My first friend is the bottom half of a broken beer bottle.

Catching daylight, the bottle's sharp edges glitter at me. Humming to myself, I pat the glitter, cutting my fingers which I immediately shake in a panic, splattering the face of a boy passing by with blood.

The boy is holding a snowcone, and I guess some of the blood got on it, because he says, "Thanks mister!" and darts his tongue ardently into a red spot on his blue cone.

"Hey, no sweat, kid. Life is like a bird eating its own feathers out of starvation, the bird subordinated by the grotesque impulses of hunger. Eating itself in involuntary selfishness without knowledge of itself or others, it is simply a self-consuming motor."

I wave bye to the boy, getting a little blood on his chest area and he walks off smiling toward the park.

Shall I continue making friends?

I would, but I'm too sleepy, though I guess I shouldn't be so tired, but then again it's no surprise because my body has certainly been getting very fat lately.

But it wasn't always that way.

When I was 23 I ran 20 miles a day. Then I'd eat a bowl of Wonton soup and read 312 pages of Russian literature. That was my style back then. Big breaths and deep thoughts. I also had hair. A long mane of haunting, braided beauty that hung down my back like a Special Forces rope.

But I don't have the energy anymore, and even if I did have the energy to run or to climb something, I get injured way too easily now to take such risks. I have grown fragile, which is humiliating, though some of my injuries do seem cool to me. For example, whereas David Blaine had to mix heroin and male femininity with the Stanislovsky method and a mirror to get that spooky (I'm-blowing-your-mind) look in his eyes, somehow the other night while I was sleeping, a blood-vessel in my right eye burst, which produced a perfect teardrop-shaped bloodstain, giving me a crazy, magician-like, designed-by-doom look. The kind of guy who is growing magic mushrooms in his infant's crying mouth.

But what point have I come to in my life where a broken blood vessel in my eye can be considered a victory? To be honest, I don't mind being screwed up. I just wish that I was screwed up and interesting like Corey Haim.

Of course when Corey Haim shoots up, I am sad. But he does this in the great tradition of American jazz artists. His work on the synthesizer is a visionary example of the "sounds of the street today" mixed with time signatures derived from experimental jazz and classical music, all of which he combines to fit the constantly evolving needs of his explorations. His is an open field of composition. He does not work in predetermined forms, but finds/builds forms that extend from and articulate the complex occasion of associations that inspires his play. Equally intuitive in acting, Corey has gone beyond the masks of tragedy and comedy, creating new, often haunting masks of distilled emotion so subtle and specific to his gifts that it will be a long time before the acting community will be able to percieve, let alone use, what he has created. Is there not something of the Sphinx posing a riddle in his grin? It has been years since Corey has really acted, but what else could he give to the craft? But those paying attention will remember the interview in the great documentary Me, Myself, and I where Corey mentions that his dream as an actor is to someday play not the younger brother, nor the older brother, but the "only brother."

If Corey Haim was my brother I would have a reason to care, to try. And I need to try now because I'm not getting any younger, and unlike Haim, I can't just rely on the volition of great talent to carry me forward. So I'm trying to build energy, but everything is just so difficult.

Even walking is difficult. The vague thud of life monotonous in my head as I walk. If possible, I'd just float around on a chair powered by whatever energy accumulates in the desire to not get out of a chair. Self-sufficient laziness helping me float above pedestrian surfaces.

There's a movie called "Stuntman" where the director of a movie almost never gets out of the crane that keeps him floating high above the crew to whom he talks down -- literally. And I think that's what I want. To experience everything from the God perspective, not really experiencing anything directly but rather existing as a detached witness to human activity. And to judge it.

**The other day I saw a man walking through the subway tunnel with his young son (probably about 8 or 9 years old) and the father and son had overweight faces that were exactly the same size. Everything else about them was different as you would expect when considering their great difference in age. And I know that I'm just repeating the same point again here, but one of them was an adult and one of them was a child. So why were their faces exactly the same size? Is there some disease that does this to a father and son besides just living in Chicago eating the same shitty food day after day? Is it a genetic mutation? Are there enough of these fathers and sons with the same-size overweight faces to form a significant community? Do they need protection? Does having the same size face make them attracted to each other, thus leading to incest as one of the symptoms of this disease? Or does it make them hate and want to get away from each other? Are there father/son overweight face competitions to see which face-pairs are most exactly alike when measured by hair-trigger-sensitive scientific instruments? Has anyone published a collection of poems written by this father/son community? Does this community pose a threat to the United States?

MORE BY MARC BAEZ

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