Nail biting is the oldest form of procrastination.
It is also a damn good indication of anxiety.

It was nine o'clock on a Saturday and the regular crowd were settling in. I am nowhere to be seen in that scene because I have been far away from those hasbeens. I'm living it up on the street where wild women dress up and get low, so low like hoes, they blow nicotine moths from their mouths that move through the air like low-flying mini-grey-whales and they settle on to my clothes, nestling in for the night, moth-jaws dripping ready to feed on the fabric that holds me warm. I crack open the smirnoff ice and I take a shaking gulp. The familiar pshhht sound and the acid-test-smell smell calm me somewhat but she is walking over to me, following that invisible moth trail. She says to me,
is that Koolaid?
The words roll off her tongue and then grind to a halt - they stop for a minute as she takes the time to spit and lubricate each letter, then she groups them into words and fits them into charming shapes - once this is done she spreads her lips and ushers them into the cockpit - all systems are go and they shoot out like knives.
I reply,
not yet.
But I am desiring her cigarette. I want to snatch it from her brittle hands and feast upon the scalding waves of pauper-incense. I want to flood the world with smoke so I could find the hidden ghosts waiting and watching me, I know they are. They fill up my drink whenever I think
that they aren't there.
My right hand is twitching in my pocket, warm yet bored, it wants to run down the streets naked stealing from the poor and giving to the poorer. It wants to blow the minds of the mediocre and fill the drains with bad liquor. It wants to flood Sydney in a tidal wave of white spasmodic dreams that will crush the remnants of the banking institutions and pulverize the reams that hold numbers and debts and lives. But it doesn't do this. Instead it emerges from my pocket, dressed in a suave suit and smelling like a god dragged it through a forest of rainbow coloured bladdernuts dripped in all the finest scents, it slowly and seductively floats through the air moving towards the languid shoulder of this woman. My hand offers her shoulder a drink and she winks, tugging at her immense cleavage and gingerly but surely touching my crotch.
She whispers into my ear an insane price.
On my peripheral vision I notice dogs wandering the street and watching hotdogs cooking on steel trays - the dogs are melting and blistering and soon will be feeding the wanton crowd that always emerges like a savage cult in the witching hour to prey upon loose leaves that are never admired on this part of the planet.

I am harvesting the desires from her eyes as my hand slips under her bra strap.
A scream utters and wobbles carelessly down an alleyway like a full-bladdered pig bursting in yellow fury. I didn't realize that I had torn off her clothes and her face until it was too late. I remember leaving her off-her-face, disheveled and broken - I packaged her next to the fire-hydrant and called 911 - she is fire, on fire, on fire, I told them.

She was on fire.
I picked up the cigarette.
It had dropped to the ground sometime during that fiasco and put it to my swollen lips and I walked away.

I am hungry now. I can still smell the hot dogs and my shoes are surprisingly clean. Lets go back. I love walking during the night, especially in the City. The opportunity for freedom here is like a drug. To be anybody, to do anything. The City eats the freakish things and burrows deep into the humane; breaking them open and showing the truth for what it is - just a deception, a recognition of incredulous humankind's breaking vision - The sunlight is the true deceiver. Daylight is a crime. Day time is a forgery. Night, and all that comes with it, is the truth of this world. During Night Time all lands and all people are one and the same - The darkness brings us together.

The guy who was meant to be cooking my hot dog was over by the alleyway.
Yelling in Arabic is not going to do him any favours and I knew no pigs would be hammering down on my door tonight.
I just wonder whether the Arab may or may not have cared that I am now eating two and a half of his tasty dogs. Shame they are not actually very hot. Just mildly warm. Lukewarm, perhaps.

Digging into the flesh of the dog with my nails I couldn't help thinking about my future - a scene careened into my inner vision and I witnessed the last Jeffersonian frontier.

I knew it wouldn't be long until I reached home.

***

I picked at my nails. You know there was once this man who was called the poet of the nation, the poet of the people. And yet, he barely wrote poetry. And the poetry he did write was like rotten milk. How the hell such a savage and ruthless lie is able to be permeated throughout academia and the lower levels of society beats the living shit out of me. The next passenger in this thought-train just took up and deserted as I pulled up my pants and caught my penis on my undone fly. Well perhaps the thought didn't exactly leave, perhaps it was pushed out by the thought that was saying
be careful, drop your pants, now pull them up, slowly, _carefully_.
But maybe not. Maybe the earlier thought just couldn't wait to leave and saw an opportunity. Maybe it took the opportunity to be a nuisance thought - instead of helping me put my pants on without problems, it aimed to rattle on about pseudo-intellectual bullshit so as to force another thought to take its place, thus allowing it the chance to escape my dome and to be free - probably now frolicking in the wasteland that circles my inner-machinations.

By this time my toast was almost done, I could feel it in my bones. And my friend, a big red-headed beast, was groaning on the leather couch. He was wearing nothing but black tight leather pants. I told him the juxtaposition between his pants and his pale skin was a fucked up thing to see so early on in the day, especially on a Monday, but he just made some ancient symbolic gesture that flew right past me. I couldn't catch it. I am a modern man, budding like a rose in a garden of weeds ready to shine and ready to breed. Meanwhile the big red monster was having some sort of preternatural courtship, a disgusting threesome involving his body, his leather pants and the leather couch. I could feel my orange juice ready to erupt from my guts. It might be something Warhol, something indie, to purge one's body of a liquid and to coat big red's hair in it at the same time - The shades of colour might just brighten his day.

I really didn't let my thoughts get that far ahead because my true happiness comes from my machines. Opening the small white door and walking out into the gaping chasm that holds my cars is always a beautiful moment. I closed my eyes and smacked the wall - two keys (out of five) dropped into my hand - I thought of a memory from childhood and I picked the key in my left hand. Driving my car is like doing yourself. While you are young it is cheeky, naughty, maybe even natural - Being young and rich means life is good. And my life, well, it is good.

T.S. Eliot once said that human kind cannot bear much reality.
I really agree with him. My car skids and burns and revs and takes turns like an angel flying at high speed low down on this earth turning heads, breaking necks - breaking necks of angelic hipsters, posting on their tumblrs how they saw me
"WHAT!?! Who HIM!! SEROUSLY HIM????"
"YES HIM I SAW HIM I FUCKKIINN SAW HIM!!"
"HNGGGGGGGG"
"OMGGG DEAD"
And there we have it. Such dialogue would make T.S. Eliot turn in his grave with such haste and frivolity one would think he was buried in a nuclear-powered washing machine. But the point is, that the sort of dialogue shown above and taken seriously today *is* reality for so many people. I am only young but I already see the faults in the wheel of society, culture and humankind. The spokes are breaking - the magnets failing, the rubber melting and the bolts cracking, breaking and bursting free from this forsaken and failing machine. In the words Goethe, omniscient I am not, but well informed.

Weaving through the streets on an early morning always makes me think. At any moment I could kill myself. I could run myself into that girl smoking. I could push the pedal down and ram myself into the pet shop. I could hit the brakes and fly out at unfathomable speeds right into the deep fryer of some fast food franchise disenchanted and disenchanting. But I don't. And I never will. Like all good things - there is an end. And the end of my driving pleasure arrived not long ago, I think. Because I have been pushing my car to the absolutely limits on these streets for so long that it has become mundane. So right now I am peeling the nails off my fingers as I do things in this machine that many men would die for. I am not blessed, I am not special. I'm just another dying beacon, another falling star another -
You know, when you drive, no matter how fast you are going, some things always appear as a perfectly clear image. No blurriness. No fuzz. Perfectly clear.
I just skidded around a corner at high speed and the eyes, nose, lips, arms, legs and torso of a bedraggled and smelly looking homeless person blew into my vision like a zephyr from heaven. I saw him and I felt him. I feel him still even though I am already blocks away from his rotting life.

But he put something in me. Some idea. I can feel it pushing between my floating rib and making a home for itself, sitting there inside of me, begging my zapping neutrons to produce some change.

***

You know you are old when you get jealous of your nails.
The jealousy is born from the realization that these useless plates of keratin are constantly being rejuvenated.
Why can't my body rejuvenate better, more important things?
Like my hearing, sight, touch and skin elasticity.
Why must I be burdened with this decrepit insanity bulging from my fingers?
The torture, the horror.
I find myself in a grim and desperate hour.
I pull the nails away.
Every time the Limo slows down and a face smashes into the window
peering like a seer into the machine trying to catch a glimpse of me. Myself. I. The nails are peeled.
I am old now. I know this. I am old like the leather in this beautiful limousine.
I am aged like the walnut that adorns the dashboard.
I am wise like the driver who knows his way around the major cities of the world as if he had grown up in them.
And then studied them intensely for five years.
This is the reality. My reality.
This is the reality that others want a part of because they are hollow on the inside. Broken. Deceived. Dead. Not not dead. They are alive, they are the living dead.
When a young woman throws herself like a bullet at my window
I don't see happiness.
I don't see joy or appreciation.
I see a black-hole, a wound, a ticking bomb draped in carnations and drugs and petrol and violence.
And I am not opposed to carnations and drugs and violence.
But I am opposed to the former.
Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet once said:
The moving finger writes.
And I do agree.
And it is the moving soul that takes flight.
I see no soul in the world anymore.
No longer do I find souls shaking with zest and life.
Big red died on the couch that day and I had to move into a new place because the kitchen ornaments rattled all throughout the night.
That boy had a soul that could shake the world to the ground, but he would always rebuild it.
I cannot say the same for myself.
Yes, I am a mover.
Yes, I am a shaker.
But am I creator?

Severe pain down my left side is amplified by the cracking and breaking of hollow-shells around my machine.

Jaw pain. Nausea.
Breaking vision.
Da Vinci once said
Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.

He was right. As I shake and pain pulsates throughout my body - I see a mercy seat in front of me - situated far away from this place.

I always knew that in death I would not stop moving, a clung to this dream since birth.

***


And he didn't stop moving. Not for 12 more blocks. I know this because I drove him there until a fan jumped and smashed his head into the indicator light.

Sincerely,

Dave the Driver.