douglaskoke.com

I'm tired of these anemic conversations with the headshakers.

I'm tired of their monochrome imaginations and uncultivable minds, feigning
consideration as they pretend to labor over their brittle, knee-jerk answer of "no". Always making a big show of sagging back into their seat, so that anyone watching might mistake them for people with souls. Sitting there, gutless, spouting off their flea-bitten, obvious rebuttals of whythings won't work, without actually thinking about how they could.

Ever the slave to their memos and doctrines, ill-equipped to fathom anything beyond the quick-payoff, they do what they always do; pathologically adhere to convention and then congratulate themselves on its marginal rewards, eternally pleased to laze around the inconspicuous glow of dumb money.

Unable to think in abstract terms of creation, they instead turn to
abolition, always going back to that same slump-shouldered, preternatural talent for elimination, shirking whatever they don't understand. Waning like little moons, their crisp white dress shirts creasing at the belly like a dent in a soft-boiled egg.

All these red-faced, flabby men with flabby hearts, telling me useless, spiteful shit like, "Business is a dirtier game than marriage, son", all the while leering at the waitress when they think she's not looking. Patting their bloated, ulcerated stomachs; "She's got a nice ass for working in a grease joint", smiling at me as though I was thinking the same thing, and not wishing she had put hemlock in their longnecks. Pliable, pasty little men with a little bit of money, hiding in wood-paneled restaurants from wives who don't
appreciate them and children they don't want, fatherly explaining to me over and over again why exactly it is that I'm doomed to failure as they rot themselves on cold beer and pork salt. Bloodless louts.

"Your idea's original, sport, but it's not practical. Can't do it. Sorry."
And with that, they stand up and take one last squalid gaze at the waitress,
all of 20 years old, unarmored in a uniform she hates, collecting cutlery and stares from a room full of assholes.

"She'd be hot if she fixed herself up, huh. Put on some lipstick. Maybe one of those miracle bras? Some heels? Yeah? I'd probably do her." Laughter.
Standing around the leaky oddments of their plates, watching her clean up as they shift in their brown leather oxfords, fixing their stringy neckties,
reaching for free candy from a bowl.

After the customary allotment of small talk concerning golf scores and ugly in-laws, each of them pretends to clamor for the check, gradually pushing their hands back into the darkness of their pockets, looking at that young
girl, thinking of their spouses at home; stolen, kept, varyingly dissatisfied. They all mutter and wink and finally someone whose navy suit is slightly less bland tosses some bills on the table, not wanting to give up a damn thing-- shelling out only to preserve their alpha-male dominance over some fuck-threat from accounting. "No, no, Tom. This one's on the big dog", and so on.

Then, the man in the slightly-less-bland suit gives a signal and they line up ceremoniously like shaved pigs, mechanically forming according to rank, ushering me down their cue of dismissal.

My skin wrinkles in warning as their palms slap down on my back, brusquely
whisking me out to the parking lot, towards a penniless emancipation. They all offer me a fistful of baby-fat to shake goodbye, and I put my business card in each of their palms, in lieu of a hot branding iron.

Conversation is a struggle of thought against muscle against breath, an idea tearing from its domesticated position in the mind to spill violently over the teeth, furious with desire and belief. Speech is the blood and animal of want, sprinting mad and fervent down races of air, choked by the glottis, bashed against the rocks of the molars and soured in spit as it strains to get out what it means; snapped at by the jaw and pushed bruised and battered through pursed lips before it stings hot against the anvil of the ear.

Talk is the implement of passion, the envoy of hate, the hard, clanging labor of mind and body fighting to overcome planets of impediment to ask for what it needs. It is an effort of lust and deliberation wrenched away from the flesh and spat out in desperate, sonorous ardor. It is a lifetime of etymological strife and manipulation. It is a hoarse, rasping supplication, doled out by
hucksters and confidence men.

Speech is not a testimony of fact; it is an exportation of self, dangled in offering for something considered advantageous. It is designed not to convey the truth, but to obtain something its author covets.