Machinepack

I saw overgrown boys growing the worst mustaches while cradled upon the laps of shriveling women, passing a coughing vape between themselves as each plucked an occasional silver-white cat hair from her ripped black leggings;

I saw three gray kittens stacked upon three corroded car batteries stacked upon a rather handsome leather gaming chair leaning on a lawn of dead grass, forming an unreadable text as if it were my own personal sky-scratching attempt at a modern Babel;

I saw the casual appropriation of any spindle, plank, or hinge into incidental decor easily besting even the most imaginative works of Duchamp;

I saw the memorization of the McDonald's Dollar Menu as Bodhisattvas memorize their Sutras, an equally political and religious rite of passage, then I saw the slow ship-of-Theseusian slip toward the Value Menu instead, the clandestine upheaval of the ancient tradition, an equal reminder that all is built upon breezy grains;

I saw telepathy between men when gender ratios suddenly became even, each remembering the frivolity of the overhead light, the movie marathon they've been laboring to finish, and their collective history as horror fanatics;

I saw shirts I'd lent to close friends appear on the back of strangers who I'd just met, and when I'd question them about what they're wearing they'd never hesitate to admit their ignorance of its origin;

I saw frequently disembarking caravans with foggy dreams of Las Vegas or Wyoming, each always fueled with more dreams and spontaneity than fuel, then I saw them enjoy a decent but disappointing evening in Salt Lake City before returning home hungrier;

I saw the mere rumor of a free 6-pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade or a spare pack of Marlboro Reds motivate groups of 4 or 5 to travel carless and penniless through 5 rural cities by means of pure willpower and cunning alone, then I saw the greatest innovations in political theory as the group of n+2 (they'd always have picked up two more on the way) decide by Greek neologism how to split the loot carcass, always egalitarian in a way that'd make Jesus Christ, Fredrich Engels, and Confucious smile crookedly from their respective clouds;

I saw perhaps not a vegetable consumed in 6 months;

I saw molly invite people to take turns sticking their heads and tongues out of moving car windows like thirsty beagles and shepherds, each bathing in the wind with their own personalities and expressions but with equally beatific ecstasy, receiving the occasional fly as a mere ante-price or sometimes as a direct revelation of from God, always at least with grateful indifference;

I saw street-engineers please their ancestral god Vulcan by creating drug-motivated drug-machines but sometimes forgetting the schematics come morning time sobriety, sometimes inventing new machinery to explain the old night, repeating again night after night until they were left with a pile of only hypothetically functional wires, re-fashioned Fanta bottles, Scotch tape and buttons;

I saw overly confident conductors offering rides in charming one-of-one vehicles painted in once-tacky, now sickly sun-rotted tones with exposed chains, hidden histories of little-brother's injuries, and obligatory piles of dust that'd never leave god forbid you were convinced to sit down in black jeans;

I saw the near uniform taste of terrible German EDM music blasted by odd-looking gas station hat-wearing fellows vaping flavors like "Rainbow Sherbert" or "Mango Sunrise" from Optimus Prime mods, gassing me in the sticky backseat of their stuffy closed-window 2004 Hyundais, but quickly made amends with it as they were always a charitable sort and I was getting a free ride;

I saw the most outwardly self-proclaimed radicals quickly bow and riddle off sensitive personal information of their friends at a sheriff's first request while everyone else was cool and they had just spent the evening repeating trite slogans;

I saw childhood dinosaur bones exposed in the form of forgotten Adam Sandler films at the bottom of Wal-Mart 5 Dollar Movie archaeological excavation sites, then saw the memories quickly washed away as a macabre curiosity in Wal-Mart Brand Slime Business Box Kits filled its place;

I saw some first-time smokers forget their most basic kindergarten sense of morality and for some reason eat literally all of the ice cream, but you could do nothing but forgive them through dry lips;

I saw smelly merch worn by only-incidentally bearded men for Cartoon Network shows I thought I'd hallucinated offer literally everything they had, but becoming horrible crabs at the mere suggestion of taking some of their marijuana, even for money;

I saw destitute, hodgepodge jalopies with randomly red bumpers fit with cologne selection, adjustable lumbar support and choice of various forms of gum, and I also saw evil sports cars on lease with annoying lights and personal Instagram accounts swimming with trophy boxes of Fillet-o-Fish, infantiley echoing the distant behavior of slain bear-tooth necklaces or wallets produced of enemies' scalps playing a bass-boosted SoundCloud Juice Wrld edit on broken speakers, where the driver cries out "Who Knew Evil Girls Had The Prettiest Face," while speeding recklessly, failing to catch the irony and reminding me the trite wisdom that reading a book by its cover is wrong, but you certainly ought judge the publisher by it;

I saw violent encounters conclude with the departure of a still-bleeding man in a lopsided tri-colored Ross or Burlington bubble-coat on an electric scooter, permanently leaving the memory scarred not by the weeping violence but by hilarious getaway, the inverse emotion of the last minute of an anthropomorphic animal children's movie being filled with the the close-shot of a man's bleeding mouth being stomped repeatedly;

I saw missionaries avert their gaze and cross the road at the sight of some, for certain souls aren't worth saving;

I saw a girl's wandering hours spent in the hallucinatory halls of Wal-Mart, inspecting each mass-produced snowglobe and producing a singular fiction for each, with thoughts of spiritually counteracting the inherent poor Karma imbued into each mass-produced, caged snowman, or feeling every single shirt and inventing a new Dewey Decimal for systematic yet opinionated ranking based on material and aesthetics, all efforts for perhaps one to three people, all to be forgotten by tomorrow;

I saw that a Tech Deck skateboard could enamor 16 people at once;

I saw a smile form and heard little happy squeals when the pulled-over drunk driver realized it was their 21st birthday, and that maybe that accounted for something in the eyes of the law, and alas, for god-knows-why they were allowed to drive away untouched ;

I saw symmetrical political shrines decorated with every-color-of-the-rainbow hats and shockingly custom framed images of Donald Trump in the only cobwebless corners of rooms otherwise dotted only by lumpy black Glad bags and suspiciously yellow-stained sheetless white mattresses;

I saw a generous green-shirt-wearing man offer me a beer and a hit of some of his weed in intimate view of a CCTV while his elderly coworker slaved alone to unload a truckful of off-brand Pringles and shitty sodas after I'd snuck into the back box room of the same Dollar Tree where my former store and warehouse managers were both arrested and fired on the same day;

I saw a day easily filled in attempted acquisition of some hygienic luxury like chapstick or facial lotion, pursuing dissipating scents to danker or damper locations and sketchier spots than explicable, realistic, or dreamable, with a success rate of about 50/50 but always rewarded with a story;

I saw an unshakeable consistency in my safety in encounters with the police so long as there were white people present in my party;

I saw that literally any object had its Hello Kitty counterpart like a contorted Aristotelian metaphysical form, and I saw that a de-collectivized worship service existed to praise the objects in this form, and that the membership was widespread enough for Believers to constantly be running into each other in my presence, swapping photographs and anecdotes of their Hello Kittyfied plates and chandeliers like Pokemon cards;

I saw women with eating disorders speak in their coded jargon to each other and always be surprised at my code-breaking fluency, where sometimes they'd even suggest simply walking outside in the winter to shiver off some calories, but never expressed using any fully recognized English words;

I saw three or four story houses with two or three sports cars parked outside for dropping off loser kids who spent the night relaying dodgy anecdotes of their harsh upbringing;

I saw heaping piles of self-pity result in equal hills of luxury, but that the consistent self-construction of a losing avatar meant they'd inevitably squander it, and I saw radically self-responsible agents face petty forces of nature, and so long their spirit never completely drowned, on a long enough timeline they always sufficed;

I saw weird patterns formed by invisible funnels - a person's essence molded deeper by their resistance - read in the form of men's "revolutionary" buns, too-expensive-to-be-authentic Doc Martens, meme taste, or the selfie-angle employed for various communicative ends;

I saw piercing distaste of my simple presence from supposed grandmas as I walked through circuses in pursuit of simple funnel cakes, women and Instagram photos;

I saw the oddest sexual specificities donned like shiny robes by mere pubescent virgins and I saw strong evidence for pedophilic actions tossed aside like thick stained cloth bibs pelting white dress shirts after torrents of spicy-mucus or splashing waves of buttery lobster thoroughly soaked;

I saw an empty box for a huge black dildo in the backseat of a girl's car, and I watched as she was slightly-less-than-expectedly embarrassed and littered it onto the street, sheepishly but never directly asking me to subscribe to her OnlyFans and more directly asking me to star with her, which I declined and asked to just continue DoorDashing as we were and to forget about it, as I was hungry for more than just sunflower seeds;

I saw the Las Vegas hotel concierge deny our party's check-in as the ones with money were under 18, so we had no choice but to get a sorrowful Family Pack of Raising Cane's chicken with extra sauce and hit the road back to Utah, and I awoke after we were pulled over at 4am when we all should've been at school, where we were simply told to slow down and made forward on our merry way after a horrible bout of anxiety;

I saw a supposedly Himalayan monk-trained man spending his days sword-fighting in a public park, and once I saw him easily defeat five contestants in a row, I knew I was in orbit of a real Shonen;

I saw a rather hairy meditating man sat cross-legged on damp grass wearing smart loafers, a blazer, and a pair slacks, yet remaining bare chested, relaying elderly wisdom from his proclaimed post of the Grand Twenty Two Years of Age he'd accumulated, warning me not to smoke cigarettes or have too much sugar, and I thought him honest;

I saw the spawning of a perpetually cigarette-hungry population pining for charitable bestowance only after partaking in the ritual of spending three weeks outdoor soapless until your hair begins to visibly secrete and become a rug;

I saw schemes plot, executed, re-convened, and repeated all contained within the same shopping-center parking lot, repeated day after day, amassing small fortunes of 40$ to be blown away on O.K. Gyoza, of-age driver fees for "literally whatever's cheapest and most abundant", and gas station gummy bear runs;

I saw an orderly indoor parking lot for skateboards and adjacent wheeled vehicles near the entrance of a house and a subsequent town-hall meeting as the parking lot's urban sprawl was beginning to impinge on the living room festivities of playing Xbox, sleeping fully upright with boots still on, and watching something secret on one's cracked iPhone;

I saw a rather a constitutional Irishman on Xanax be Spartan kicked down the stairs after some scuffle originating on Snapchat of all places, and when I questioned him about it later he admit he had no memory of it thanks to the Xanax, but he thanked me for the clues regarding the origin of his bruises;

I saw a grown man consciously choose to continue drinking dollar Vodka, eating Popsicles and watching shitty YouTube videos on a dysfunctional iPad night after night rather than stand upright and take care of his baby;

I saw the construction of half-way comfortable architecture given up as soon as the bare minimum definitions of "privacy" and "bedroom" were complete, leading to odd, creative divisions of space in crawling dimensions separated by clotheslines and Amazon sheets with confusing graphics that'd boggle the rigidly trained architects of our time and shorten the lifespan of any sensitive interior designer;

I saw a ketamine-overdosing man aggressively flirting with me, bordering sexual harassment but still managing to never make eye contact due to his state, and when I called him out on it he became reverently, royally offended, as the homophobic was always stronger than the currents of homosexuality and he passed out mouth open on the porch, frozen in time fighting me, fighting himself;

I saw managers earning 14.00$ an hour quickly become abusive post-promotion to the faceless underlings of the mythological "Morning Shift", but felt compelled to forgive them, unsure if my emotions sprung from empathy for any adult working with teenagers or an odd Harvard Prison Experiment-esc Stockholm Syndrome underlined by the soullessness of wage labor;

I saw the ugliest vomit-colored marijuana-themed tee shirts held up in thrift stores for my co-sign and I felt my mind race for any non-negative words about Scooby Doo in this light;

I saw a funeral for a prized light-up Family Guy themed vape pen found fully untouched in the seat cushions of an Olive Garden, where a stripped Converse shoe box served as a coffin and final resting place;

I saw occasional new puppies appear and grow up, forming a new never-ending responsibility for those who could hardly feed themselves, but felt conflicted as these dogs could run proper despite their hunger, unlike regular suburban Doodles;

I saw a birthday party where the happenings were an empty parking lot, thirty real swords and zeal;

I saw flecks of spittle fly in a reflected mirror from the mouth of a stimulant-abusing man shaking my shoulders after I beat him in a game of chess, prompting him to grab me and repeat "You're different, You're different, They're not going to get to you,";

I saw the failure of a thousand words of crafted slang flung onto the proverbial wall of life, then I felt the twisting knife of cosmic humor when someone I only distantly knew by acquitance's acquaintance used last month's attempted words with poor grammar or only in a half nuanced way;

I saw communal guilt and haste when the drug dealer approached quicker than expected, and he was forced to take our assorted pennies and nickels by the inherent social pressure of the exchange, but followed us home as a threat to the great dismay of the backseat first-timer's nerves;

I saw filthy bathrooms serve as a everything but, rather made into a kitchen, bedroom, dining room, paralleling wartime conversions, a safe haven for whatever needed to be, a Zen Temple's silence always interrupted by the drunkest pissards;

I saw seldom a car speed faster after the comment by the hero of the night made by the valiant pizza-place worker in a hungry car volunteering the fact that pizzas are thrown away about this hour and that we might save them, and successfully we did, stuffing ourselves on artificial barbeque flavoring and old cheeses;

I saw memorized lines of future plans whipped out like flashbangs or pepper-spray specially engineered overtime for minimum follow-up potential, meant to clear further pressing rather than act as a dynamic, living map of pursuit;

I saw a successful secret party thrown in the dungeon of a suburban home with 10 guests in a bedroom fit for one, already bursting with a bunk-bed inside but with flowing shit whisky and Daft Punk at shaking volume all was well;

I saw countertransference in real time when the ordinary bullshitters and manipulators became impressed at my ability not only to catch their real-time word-salad references but contextualize and empathize with their errors, and I had to watch them grotesquely fall in love with me a bit;

I saw the disappearance of a friend's favorite drug dealer after he had wronged someone and they had knocked on every single door of his apartment complex brandishing a gun until they had found the correct room as retaliation;

I saw the shakiest, wobbliest men fit for wheelchairs somehow become Yogic angels of balance once they drunkenly fell onto their skateboard, juxtaposingly hitting godly tricks I had only seen in Tony Hawk video games, and it instantly made me lose hope in my future;

I saw some people I met in a graveyard ask to cut me, and I obliged I suppose only because I was three beers deep into an abyssal, unknowledgable body, and shortly after a few sheep bleated requests for the same treatment, and later in the drunken car ride home I felt the color of every bass tone throb my bleeding upper arms as I lay face down enjoying the System of A Down, surely staining the backseat's white cloth with more sweat than red;

I saw terrible behavioral outbursts at the crux of too-tough hikes on empty stomachs, but did not resent them, as the boulders in a river-stream are an indication of the white water's velocity;

I saw stacks of fully-dressed strangers sharing tiny blankets in impossible ways, cuddling like handfuls of recently unearthed worms on cement after a muddy rain;

I saw the most dramatic, poetic, toxic romances playout in real time, carving unclearable scar-tissue immune to the hands of the grandest psychoanalytic masseuses and forming a never-ending wet clay for a new artists to sculpt away fruitlessly;

I saw myself and a friend each bearing a bookbag full of Jimmy Dean's breakfast sandwiches, spray-paint cans and playing cards stopped by a worker heavily hinting but never fully accusing us of theft, and I saw the mystical forces of sheer confidence and idiocy shroud the indefensible Coca-Cola bottles and bouncy balls naked in our hands as we walked out ignoring the balding minimum-wage teenage store-cop, and were confused at his effort;

I saw IOU's promised with once-in-a-lifetime authenticity after a random Bacon Egg and Cheese burrito was humbly gifted, with the recipient even including questionless murder as a possible expression of their retribution, flashing small pistols or sharp knives as antidotes to any perceived verbosity;

I saw too-grown men use silly Snapchat filters to woo too-young women, the metaphor being almost too snug in their donned fashionless circus mirrors distorting the horrors of their real lives;

I saw a pipe lit in the backseat of someone's mom's borrowed Forerunner, and as the smoke was exhaled a police car paused next to us, and the grand question of whether to air the car out or not become of supreme significance with violent political lines forming with near immediacy, but in the end all was calm and the cop simply rolled away;

I saw thick furry lint rollers futilely attempted once-over before stepping out of the house unchanged;

I saw 25$ for a night's endless beer easily turn into 10,025$ by morning time medical bills due to the taking on of one's unquenchable urge of punching a brick or cement wall to determine the outcome of a wager without winner;

I saw that you could take a drag from a blunt and swallow a swig of coffee before exhaling the smoke, increasing both's effects, and that the action would be called "Taking a Mud";

I saw Wu-Tang clan's inexplicable effect at bonding the most disparate souls who'd be sworn enemies in any other context than in discourse surrounding one's favorite Kung-Fu themed Hip-Hop MC;

I saw the truly wholesome fun of a haphazard haircut taken anywhere by anyone, usually resulting in only a final product buzz cut and the collective memories of a happy evening;

I saw the methods by which fast-food corporations copied each other's bottom-of-the-barrel marketing strategies leading to mass cultural hegemony and special meals for TikTok "celebrities" hidden in dusty corners of broken electronic menus so that when you ordered them the cashier was a bit surprised and had to search for the correct button to press, and when you received the meal it looked like everything ever between wet buns drowned in a warm-colored sauce of odd vibrancy;

I saw my lent shirt be puked into with a mash of KFC potato wedges and experimental marijuana strains, and I was gifted a religious lesson of the impermanence of all objects and the staggering weight of possessions;

I saw for some reason a rather wealthy man wear sunglasses indoors while wrapped in a white robe, the most inappropriate yet unquestionably powerful garbs to wear on a Thursday afternoon run to Crack Barrel for steaming dumplings and crayons;

I saw smoke circle conversations quickly turn racist, but at the conversation's ordinarily violent apex all races were equally stoned and rendered immobile and forgetful of their enemy's no-bars-held hate speech;

I saw the pulled-over driver of the car secretly throwing seemingly endless paraphernalia into the backseat while pretending to search for their non-existent photo ID, car registration, or driver's license while the cop blinded me with an industrial grade flashlight and I patted down metal pieces under greasy McDonald's bags;

I saw that under specific pressures literally every woman became something of a dermatological MacGyver, urging her minions to shoplift various creams and odd tools for her goals I couldn't dream of, or sometimes fashioning new ointments from household goods, the education inexplicably passed down like witchcraft through generations, or atleast that'd be my best guess;

I saw a man rip maybe the largest hit of marijuana I'd ever seen out of a comically large glass in the backseat of his car in a parking lot of a Salt Lake City burrito joint before quickly running back inside, apologizing to us for keeping us waiting, taking our order, and delivering literally the most delicious meal I've ever had, a high I keep on chasing;

I saw proof that you could really climb whatever you wanted if you were so motivated, and nobody could get you down;

I saw that maybe one out of every one hundred people I'd meet had some shockingly huge following on a social media platform, (men and women alike both popular for editing, but one of the body and one of Clash of Clans or epic RC car videos), and that they were usually sure to keep it secret, but sometimes revealed it to me, the psychological effects of which have yet to unfold in the entire history of mankind;

I saw my addition to a private pornographic snapchat story, and felt the odd emotions of greeting someone who you'd seen their ass shake more often than their head, always posted to the dreariest pop, and my petty, subsequent removal after I was a bit too "stingy" in sharing my smallest-size Red Bull one tired morning;

I saw evidence of an ongoing hidden history of petty theft in a gas station, where occasionally I'd walk in with someone and they'd be instantly turned away, and it was never militarily enforced but more similar to the way a thirsty dog is directed away from boiling water;

I saw a girl learn how to drive stick-shift in real-time from my backseat perch as the hesitant cops let us drive away so long as the only properly licensed person in the car actually drove, the car stalling and grinding horribly, emitting torturous horse-like sounds as a soundtrack for our sweating necks, as the radio was off so the stumbling driver could try and hear multiple drunken instructions, flopping about like an injured trout in river of hungry bears;

I saw somehow successful heists for alcohol and candy taken at upscale grocery stores by squads of five looking identical to the caricature of "criminal" drawn by professional portraitists, and I lean far toward theories of apathy than ignorance for an explanation of the employees failure to apprehend them;

I saw a beady-eyed crack addict with a nickname of something like Crackhead Craig admit that he read the entire DSM-5 (Diagnostic Statistical Manual), and he became rather impressed with me when I told him I was familiar with the book, and he looked through me, never at me, asking for confirmation that he was lost, and in my dazed hesitation he turned on a YouTube royalty-free trap beat and began "freestyling", really just saying the N-Word off rhythm for two or three grating, torturous minutes;

I saw an incidental underground preparedness for suburban guerilla warfare paralleling motivation for dodging subletting clauses and weed-smoking cravings in spite of the nosiest neighbors;

I saw a beautiful Mexican girl rendered speechless but conscious by heroic combination of ketamine and Miller Lite, staring at me with great, gorgeous eyes but sometimes drooling, and all I could do was stare back in awe and wonder what would happen if I tossed a pair of keys at her;

I saw great tumbles taken down pothole-riddled streets after speed wobbles became to great to bear in pursuit of a breeze in the face that could hopefully emulate an experience of God, a melancholic irony for what I considered honest seeking;

I saw partially unearthed buckets and action figures near train tracks speaking dead stories to entertain my bored mind as I continued miles forward with friends over rocks with warm Goku Energy drink in hand and no destination in mind;

I saw the construction of "Grinch Place," a temple of worship and artwork for a splendid deity, then I saw vagrant delinquency vandalize the Holy, my personal fall of Constantinople, and could do nothing but accept it, play my skateboard iPhone app tearily-eyed and carry on the legacy in my heart and in print;

I saw the deepest and most shallow aspects of man reflected equally in his life-long premeditated action and his thoughtless shooing of a housefly, each equally contributing to the forever in-progress fresco the imprisoned man is urged to paint out;

I sat as food on the Great American Fork, urging myself to walk another path before becoming consumed by the ever-hungry river mouths flowing through time, carving each of our lives like obese sculptors working with warm butter, and I never regret a single choice I made.