Police Work

Aligned in pristine geometery, both the alarms of a tin analog clock and a two-dollar digital clock are set. One clock materializes its hands a minute ahead of the other. This epiphany is wired to ignite scorched earth for a rebel in his thoughts. Such is the psychological onion layer of one Marty Solange wrapped in his mind, wrapped in his room, wrapped in his apartment, and wrapped in the godforsaken city. Nothing further. What lunar escape was in the window left one or two minutes ago, depending on who's telling. Cigarette smoke seems to entail a progressing effect for his shaking palm. One wonders if its from the anxiety, the files and evidence of things that exist, or both. White-out looks like constellations atop inked out documents that used to seem important. A dusted badge cheaper than the loose change it cripples next to tumbles with every mistake.

For moody Marty, he exists the rest of his days daydreaming with an animus akin to adolescent crush. Marty is 32 years old, single, loves his job, and smokes two packs a day every weekday. It's a slow burn, but most like him who live in the city are lucky to burn. There are things Marty does to forever stay young, even deep into the turn of an analog hand. We've all had that meta-romantic feeling in some third-world public school. The kind Marty walked past years ago on the old beat witnessing happy portraitures under gray skies. The air you breath in those institutions is infinum and the farthest thought into the future is a nap. Marty sleeps differently from everyone else. He sleeps in the position of people he sees in photographs. The photographs he emulates are evidence giving his REM process the title of autopsy of the mind. Marty now performs dutifully as a beat detective for the naive denziens of Washer Country. He witnesses death in copious, fetishist amounts by some social construct or other. Everyone has created a bubble for themselves, so as a simultaneous act of bravery and perversion, Marty must witness outside the bubble alone.

The art of Marty's work, like most art work, deals with the suffering of the subject in relation to the subject of the artist themself. There is a pity Marty gazes into pulped paper with. These headlines contains sentences of deceased personalities returning back an atramentous gaze of paragraphs condemning Marty's ill-advised breathing. You see death as much as you see life in such an occupation. If life were dimensions, we'd be at about six or seven by now. Like an artist, you see just as much representation of what is not life as what is life. Why is the victim on June 22, 1973 dead? Why was he so alive? What made this fool so alive that suddenly he's now dead? Its a confusing job. Somebody has to do it. So why not the guy who fits the old axiom of distance from the living? 

Marty Solange started smoking when he was 15. Expelled from his third junior high when he was age 16 for replacing a dodgeball with a professional grade basketball during PE. The truth is, in his words, the weight felt the same. Marty does this even now, convincing himself more than science. Age 22 onward for three godforsaken years, Marty spent day and night in Washer City pentitentary for trafficking hallucinogens. He was accused of intent to sell. The truth is, in his words, he was only holding. There's a lot of change in between those dollars spent keeping Marty a menance to society. As reparation for his acts, or lack thereof, he had two choices : spend years in jail or give his darkside talents to the department deep downtown. Little did Marty figure out before he signed off destiny on the dotted line, he traded a shitty physical jail for a deceptively non-shitty mental jail. The gaze on Marty's face, shuffling through murder case after murder case in his dilaphidated cell, starts to become like his literary heroes in the photos. Even night its the same question he asks to himself : How to discern between truth and lie swimming in the sea of death, if everything looks dead to me? The minutes on the two clocks did not do anything to separate or conjoin the minute of distance from one another. Soon, they dove in the city lights outside a cell, to kiss the streets goodbye. To be like all the others. It seemed less confusing that way to Marty.