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Edgar’s Dirty Laundry - by Jacob Zillhardt
“Life is much too short, to be whiling away with tears.”1
He kept telling himself this verse, walking down the cold street, sitting in the stuffy pub, flirting with some drunken bitches. Edgar was a foolish man. He lived a dream no one could want to have; he owned glitter pants and smoked vanilla fags. He was one of those disoriented types where everything down to a toothbrush or friend’s hamster seemed absurd upon scrutiny. With such indignations as look at this stupid thing. It doesn’t look right. It just sits there most the time, until someone puts it in their mouth. Such is life… His hobbies included bicycling and telling people where Karl Marx went wrong. He never liked being referred to as a wuss, or that guy. Not that anyone called him those names, though, just a trivial point, really.
Anyway, The evening was a stunning bouquet of sights and textures for those who enjoy fast traffic, small talk and moist, smooth skin thrown all together in one sweaty miasmal soup. Out on Baker street, near his flat, Edgar dropped his keys into a rain puddle beside the gutter. Towards his soaked party across the way, Edgar shouted,
“Don’t wait for me! Rush to three and get out of this fucking rain!” Whereupon the mellifluous nonsense of several belligerent voices replied,
“Confound you, you drunken tod!”
“Did I leave my handbag on the seat?”
“Fumbling the key to your own home like some wanton anarchist.”
“Jerry’s got it and running away.” “No, I don’t smoke.”
“Look at these damn metal fingers with teeth. Who the hell invented such a stupid item? Well, better pick ‘em up now…”
This last chain was muttered by none other than Edgar himself.
His friends just didn’t care one way or another. Neither did Edgar, to tell the nasty truth. Whoever’s suggestion it was first, they all spent the night copiously wasted on self-induced mind control, each person trading worries for chemical restraints, straight-laced work jockeys to nirvanic catatonic alcoholics. Edgar stooped down and retrieved his keys from the puddle. From its rippled reflection his own alien image momentarily struck him, two violent hawk eyes screeching absence into his sunk mind. A pyramid, tiny and orange, stood at the end of the cancer protruding from his lips. There it burned in rebellion against London’s dismal aquatic life. Something obscene seemed to surround him, like one big dirty joke; Edgar knew it was only himself. He exchanged his keys for an empty bottle of cider. While turning to hurry away, he heard a splash accompany the tinkle of shattered glass. The sound seemed to say to him that we are a generation of indifference, apathy and nihilism. He pondered and swayed in front of the doorway to his place. Not even anarchy, but submission, conformity to convention, guilt, jealousy, resentment of self, dissociation from nature; Edgar mixed the words up in his head and then threw them out like 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 NEXT |
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