I am having trouble defining how I feel about myself these days. I feel like there is a remonstrance coming, or a rubicon. With each passing day I find myself feeling the weight of every step I take, of every movement forward, and of every moment spent idle. My brain is as active as ever. Through the brain I can feel flesh clutching my bones, and I sense innards rising and rebelling to levels approaching turmoil. I think there is a word for this kind of experience but I can’t think of it, nor can I think of a proper search query to identify it. “Synæsthesia” is close but not quite what I’m thinking of. It could make you insane to pinpoint the feelings and nerve endings in all your internal organs. It makes me think my body will sprout plants and fungi.

I know that loneliness is starting to get to me. Even the door buzzer ringing by a FedEx delivery person was enough to give my heart a lift, thinking I had company.

Thinking about that nasty dream from which I woke last week, in which I was ordered to shoot somebody and I did, sending a bullet into the bottom of his feet. The bottoms of my feet are, like the back of my head, a region of my body I rarely have any reason to look at. I remember a feeling of both mild grotesquerie and amazement one day when I found myself forced to sit down on a sidewalk and take off both my shoes. I was in an isolated section of Queens on a Sunday, a day when very few people were around, when the shoes I was wearing became too much for me to bear. These were MBT shoes, those overpriced “fitness” shoes that don’t really do anything to improve your fitness. I was duped by those shoes but whatever the case this was the first time I had worn them and, for whatever reason, I decided not to wear socks. It was a hot day and the sweat from my ankles combined with the shoes not being broken in combined to make it feel like my ankles were being eaten by these MBTs. Blood stained the shoes but I kept soldiering on, thinking I would just get used to it. Finally I gave up. I stopped walking and sat down on the sidewalk, unpeeling the bloody monsters from my feet and sitting for a while to let them breath.

That’s when I turned one of my feet over and saw that strange and almost foreign part of my body at which I almost never look. “Is this really me?” I asked myself. They seemed too big, but then so did the work they do. It was like looking at a tree stump or the innards of a tall building. The design, if you could call it that, was impressive as hell, and the work they did in getting me from place to place seemed more formidable than I had previously had reason to consider. The longer-than-expected length of the toes and the broad fleshy span of the arch were revealed to me as a background support system that I just never thought about.

After that strange moment of discovery I thought about getting up and moving on until I noticed something that kept me seated: I was surrounded by broken glass, every last shard of it looking very sharp. This was obviously not a good surface for walking without shoes so I managed to get the MBTs under my feet by pushing the backs of them down and effectively using them like sandals. It was not easy, and the cuts on my ankles still hurt like hell, but it worked. As I slowly made my way back home, step by painful step, it occurred to me how easy it would have been to languish there on that sidewalk with no one noticing or having reason to care. It was that isolated a spot, and since then I’ve noticed other rows of shrubs and bushes behind which a body could disappear and stay that way for a long time before any person or animal had reason to encounter it.

Those MBTs remained blood-stained for however long I continued to wear them. They were retired once and for all after the memorable incident at Calvary Cemetery, a story I must have told here before. After a 24-hour blizzard some years ago I went out to the cemetery, as I was wont to do in those days. Sidewalks and streets were all plowed, making the trek about as trouble-free as if it had not snowed at all. At the cemetery I wanted to see how the Soldier’s Monument was doing. That’s up at what I think is the highest spot in the yard, in Section 4. I stopped walking and stood in place for a few moments. When I attempted to start walking again I found it slightly difficult to do that. I looked down and discovered I was standing in a sea of shit. It was maybe an inch deep and spread across as much as 20 feet in front of me and maybe 8 feet to the right and left. It was quite fresh and sticky and smelly and, you know, all that stuff shit is. After a moment of revulsion all I could think was “What the hell is this doing here? How did this stretch of ground come to have so much feces on it?” I imagined there was some kind of scenario involving badly contaminated feces that is so toxic it could not even be let into the sewer systems. What if some kind of crime was being covered up would reveal some kind of crime, so people are forced to dispose of hundreds of pounds of animal or human feces by dumping it onto snow-covered cemeteries and scarcely trammeled grounds.

or maybe someone just thought it was a good way to fertilize the soil, not that this particular cemetery is lacking in fertility.

None of my theories made any sense. It took a few hours of consideration to settle on the obvious answer to what the hell all this shit was doing up there. It had to be the geese. There are hundreds of them in and around Calvary Cemetery, and their turds are everywhere. During the 24-hour storm they must have huddled together in that space to keep warm, all of them pooping away the whole time. There’s no other possible explanation.

After that incident the MBTs landed in a trash can.