exhibit a: cozy.
exhibit b: weed pipe cozy! yay!
that being said, here is a story i wrote a little bit ago. i call it "sardines", because i'm very original like that.
You cut the headlights a half mile before you reach the meeting place. Your radio, and Elliott Smith’s doomed voice along with it, you cut off, I don’t know, a quarter mile before that.
The ski masks and assorted bandannas that will be covering your faces, you put those on as that distinctly church-shaped behemoth of a building, centuries old, once undeniably grand and now crumbling into the landscape and latticed with ivy, comes into your limited and obstructed field of vision.
Sardines.
Sardines we said, sardines is what we called it. Nothing more than a bastardized hide and go seek, a slight departure from your garden variety children’s game. A game in which all one needs is a group of friends, a lack of good sense, a dark and moonless night, an abandoned building, a handle or two of cheap vodka, and the feelings of invincibility which only youth can bring.
Sardines is the name of the game, now here’s the rub; the bravest or drunkest of your party (and how the too are entwined!) hides alone. Hides alone, mindful of loose floorboards, derelicts, and roving bands of mice and rats. Hides alone, in this archaic monument to the abstract concept of God. Hides alone. The rest of you attempt to find him, and upon doing so, perch, squeeze, or bend and hide there a long with him. A game where, if successful, all seekers become hiders; all hiders, all crammed and jammed together, balanced on cramping legs and trying not to make a sound, in the pitch black of a building without electricity for decades; sardines.
Our game took us all over that church, guided only by the lights of our cellular phones and by the various substances consumed. We found each other in the bell tower, where no bells sound anymore. We found ourselves perched along, step by step, a white marble staircase, a white so stark, so bright, that not even the pervasive and utter darkness could muffle its glow. We found ourselves attempting to squeeze beneath the altar, the crucifix hanging mastodonic and menacing above our heads, Jesus Christ in his final and private throes, unaffected by the sacrilege taking place at his very feet.
The final hiding took place around the baptismal well, still filled after all these years. I was the last to find them, this time; I traversed a hall, negotiated a turn, went through a door, and then I heard it: various shouts and screams from my friends, those poor wretches, as disconsolate and sardonic as I; “Stop! Be careful!” “EMMA? Don’t fall in the Jesus water!” “Finally, you found us! Do you have the last bottle?”. We sat and we drank, then, til that last bottle was as dry as the deserts of Jerusalem.
As I was the last to enter, I was also the last to leave. My friends filed out, and yet I sat, sat on that narrow ledge with the stagnant water beneath me. I dangled my feet above it, and I sat. I sat and I thought of the men who once built this church, our Irish or Italian grandfathers, new to this country, sneered at, yet good enough to build the places of worship. You think of all the thousands of parishioners who once moved through these halls, many of them absolved of their original sin in these very waters. You think of the priests, black robed and long faced, the years of study and the lifetime of celibacy they gave up for their beliefs. You wonder what they, the congregation, the workmen, the clergy, would think of you; a group of half drunk and irreverent suburban teenagers disrespecting utterly and totally the place they believe to be literally God’s House. You feel ashamed, and you wonder where this life could ever lead. You worry for you, and for your friends, for whenever the bottom falls out, for whenever that proverbial pendulum swings back.
i really hate capital letters. i'd go back through and take them all out but i just dont know where i'd find the ambition, you know?
