Treadmill!

 Cement surrounds you and time passes. 

I saw a man running and I saw the rain. 

I walked to the store to pass the time. I bored myself at the store and stood there for at least four hours. I repeated phrases and greeted each person differently, depending on the way that I felt. Wet cement is like the circus, there is not much. When I see the store and its name in the capital letters I worry about the meaning of everything. I saw the man exit the place and go down to his car. The black tar in the parking lot was hit hard by the sun and it wafted its goo out into his nose and he felt the feeling of the store really. I saw him open his door and let the rain hit his seat. I saw him sit on the wet seat. The wet wouldn’t leave that seat for a while now. It will sit and wait.

He goes out to put on his shoes and forgets where he has just been. He has done this too many times. Minutes are lost in repetition. Where was I just? I am where I expect now but why? What events lead up to now?

He presses numbers and smiles and drinks and says he too is excited to leave the store. The store must be the worst for the others. They must find rides and take buses and walk there and spend much time in transport. On the wall there are faces that look stern. The checkpoint is missing today so it is easier. I mean that their faces look pleasant and unjudging, but they are not. Neither am I. 

Cement has always been, it has all dried. It cannot be that there was ever cement that was undry, only things that are in place, as they have been.

His pants do not fit today. He tries another pair. 

Cement surrounds. Cement grows. I don't know how cement acts. You know that people can hear you, like when you are thinking thoughts. You know that they are all in there. You know that they plot against you. Maybe they just study you. I am their lab rat, I know you all hear what I think. What I say is no surprise, I disguise what I’m writing with music but you are still there, listening, plotting, writing, recording, telling your boss that you are not sure how to analyze this bit or that. I know you are there. But really I’m not sure. It is just as well that you are not listening, not hearing what I think with a headset in your left ear with the right bit having a piece that comes around the front so that you can communicate. What each of these situations means for me or you, I’m not sure, perhaps you have an explanation. Perhaps not. You are they.

He is locked into the mode of being which there is. I am locked into that being.

There is a velvet homeless who claws at the door to his house. The door is answered and there is no sign. Just a card and a thank you. And a repetition of all the same there ever was.

The house changed but really it does not. All that is exciting is the change in appearance, never the content of the place. There may be something new up at each moment but that is non matter. He is here and he is within the place. He is so very lucky. 

He presses numbers and smiles and drinks and says he too is excited to leave the store. He makes up the usual baloney and calls the others over. There is no other mode of being. He sinks into the wet cement in the store. The floor has squares all over. Each is one foot in width and length and each is speckled with spots of color not too offensive but never too uninteresting to the uninterested passer. Each square is outlined by a thin black line that is just the flooring below or else the glue used to hold this all together. Either works well enough figuratively. Once in a while there is a rubber rug on the floor, with polka dots like a Hirst painting. Except without the color. Never the color. The rugs are black, and as you lean back on something and press your feet into the ground on top of one of these rugs, it shifts under you and moves you. Then you kick at the rug from the opposite side every couple minutes to reset the thing. When you are doing this, be sure not to run into or hit anybody on accident. The floor goes again in the same mode as it has always been. 

The store once had a cafe area, long ago that was removed in favor of more space for the people to buy. That area curved the walls and sat nicely. But it has never been in the place. It has always been how it is. I cannot remember much of when the store was like this, only that it was. So it mustn’t have ever been like this. At least not quite as I describe. The place had tables and seats all around the windows and also had couches and was pleasant enough, at least in theory it was. Or in memory.

Every once in a while I ask myself: What is a genocide? What does it mean? 

He again enters his car. He again. I think you get the point.

Repetition is what makes us all fat. It is what gives us what we have. It is the mother who nurses us to being and existence. It is what is. There is no denial. There is no revolution. There is no progress or hunger. There is only cement and wet cement, but there is never really wet cement, and the change that is all sinks in the wet cement. There is nothing but food. There is nothing but sustenance and value for the repetitor.

There is nothing outside of what we know. Everybody knows everything. There is nothing.

The woman running in the rain stopped to see her watch, to see the name of the song, the time, and the date. She continued running, only this time the same as before, and around and around. The woman never tripped. Her shoes gripped the ground and she saw just what she needed to see. She produced what she needed to and in surplus. The woman looks out onto the sun rising and setting over the rectangle and the infinite squares beneath it. She looks up again. She stops for a moment and catches her breath. The woman runs to the store with the big metallic font out front and the welcoming doors that open as you approach them and can be seen through and analyzed at depth. She throws away her gum and enters the store.

She washes his face in the company bathroom. And she continues on his way.

The woman sees the black tar and she knows it.

The sky is filled with tiny specks of colors not so bright as to be offensive, but also never so plain as to arouse suspicion.