Robert Bradley

This Isolation

All boxed up in my studio apartment on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Sitting, naked, typing. If you were here with me you’d be lying on my bed, on your stomach, kicking your feet, listening to the Cowboy Junkies. I’d take a break and cut up pineapple, strawberries and bananas and we’d have to think of what we were doing, physically, with our hands and with our mouths, blindly straining against this isolation.

Remote

I'd heard stories where monks were badly beaten by their masters, or they were out on the road and a twig snapped, and they were suddenly enlightened. I pondered this as I walked outside to get a beer from the cooler on the porch. The lowering sky dinned the empty fields, the distant trees and high grasses. There was a crack of heat lightning which created a gap in my thinking. It was a moment charged with futility and longing and dread.

And before it was lost forever I became aware of the difference between voluntary and involuntary thought. I also recall an accompanying loss of consciousness, but only vaguely. 'Was this important?' I wondered as my hand plunged automatically into the icy water.

Above, the metal clouds spun coil the expanse of the sky. I could hear, in the electrically charged air, for miles around. My head opened up like a sunflower, had become hard to locate. Somehow, I made it back inside.

I sat in my chair in front of the TV and cracked my beer.

"What about you?" someone said.

I looked over. "What about me?" I said.

"Well," he said, his head twisting left and right, "are you happy?"

"I guess," I said, without thinking.

He bent forward, spread his fingers out on the table in front of him and seethed, "And you think that that justifies all existence?"

“Game time,” I said, pointing the remote.

CP

Robert Bradley is a Brain Engineer. He will call you on the phone and, using remote access energy technology and verbal instruction, travel the corridors of your unconscious and peel back the layers to your immutable self. He owns one (misplaced) umbrella and zero cats.