Badges

Someone said something recently in an instant message about badges being a good conversation starter. I was resting because my back hurt after I’d lifted something stupid. A little while back I had a fall. I put my badge on and stuffed a reusable cotton tote bag in my back pocket. I decide to pop to the local shop to buy a four pack.
I exit the rusting metal escape stair at the rear of my first floor apartment. A guy stands fanning a barbeque adjacent the boundary wall. There’s a farm’s worth of meat lined up on the hot steel grille, already turning brown. I wonder how much carbon all that accounts for. Dub music is playing out so loud you’d hear it three streets away. As I descend, I remember there’s no last step.
I can’t decide which beer to buy so the shop owner comes over to help. We’ve run out of that one but if you want flavoured beer try this. I buy flavoured beer, maybe because I feel my life has lost flavour. Nice T-shirt I say to the little girl. On it is an image of a unicorn surrounded by colourful psychedelic rings. I assume the girl is the shop owner’s daughter. You hear what he said, the man says. The girl shrinks but manages a smile. I give the man £12 to get a fiver back but he seems confused. I explain it to him.
I leave the shop and cross the road, staring accusingly through the windows of passing cars. A car alarm goes off behind me, the same one that’s been bothering me each day since I moved in. I peer over my shoulder and realise it’s the shop owner’s. Sonofabitch, I mutter.
A couple look down at my badge as I pass them. I see a mouth move but no words. I walk back past litter lining the alleyway, knowing I’ll pick it up tomorrow. The recycling bins are overflowing with beer cans, only a handful mine. My neighbour sits rigid against the ground floor rear extension wall, leering grin on his face like Al Capone, clearly heavily intoxicated. I think about the garden again, all hardscape concrete. If there was a fire, I thought, it’d be quite well protected.
My life’s pretty quiet now. When I can get out of bed, I’m turning over the same goddamn stuff in my head. Everything I see, everything I hear, touch, smell. It’s exhausting. Every time I get up I start to feel rough. I thought it had gone away. I’ve been taking some medication but that’s stopped. My friend died and all I seem to think about is myself. They say we’ve a good head on us, trying to save the world. But my head’s a mess, and then I often reckon it might all be for pretty much selfish ends anyway.
I get angry a lot these days. I think it’s the sense I have of a dwindling mental faculty and inability to understand. That or an incapacity to control. I take another swig of my drink. Beer probably doesn’t help. But then it calms me down and helps me forget at least for a while. Then there’s the writing, helps that within reason. A sort of tarot card of a naked Japanese man and lady, usually propped at an angle against the digital radio, has fallen over and I hadn’t noticed to reposition it. Unusual. I hear someone outside my window say something along the lines most things are really blurred and I’m glad for this moment at least my mind isn’t sent whirring. I stare into the laptop reflection or somewhere about it and it helps me centre. It’s running on battery. I start to feel a little drunk and let the thought go.
Sometimes I get so tense and my body seems to just lock up. But if I don’t keep fighting, I’ll lose it. Do I deserve to do this to myself, I think. I have to keep feeling that I’m processing it all, or I’ll flip. Sometimes I think, if I don’t think about it, nothing’s any different, and I can save myself all the stress.
I stay up late in the summer, something to do with my diurnal clock. What badges do we all wear, I wonder. My mind appears to slow down again. I hear a sound knocking against the wall. There’s a racket upstairs, someone stomping about. A house alarm goes off in the distance. I take in another breath.