VICELAND AD#500

When lying is your best option, and not even the bus drivers are on your side. Getting nothing published. Going unnoticed. Firing at bullet-ridden targets, and your “i” key is broken, again. Too many returned submissions. Too many typos in the dust that never asks. And maybe your record player’s gone and done broke on you. Yep. The world’s tilted against you in the pinball game you call your life. It doesn’t matter. Get up a little earlier. Drink a little less. Go out into the world while the sun’s still getting all over things. Duck into a few crumby alleys. Douse your worries with a few glasses of cheap champagne. Smile and nod at the strip club barkers as you so insouciantly stroll by. Be cheerful. Give up. There’s more mustiness in your every gesture than in all the eyes and highs of this misbegotten world. Get thyself to a beer bar. Relax. The shiftiness will be back, with a vengeance, soon — but for now? It’s all a gas. Be subtle and morose. Glide. The harness that’s been yanking you around’s a bit looser, built to stay as you were, or are, in the flexed muscle of day’s hardiness. Don’t forget your winking nods, and the sly tenderness of all your woes and wails and plaints at the curdled sniffs and polluting whiffs of this crapshoot we all call being alive. The ladies all pass by without even a whimper in your general direction. This? This is as it is. Leave it be. Be riled and robust in the day-to-day missteps you keep taking. Sit down in a lawn chair in the sun in a grubby unkempt backyard off the highway somewhere where the grass just don’t grow like it used to. Be a sap. Walk the show of your life off the road and take a dive into the small time. Kick around in the broken glass and discarded mementos of dissatisfaction and fallen rebar like the hammer-smashed snail shells of your youth. We are all who’ve we’ve been made and made ourselves into, distinct and incurable is at all might be. Brains gone fishing, sloshed. Feet up. Inspections never passed. Guardian angel all fed up with pulling you out of every last jam, over and over. And you know where your better half’s gone and run off to now? Not reading a damn thing you ever get around to putting down, that’s where. Phone’s running around with who knows who, and it’s anyone but you, knocked to the canvas once again at (646) 851–0347.