one one nine! one one nine!

Stumbling from fatigue over shit soiled sidewalks infested with rats and cockroaches in a post dawn San Diego. Haven't showered in days, glimpse my over exposed phantom leering back at me from a department store window, I mumble, "Man, you look like crap." Dingy, soiled clothes, grey stubble on a sun blistered, gaunt face. I seriously doubt I can physically continue with this experiment. I have become a full-fledged member of these un-noticed masses. People forgotten, people ignored, people despised. I seriously do not know why I am documenting these events. No one cares. Friends are gone. Family a distant and uncaring memory. My life has been encased into a diving bell sinking to the bottom of a black sea, cables severed. I walk and all I think at this point: All is lost. All is Lost.

All.

Is.

Lost.

A familiar voice in my head laughs, "You did this. You get what you deserve." Shut up, you. The sounds of hissing and arching electricity.

Even with the dim glow of an approaching sunrise, the howls of crazed anguish echo up out of the labyrinthine concrete of this unforgiving city.

Silent as ghosts, furtive crackheads shuffle slowly in the shadows, the stench of stale piss and putrefied feces everywhere among piled garbage of abandoned syringes, glass pipes, and smashed bottles of various substance. A black dog infested with mange trots across my path holding a dead rat in its slobbering maw...past row upon row of catatonic schizophrenics wrapped in death shrouds of rotted blankets litter block after block under the baneful eye of the filthy rich in their gilded condos feeding off the ravaged disfavored only a few stories below. I amble with achingly sore and pathetic feet, red eyes focused down through a kaleidoscope of cigarette butts and wadded napkins of shit down down down cold and silent streets brain dull and tepid from insomnia and complete exhaustion. Black lady as emaciated as a corpse slithers up out of a pile a trash and with eyes as bright as the sun asks me with pointed finger of dried and lifeless twig, "Boy...boy, what is it you want?"
I do not stop my slow pace, but mutter in my wake, "I want to die."