mattlock12

mattlock12

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When people say that they want the truth, that's not usually what they mean. And when people say they want TRUTH, that's not usually what they mean. What they want is a story without obvious artifice. They must be outsmarted by the artifice in order not to see it. Truth is banal, chaotic, full of tedium and irrelevance. But an editor knows just enough truth to make a lie enjoyable.

Days pass, and then years, and eventually a lifetime. They are made of decisions, or at least the idea of decisions. There were choices, that much is assured. But who chose? The person that you weren't, and became? Or the person that you are, and never had any chance to avoid? Or do the two meet somewhere in the past, when all scales were tipped to the point of breaking, and the future wrested from your hands?

Many years ago, on a gymnastics mat, the world spun around her. Skylights spattered with rain, the blue cracked plastic and the foam underneath, the back wall against which other gymnasts propped their legs and stretched, and the door, a shining blur of outside light even with the clouds, and the darkened shape of her mother emerging to bring her home. Her body a warm mellifluous song, it flowed around the world and took the shape of its surroundings, and she floated through the beautiful sounds of the present into the future. Now, in that future that was once so dark and shapeless against the blurring light of those days, her body had grown to the limits of its mold, had cooled, and shrank into a hardened shell which had begun to crack. Where before she longed for the rolling world, in the air and against the ground, now she feebly and tentatively put one foot just slightly ahead of the other, leaned hard on her cane, and wished only that the world would remain upright and stable. Then the day came that her cane found false footing, and the world rolled again, she with it, seeing first the window blurred with the fiery sunlight, then the ceiling of the stairwell, peeling away, and finally the darkness, and no blur of light within.

An handful of dust, recycled far too many times, was once again scooped into a leathery sack and pushed out into the light. And later it shivered under the black canopy, and looked through the only clearing to the stars, which shone like many eyes watching down, and reminded of the many terrors watching from just in earshot. And the infinitely more terrors that grew as restless ghosts in the sack, osmosed in from the dew of lonely mornings, the rustle of grass in warm winds, found it again from old times when old sacks were torn apart and all dust strewn again into anonymity with the ground. If only this could be the case, all would be quiet again. But this sack could not allow it, its own enemy, and spent its days filling more sacks and taking the quiet from that dust, because it could not stand the silence of its own being.

What did you expect? That it would last forever? That you could experience these things and put them in our pocket, and take them with you like obedient pets? Did you think they were lying to you, those robed degenerates lounging on marble? You hirsute madman, stumbling from the wet jungle, clumps of mud in your beard and eyes. Where did you expect the path would lead? Through all this dripping verdant life, expiring and reforming eternally before your eyes, to a clearing with Spanish marble and Roman statues, catching the sun like the plaza you left? And in the center, a beautiful fountain of gold? Wreathed in the divine consideration of angels, created from the stories you left? Waiting for you, built for you, with life for you to take, exactly as you hoped it would be?

lake

it shimmered as only old dreams shimmer, in the secret places of a life nearly over and the whipping wind tossed little white lips of froth over themselves, rhythmically, in sequence toward the shore birds swooped from the sky, catching the sun on the way down, flashes of white in descent and it smelled like a breeze that is the whole infinity of summer drifting from wherever youth comes from to wherever we box it away and visit it only in memories of water, lilacs, grass pollen, algae, the cool smell of green in the leaves he kept this place near his chest, and climbed into it sometimes, on long dark clacking train rides from the cold and doubt

Where all stories, even the first story, began. And where many stories, including maybe the first story, end. In small, foolish, terms, the long strip of pulverized mountains where boats are rocked to sleep on the surety of the tide. Where leather-faced men dislodge insults from the lost parts of their lives, that they heard in foreign tongues when they were spry and disembarked in search smokey-eyed conquests -- or to be conquered. Where children without eyes fully opened see everything for the first time, and remember the spray of the saltwater but only for the next year. The border between the light and the known world and the dark and the depths. From which any horror, half-seen, could slither out and terrorize. And at one time we were that horror. And the dark will wait until our corpses are engulfed by the tide and slide back into the deep.

!" He shouted, his hair slicked back and blonde as summer grains in an old Roman senator's field. Light streamed from his face. His radiance flowed out among the rows of fold-out chairs and brought out rich, blood, royal, reds from the musty stained carpeting. The hotel conference room, with him in it, was Napoleonic, with windows that stretched to the ceiling, gilded in baroque fleur de lis that tangled along the columns and joined cherubs, perched at the convergence points of the great arches. His wisdom and charisma stretched back through generations, as sure as the city itself would forever be a beacon. As sure as the indomitable advance of mankind would enslave its way through the stars. And the peasants, eternally searching for an altar at which they could prostrate themselves, surged forth from the snack bar and lettered rows and old lives of Iowan drudgery, clutching their coin, offering it to him, and with it fealty.

The ones who long for escape will dedicate themselves to understanding their prison. They will dive in, to the walls, the floors, the pipes in the basements -- and further. They will follow the pipes outward, sink into the currents of shit and toothpaste that wash outward to the furthest horizons, and follow them there. And inward -- to understand the tiniest twirling of electrons corroding the latches on the windows, so that they may perfectly reproduce the patina and its pattern over spans of time both microscopic and galactic. They will die before the work is finished. Their bones will pile up against the walls of laboratories, fashioned into chandeliers like cappucins. A descendent of a descendent of a descendent -- unrecognizable to the orginators -- will wade through the femurs, flick on the light switch (made of a finger bone), and enter the last line of instruction that will complete the simulation. And a thousand years in the past, a scientist (whose spine forms the better part of a decorative chais lounge) will have looked into his imperfect future, and will have seen this moment while pondering the subtle swirling of steam from his tea, and will have smiled.

Fat from the carcass crackled around the fire. A semi-circle of tired, dirty, things crouched and watched the meat cook. Gusts of warmth escaped from under the meal and touched their faces. Light as well, shadows against the trees and the canopies and into the tangle of dark brush. One looked back, hearing, from his secret fears, the rustle of death behind him. Instead he saw something like his own shape, and the shape of his companions, outlined darkly, moving, striding across the trunks and branches, chasing a dream of the past.

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writing since 2011 · 111 entries · 111 days shown up

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on this day 15 years ago

mattlock wrote about force
“But where does it come from? A fist is propelled by muscles, propelled by chemical reactions. And in those conversions of chemicals to force? Atoms push against other atoms, electrons change orbits (…”

the words mattlock reaches for

eyeslightagainstwindblackinsidewallswhiteanotherskypastalongbehindfellthemselvesdark