I was bored because I’d watched all the things I thought would be interesting on Netflix, and so I went over to my friend’s house. He was always doing something interesting.
He had on a video, someone was running with a video camera on their hat. You could hear the grunts and the breath, and feel the jiggle of the camera and the fellow ran along tracks and rocks out somewhere.
Where is that?
Minnesota.
Who’s that running?
I don’t know.
Where’d you get the video?
Someone gave it to me.
My friend and I used to run together, but now we were middle aged, and I’d stopped running because I prefered to drink and watch Netflix, and he was obsessed with his artwork. Every week or so he was on some new process. One week he was just pounding on metal trying to make it do what he wanted. Another week he was doing these elaborate pipe cleaner sculptures. There were a few months where he was doing this lego things. They all seemed kind of neat, and he explored the potentials of the materials, and always had something new in his studio. His studio was an apartment, but besides the bed, and the kitchen counter, it was really a studio. My friend painted and sculpted, he did video projects, and he even clacked away on a typewriter obscure impressionistic poetry.
The guy was running in the background. I could tell it was a guy because of his masculine grunts.
My friend was on one of his pet themes
The man pug you into Netflix today?
No, I’m pretty sure it was me who watched the last season of Arrested Development.
Isn’t it funny that they don’t even hide the label of what the show is doing to you?!
I think it’s about the show, not what it’s supposedly doing to you, and do you think I have arrested development?
We all do. As an artist I regress to the state of a child so that I can do my art. It takes it’s toll, sometimes I have a hard time getting out of the child position.
So why are you busting my nuts?
I’m trying to wake you up. Don’t you want to be awoken?
You’re the great awaker?
Call me what you want, that’s your box, not mine.
The video of a man running continued.
I told my friend about my new girlfriend. I was trying to figure out of she was too needy or if I was too selfish to give her what she wants. My friend would call that my pet theme. The woman I was with had it all going for her, but she had chronic fatigue syndrome. Which meant she didn’t have much energy. She had energy for work, she had energy for me to take her out. But beyond that she wasn’t really present. She slept a lot. I was trying to work out if I wanted a woman who was more awake. My friend, who has all kind of theories, said he didn’t believe in chronic fatigue syndrome, and called it lazy-excuse-to-sleep-a-lot-syndrome. He said he got some of his best ideas when he was really tired, and had been working hard, and let his guard down. He had cycles, where he’s stay up for a few days and then sleep for like a day. He wouldn’t take his bipolar medication to make his sleep cycles conform to the norm. “Who cares, I’m an artist, I like it when everyone is asleep. Nobody to bother me when I’m working. But mostly nobody bothers me except you, and really I can keep working while you’re here, so you don’t really bother me. I need some human contact.”
The runner kept running.
He had a few friends, and his art dealer, and every once in a while he’d go to a bar and sometimes pick up a one night stand. He was too into his art to care about someone else, and the women figured that out, and would leave in the morning. I think he made a point of ignoring them so that they got the picture.
The runner seemed to be getting tired. There were gaps. He stopped a few times and then groaned, and started up again.
My friend made some coffee. He would often quit coffee, because he said he was just using a maintenance dose, and that’s addiction. He’d had trouble with drugs, but was past that. The biggest thing he used now was coffee, and every other time I went he’d serve me tea. Today we were back on coffee. My friend liked to talk about future trips he was going to take when he drank coffee. He’d traveled the world whenever he had a big jackpot of money from his art. Every once in a while he was hot, and he’d use the money to take a break from art and travel the world. He’d pay a few months of rent up front and go away for a few months. He’d come back broke, and that would be part of his hungry artist process. He traveled cheap mostly. Sometimes he’s “slurg” on a hotel room to take a shower and catch up on sleep.
The guy on the video fell down. He twitched a few times and then the camera was still, with the world tilted to the side. Then you couldn’t hear the breathing, it just stopped. Just the wind blowing the grass and trees in the distance.
