and clothes on our backs which were prescribed to us on a strict regimen by our handlers, depending on the context of the day. This Jamaican man had killed people, taken the life of his own dog with his bare hands, and held a gun to the head of his ex girlfriend, and now he was asking me- “-I’ve seen you weep during the day, but you come alive at night, like you are no longer in pain.”

I don’t remember how I answered the question. I could have given some sarcastic response about suffering from hemophagia, or the sanguine curse which has haunted and shall haunt my bloodline for all eternity, I could have called him a superstitious dunce, but I’m fairly sure I did none of these things. Whatever my response is, it’s been lost to time, a black patch in my memory. I had cried the day prior, on the phone with a chaplain, hiding at the wall phone in the laundry room, and here he was airing my dirty clothes for all to see. Unless he was serious. I keep going back to that moment, wondering less about the content of what he had to say, or what he really meant, as much as the simple question of whether or not he was being literal. He was certainly an eccentric, of a certain kind, that being the homicidal kind, but was he eccentric enough to believe in the non-mundane?

I doubt it. I don’t entirely doubt it, but I doubt it enough to dismiss the idea, despite how raw it could be.

Anyway, why should one not weep during the day? It’s warm, there are people all around, bodies of flesh and blood who can lay their sensory organs upon you and perceive you for what you appear to be, make decisions about who you really are, form opinions, discuss these observations, and create what amounts to the psychospheric representation of who you are- in the day. At night, everything relies on intuition. There is quiet, everyone else is asleep. The watchman who pulls guard duty in the dead of night need not fear who may or may not be his enemy, for he knows that anyone out of place must be an enemy. He knows where he stands in the world.

Is that really it?

They say there is nothing new under the sun, but others say that if you must write prose or poems, then the words you use must be your own, and warn against plagiarism or taking-on-loan. When I observed, on a walk, during the day, the very same day I felt as if I would throw every morsel of myself out onto the pavement, an upper-class reception center of a sort, at the seaside, I was enchanted by it, for a few seconds. Walking by, I caught a glance through the back door of white tablecloths, crystalline wineglasses, candles, opulent carpets, and imagined in my head the suited gentry who may spend their time there, and it felt so real, until, six steps later, I passed the open door to the kitchen, and it was dirty, cramped, staffed by a short, fat Mexican man. I wondered for the rest of that sickened walk whether this was more of a representation of class relations, or racial relations, and then I wondered if the two were one in the same, and then I considered writing about the topic, and then I realized that someone, somewhere, already has. I realize now, after two weeks of diffusion, that it does not matter.

Nothing new is under the sun, but if an idea one lays out, organically, happens to have been spoken forth a time before, or on many occasions, does that not make the make idea all-the-more valuable? In science, they call this ‘peer-review’. They absolutely do not call it anything of the sort, actually.

I’ve always been fond of creatures of the night. There was a period in time, a pleasant period in time, where I never went out, except for at night. My apartment, a studio, if you could call it that, was a room with a bed, room for a desk, a wardrobe, and nothing else. Attached was a cramped bathroom with yellowed tile, cracked caulking around the toilet and tub, toothpaste stains in the sink, and a thick layer of something unpleasant over the mirror, which formed little splotches, and similarly attached was a kitchenette, wanting for a stove, with a metal sink to draw water, and a miniature fridge-freezer combo, within which the freezer would not properly close, thus making it useless for just about anything other than driving up an energy bill, which I would do with great intent, out of protest, as the complex paid for the utilities. This spiteful act, while pleasurable (if not inconvenient) for me, did not beget a result, positive or negative. It was in this room I would spend every day, mostly asleep, often somewhere between sleep and delusion, in that near-dream state where your thoughts are utterly irrational, moreso than usual, and one can look back during a brief moment of clarity at a sentence they just thought out in their stupor, only to realize that it was a string of unconnected, nonsensical words, from which only someone still within the dream or delusion could derive meaning. When I was neither dead-to-the-world nor prisoner to a waking dream, I would walk the town beneath the light of moon. I would talk to the barely-closeted transsexual at the gas station as I purchased cigarettes, coffee, and beef sticks, and internally lament that I could not know them better, until, steps later, realizing that this was the best way to know someone- transactionally. He-she-they knew that I liked American Spirit Blacks, Black Coffee, and Jack Links Wild Original meat sticks, and I knew that they were somewhere between identities, and leaned towards ‘emo’, and that they were quick to check my ID, and-

-Karl Marx considered those relationships to be extremely substantial, as if those created a social connection that would beget a responsibility to one another. Tripe. Utter tripe. They-she-he was nothing more than a monad, like myself, unconnected except financially from everything around it. They would go to their possibly worse apartment, and spent their day dreaming or deluding, just as I did, and I don’t know that for sure, because I didn’t bother to get to know them, and I didn’t need to, and I don’t regret it, and one night-

-walking back with a can of Monster Energy, jaywalking across the street, a car stopped to let me hop along the road like the arcade frog I am.

-and another car merged out from behind them as I walked across the street.

-and I began to dream. This time, I was dreaming at night, with everybody else.

-and the car didn’t stick around. I awoke to a light in my eye, the medic-

-told me I had been struck by a car. “What a jackass!”

Those really were my first words upon waking. The next were, “I can feel my teeth in my throat.” Is this the sign of someone more concerned with despising others than upkeeping themselves? Absolutely not. This is the sign of someone who has just been struck by a jackass and is rightfully upset about the issue, especially when they’re covered in blood, have flown one hundred forty feet, and can’t walk. The Jamaican believes that I got the scar from a prison fight.