Free Rontel by Sam Pink

die.
    He pointed at me with the last bite of hotdog.
    He said, “You cold.”
    I said, “Fucking right.”
    “Co-dest,” he said, laughing.
    And for some reason I imagined our severed heads connected by a glowing double helix—floating up to the apartment rooftop where our vibrating power stopped the violence—and everyone cheered us, the two headed double helix, as we went to other planets to help likewise, yuh, travelling the world helping people.
    No/who cares.
    Behind us, a drunk woman walked up and started making sounds at the hostage situation.
    She had on a dirty NFL winter coat.
    Uncle Sam’s woman.
    She stood there toothless, making noises at the situation.
    Like, not words, just noises.
    Then she came up behind Uncle Sam and slapped his head hard and said, “That’s not only your cigarette, gammee it.”
    Uncle Sam ate the last of the hotdog and held up his empty hands and said, “S’a fucking ha-dawg, bitch.”
    *
    So I had to run over to my girlfriend’s.
    It was five and a half miles.
    I liked running over.
    It was cheaper and faster than the train too.
    In fact, fuck the train and fuck Chicago and fuck each United State.
    I went home and put shorts on and lay on the floor, sweating, vowing—to myself if no one else—to figure out a way to kill everyone in Chicago.
    “They all have to die,” I said, looking across the floor at Rontel, as he lay there blinking, streetlight across his face through the blinds in sharp lines.
    *
    I walked the first couple blocks to prepare my legs.
    Had to wear boots because my other shoes fell apart.
    It was almost dark out, but still over ninety degrees.
    One street before Clark St., a raccoon walked around someone’s front yard.
    And a dog walked out from the backyard, approaching the raccoon.
    When I rounded the corner, I heard the dog whimper and shriek loudly.
    And I started running with a smile on my face—thinking something like, “These are the days when the dog loses to the raccoon.”
    And that made me smile even more.
    To be my own stupid best friend.
    Let me show you how a real man accepts the weights of shrieking terror.
    *
    On the run over, I thought some more about my “Talking to yourself is…” stationary.
    I’d been thinking about creating this personalized notepad or like, calendar, or something similar, where on each page at the top it had, “Talking to yourself is…” then at the bottom it had something unique.
    But so far, I’d only come up with like, ten ideas.
    I had:
    Talking to yourself is…“the result of having no one to talk to, even though there are plenty of people to talk to.”
    Talking to yourself is…“never avoiding the argument.”
    Talking to yourself is…“killing a strong animal such as a gorilla or rhino using only strikes to the mouth with your fist.”
    Talking to yourself is…“killing a strong animal such as a gorilla or rhino using only your mind/kindness.”
    Talking to yourself is…“being too worried about people knowing your thoughts.”
    Talking to yourself is…“feeling comfortable.”
    Talking to yourself is…“keeping a small animal frozen (having been frozen alive) in your freezer.”
    Talking to yourself is…“not changing your shower curtain in so long that when you were showering the other day and saw a fly emerge from a moldy fold in the curtain, you were convinced fly larvae grew there (and it probably does).”
    Talking to yourself is…“one thousand years of numb-handed surgery.”
    Talking to yourself is…“too many cookies and not enough milk.”
    And the run was nice.
    But I felt depressed, thinking how sometimes the hardest person to talk to is yourself.
    Just, nothing to say.
    Kept thinking there was so much to say.
    But there wasn’t.
    Didn’t have anything to say.
    *
    Running over the Damen Bridge, I heard song lyrics in my head, from this dance song they played at the sandwich place earlier.
    The lyrics were, “End of the world/end of the world/wake up, wake