The Tail End of the Head Beginning
By Owen Clarke
On Saturday I told myself that I was going to do something productive to forget things, so I went to the coffee shop across from our apartment to write fiction. Unfortunately the coffee shop across from our apartment also sells beer, so although I started with a cortado, I followed it with several Pabst Blue Ribbon’s, and after writing 112 words I exited Google Docs and closed my laptop slightly too hard and tried to flip my beer can into the waste-bin near the bathrooms but missed.
Lukewarm PBR splattered onto the floor.
The barista eyed me. She had dyed red hair and cutoff denim shorts and dark eyes and a pale, moonish face. She was attractive in that slightly aloof, haughty way that in my experience is irresistible but also almost never good news. Her name was my favorite name for a woman. I knew this (the name) because I’d asked her once.
“Sorry,” I said.
I cleaned the beer up with a thin napkin, which disintegrated in my hands as I wiped. I flicked its remainders into the trash, bought another beer, walked outside with my skateboard, tried to land a kickflip and nearly splintered my shinbone. I spent the next couple of hours skating around the neighborhood, drinking and carving in loose circles and trying to pull tricks and talking to a friend in Dallas on the phone.
“I’m chillin’ bro, really,” I told him. “No like, seriously, I’m chillin. I think I’m all good now. It’s over. Moving on!” I chugged the rest of my beer. A police car rolled by. I put the skateboard in the grass and sat down, trying my best to look serious and formal and 28 years old.
A few hours later, I went to an arts festival with another friend in town. We paid twenty bucks to get in, and in exchange were granted entrance to a giant, oppressively humid tarpaulin tent, populated by hundreds of people trying to sell us stuff.
I gaped at a surrealist painting of a giant tortoise with a small town arrayed on its shell, muttered, “This is rad,” to my friend, and then saw the price tag: $8,699. The painter, a crooked-toothed guy with forty-seven or forty-eight long, sweaty hairs pasted to his skull, was smiling at me.
“I take Apple Pay,” he said, “and Venmo.”
I left and rode my motorcycle to another friend's house. (They say, when things like this happen, that you should spend time with your friends until you forget, so that’s what I was trying to do.) I’d told this friend, over text, about things, and he’d invited me over.
I arrived to find him outrageously stoned, his eyes like oily marbles, but he listened and nodded and said, “Yeah” and “Damn” and “Okay,” in all the right places as I talked. Then he said, “Sorry I don’t have any beer,” and reached into his freezer and pulled out two frozen Snickers bars. I thought he was going to give me one, but he ate both, and then we played Mario Kart for a few hours before I went home.
In the darkness of the empty, smooth freeway, I ripped the throttle all the way open, leaned over the tank, cranked Skull Fist’s ‘No False Metal’ and screamed “FUCK YEAH” over and over again inside my helmet until my ears felt like they were bleeding.
Saturday was complete.
On Sunday I woke up, and went about my routine, because Sunday is my routine day. Sunday is my ‘back on track’ day. On Sundays I go to the grocery store and buy organic food. On Sundays I swim 100 laps, and I make excuses to my parents as to why I’m not able to attend church with them. I tally up all the money I’ve spent over the week in a little black notebook, and I tally up all the money I’ve earned in a little tan notebook. I do this using a black felt tip pen called a “Paper Mate Flair Porous-Point.” On Sundays I do yoga and I meditate. I drink lots of water and I read books. I burn incense and research mountain ranges I want to visit. I mediate.
On Sundays I stare into the mirror and say, “Fuck yeah,” but really calmly, almost in a whisper, sort of like a Tibetan monk or a peaceful animated flower in a lo-fi music video or someone’s grandmother.
On Sundays past, we would sleep in and get a late brunch at a restaurant that was too expensive and the service too slow (It was never the same place, but it always was), and I’d always think, Why didn’t we just go to Waffle House? Then I’d tinker around on my motorcycle or car, get covered in black grease and filth, break stuff, lose o-rings, squint at YouTube tutorials, and come away with the knowledge that I need to order more parts online.
On this particular Sunday, I woke up early, alone, and I did go to Waffle House.
It was a grievous error. The food was greasy and the bug-eyed man sitting next to me was half-rotten. He smelled awful, a couple of flies circled him, like some sort of heinous Texas Chainsaw Massacre villain, and I thought, Why didn’t I just make bacon and eggs at home?
Then I went home and emailed a Zen Buddhist master named Gary that I found online, wondering if he’d teach me how to forget things, and he said he would, but informed me that I’d need to wait for a couple of weeks because he was busy.
I also watered all my plants, like I do every Sunday.
There are four of them, and they sit on a shelf by the sliding porch door that faces north. They are accompanied by a clay gnome she made in a pottery class, a four-faced golden head that I found in a curio shop in Vietnam, those crystals that women always seem to collect, a wooden Balinese egg depicting Kali, the Hindu god of destruction, half of a coconut, my grandfather’s wooden necktie, a pair of brass knuckles, a painted doll from Mexico City, a shrunken head from Peru, some Warhammer 40,000 figurines I can't motivate myself to finish painting, and a reddish wooden sculpture of a naked smiling man, from somewhere in West Africa, that I used to pray to when I was a teenager. I used to believe that if I tried hard enough I could create my own deity, because none of the other ones made sense.
It was Sunday, so I took the plants down, one by one, and carried them to the kitchen sink where I filled their terracotta pots with water until it dripped out of the bottom. Then I brought them back to the shelf. I hadn’t listened carefully to the lady at the plant store when she’d told me how to take care of each of these plants, but I remembered that at least one of them was supposed to be watered once a week. They’re still alive, so I must be doing something right.
One of the plants is a wiry sprout of brittle palm shoots, constantly drying out and flaking off. Another is a rat’s nest of twisting, crunchy tentacles. There is one composed entirely of soft limey spades that is supposed to grow and drape over the pot but it never has, and another that is just a single shoot with three little leaves.
My girlfriend named this last plant Blue.
I never liked naming things, but she did. She named my car and our plants and stuffed animals and the quarter we always used to unlock the grocery carts at ALDI (Toby). Toby was never the same quarter, but he was always quarters. He was everywhere, omnipresent, a quarter that would exist as long as quarters did.
Part of me thinks I don’t like naming things because it’s effeminate, but I also think like part of myself doesn’t like naming things because it makes me afraid I’ll become attached to them. If you name something, then when you lose it a part of you dies, like the stone necklace of an orangutan face that I carved in Sumatra that was stolen by rats while I slept. I can’t remember its name, now—although maybe it was George—and I feel sad about that some days. When I was a kid, my mom taught me how to play chess by naming all the pieces on the board, and when they were captured she’d mock cry. This affected me deeply, and I resolved to become a great chess player so that I’d never lose any of my pieces. (Never losing a piece, of course, is hardly a winning strategy.)
I can’t remember what I did anymore, on that Sunday, after watering the plants and tallying my expenses and emailing the Zen Buddhist master. I can’t remember what did on most Sundays. I can’t remember what I did 30 minutes ago, actually. Sometimes I feel like my brain is seeping out of a hole in the back of my neck while I sleep and evaporating in the night.
Sundays are, depending on who you ask, either the end of the week or the beginning, the part of the ouroboros where the head of the snake swallows the tail. I used to want an ouroboros tattooed around my neck, a thick, black snake devouring itself, but when I looked up “ouroboros tattoo ideas” on Google, I saw that the vast majority of people with ouroboros tattoos construct them on a flat plane. The snake is not looping around an appendage, like a neck or an arm. It is a circle, a ring. The magic is gone. The full form is revealed. It’s not a trail that you can follow, endlessly. It’s just a circle.
I stopped wanting to get an ouroboros tattoo after that.
Before Friday, what we had felt quite like an ouroboros. Each week like the last. Every good memory another Saturday, every bad one another Sunday. Every year a new beginning, every fight a new end. Each end the start of something new, something that looks like a fresh path at first, but then you bite down on it, you taste it, and you realize… It’s just my own damn tail.
Good and bad, that. We can always have a second chance? Soothing. The same mistakes can be repeated endlessly, with no consequence except time wasted? Terrifying.
In much of life, relationships especially, it often seems the absence of something is supposed to be evidence of the conclusion. If you don’t know, you do. My mother’s always told me I wouldn’t believe in true love until I met it, wouldn’t know I wanted to have kids until they popped out.
Do you not know you want to live until you know you’re going to die? That’s what they say about those people who jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge and survive.
I have accepted certain things as part of life, like my car’s passenger airbag being broken, my taste in women being immutable, my right leg being shorter than my left, and artificial intelligence being a better writer than me. When you accept some things as part of life, though, it becomes easier to accept other things.
If you aren’t careful, you can stumble down into a pit of neverending acceptance.
If you aren't careful, you may find yourself signed up for three hundred virtual subscription services, wearing synthetic athletic clothes and slide sandals everywhere like Adam Sandler, watching Netflix every night, sitting in drive-thru lines at Chick-Fil-A, and living in relationships that feel like a snake eating itself. When people ask you what you’ve done lately you may find strange responses popping into your head, like,“I ate breakfast at Waffle House next to the guy from Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or “My girlfriend and I broke up,” or “I watered the plants.”
I went to sleep on Sunday telling myself, like I do every Sunday, that things will change.
But I can never tell if that means that things will get better, or that they will go back to being the same.
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of Dead Foot Collective. You can find his work on his website.
