Sunday, February 29, 2004
Maaaaannnnn. This Mexican guy and his kid, to the left of my station, will not shut UP. Daddy is apparently successful, and is driving the child hard at something academic. He ignores the shushing--mine, the short and flimsy arm of the psycho gringo bitch.
I came here today if only to get out for awhile. I drank a forty last night, this on top of my usual cocktail of pills, and doubt that this caused me to get up and black out and throw my specs outside my only window. My eyes have gotten bad. I'm going nose to nose with the screen right now. A noise I hadn't noticed up until last moment has just jackhammered its way between my ears--a typewriter, of all things, sounding old, evil, loud.
I am hungry. Even though I look bad and bloated around the middle, floppy little drupes of breasts set on top of a fat vat, two spare tires that grow and fold upon each other, all of this even though I shit often and well: I HATE MY FUCKING BODY. I WANT TO TAKE A STEAK KNIFE TO THE TIRES AND SLICE EACH ONE OFF, NEVER MIND THE GUTS OR THE BLOOD.
If anyone is out there, please talk to me. I've done the math on how many hits this gets, and the results are not good. Mybe five ppl read this a month.
Excuse me while I get rough with the person who is kicking the other side of this carrell.
And Papa Rudeness gibbers on.
The woman searched her box of an apartment for over an hour, looking for her glasses, but she did not find them. There was a lot of black in the place, arthropodal boxes and Indian tapestries; the black wire frame of the things would not have stood out. She searched, searched again, hollered in her head, Please. Help. But whatever she was asking didn't answer, unless No! was what it had been trying to say.
And as such, hers wasn't an unusual arrangment--people everywhere were answering in the negative, for items and occasions simple as minutes for her pre-paid cell phone, or a little factory job. She didn't feel a lot like asking these brightening days, stretches of minutes headache-shiny sun on blue. Weariness and age growing leadened her boots. She was going to have to get out on the road without glasses, and this disturbed her a little: even though she secured rides much easily with her glasses in a jacket pocket, from which she could take them out to register impending violence, or details, if needed. (This sentence sucks, but is gonna have to wait.)
And after many muttered curses, a ride came, a woman named Rebecca, from the meetings. Rebecca was a cheerful bag of bones. She wore dark makeup against her Northern European skin. The woman desired to wipe this off and start over: she would work in pales and neutrals, use a light hand. She didn't say anything about the makeup and never would; a bling of ire at having to walk the three blocks to the library from Rebecca's car tapped at her consciousness, for Rebecca appeared to be borne of money, though she did nothing, nothing at all but go to those meetings, where the sun came up and shone its chatty self all around her.
pp
ch
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Is "whelm" a word at all? If not, exactly what is it? What it IS, bredren. I find it a set of phonemes perhaps designed to suggest the motion of tsunami, and under this, the wave's effects--and that said, something that might stand alone without "over" ripping its bodice. Well, whatever. This is not about *that*. I feel bowled over and breathless, breathless in a bad way, that which follows the lungs' reaction to a swift, well-placed blow to the gut. All this SHIT. I can't set it straight in the mind, cannot line it up so that I might pick it apart and break it down into manageable pieces.
Today is not a workday. The professionally homeless and the Hopeless Center guys muddle up from the bottom of their--our?--ocean to come to the library en unclean masse. Hey, at least I washed. Smell that, my brothers. Sisters. I had to wait to get on, and will soon be asked, by the computer its damn self, to leave. Well, hell. I intended to work out and cadge a meal at Sally's (the Salvation Army feeds the homeless at three pm today. The directrix of the place saw me thumbing the other day, and drove her dirty South-ern ass right on regally by. Means I didn't do myself any good. Or not. Probably, nothing, but I sure am hungry.
hungry as a hoss
Friday, February 27, 2004
*&^%. That's an expletive in italics. I did not mean "annihilism". That is probably not even a real word. Somehow, I have confused a non-movement with the violent end of a symbol.
Stress shoots holes in the neuronal membranes.
I am in a loud place and can't begin to start editing the character sketch(es) below. This thought pops up: neither is a character sketch, but rather a prefab description of physicalities (Don) and unbolstered, perhaps necessarly shallow musings on the part of 'the woman', who is terrified by the thought of someone leaving her for real and imagined failings on her part, including the presumptive alcoholism (of both figures).
That reads better than the character sketch. It was someone else, Hemingway I am thinking, that begged the annihilism of adjectives, the piece is shotty with the words. I have just been officially cut off from all avenues of help from my aging and strung-out parents, but I don't feel liberated, and not at all free. In fact, I'm scared to the point where my colon is clean, clean, bredren. What to do and when to try to do it, and is it worth doing, all of these come to mind. There are large and small papers to be cleared away, if not exactly organised, back at my spider hole. I swear, They could put me in a cell with Saddam and let him curse and spit upon me for being ugly American infidel whore, and then proceed to do what ppl who have never met him say he did often, sometimes several times a day.
D---this life. D---it all to that place where the wretched among us go.
hoss that can't swim right (and yes, most of us will swim with our four legs when the need arises)
Donald--Don--thshares. Begins with a membrane of self-deprecation arrayed sparsely over his narrative. The woman sitting behind him doesn't hear him, and if she could, she would know the words heart by menacing heart. He speaks loudly in his midwestern lisp, always does. The woman blocks his spitty monologue because she is too busy staring at the claw (hand, says the voice of the righteous something) that he has flung behind the bones of the folding chair. It looks like this: four digits, nails of these growing on the opposite, the wrong, side of each knotty one. She can see by their thickness that the four nails are not cut often. And the fourth doesn't stop at being merely knotty, for it is a fusion of what would have been Don's second and third fingers. Disproportionately large, like a penis among toes.
Don used to drink a lot, and now he sings. The voice must come teeming up huge from the vessel of dense-packed fat that surrounds it. Don now eats a good deal, too. And why shouldn't he, the woman thinks later, but for this moment, her senses are fixed on the contents of his other short sleeve. There is a stump there, and at its end, a baby's hand. The baby's hand scratches at the skin of the arm that Don holds up before it. Behind and to the right of him, she is train-wreck repelled, this an almost vicious action on his part.
She grows hatefully, benignly plump around her middle parts. There is another man, one who may or may not be circling her life right now--she fears her trifles and concerns and psychological discourses have finally bored him back to Internet dating. His profile, dormant twenty days now, is active again. There comes the swelling anger, and then the nothing. So she returns to Don as she walks small steps back toward downtown. The baby's hand scratching. The lisp. The penis finger. And the voice, ensconced in the fat. The world of pain, and the things he must do these days to get through it, or if not through it, at the least beside it. He is its equal, a fearsome being, for this time.
publish post
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Elmore Leonard says, Never set a scene with the weather. But today she ignores Elmore, and wakes to, dresses for, brute grey cold. The meteorologists are wrong again. Forty-seven and sunny, they said. This weather is neither. Clouds level close to the ground, sealing in the chill. She is in her puffy coat--thing makes her look like a badly stuffed couch--and big over-the-shoulder bag. Sneakers. Businesswoman or bum? Neither, she would answer, were it her habit to speak startlingly aloud to herself, to others, to the air.
And amid all this, fake-limping down the Pike and into town, a fat white man with a mass of moles on his forehead stops, offers her a ride, she accepts. The conversation almost predictably turns to marriage, then men, then dates. And this: does she have a place, and does she want to make thirty, forty dollars? To take off her pants? To lie down beneath the stomach and the moles, the doubtless bad breath and introject invective, and accept the flab and the final fifty? His best offer. She does not know how to ask for it up front. The fifty is tempting, but like all attractive things--the dough, not the sex, not the ambience of the whole deal, and in stone not the knowing--it would be taken back. And as she blew him, found the stubby little dick in the crust of his unwashedness, and practically prayed not to choke or die on the sheer funk, would he go for her pretty neck? Put the omnipresent knife to her pretty throat, and be wanting to kill her for being the sorry thing she is.
Yes. This is what she sees in a matter of seconds. The fifty lurks, luring. It would put minutes on her phone. But she must go to the town library, a ritual of sorts, hack away on the computers there under the pretense of actually doing something to improve herself and the ever-looming situation. She has become one of those people who is always in situations. Those situations these ppl have, they tend to not be good.
What is anxiety like? Words have been worn out. A shaking inside that can't seem to stop. Gloom and doom and destruction, destruyudo around every corner. Thirty-something and aged badly by these situations. Now she is taken to be a road hooker. Each man has been ugly and smells. But the beauties are too young, and too deeply taken by the youth she no longer has like an egg, a piece of old jewelry, in her hand.
If only you'd take care of things. There it goes again, the voice, and in the fine eye of the mind, the gymnastic forehead, the pelvis-forward posture, the whine. Well, if I could have...She hates ellipses, an affectation drug through convolutions and gyri and other fascinations of the brain. She cuts the dialectic of the introjects short. She has somewhere to go, another agency whose icy representative will look at her as though she is some kind of rodent. She will be handed an application heavy as an encyclopaedia, and she will come to the criminal background check information. If she says yes to a misdemeanor or four, she will be dismissed out of hand. If she lies and gets the job, and is later found out to have lied about her staggering in public, she will be terminated. All this in her head with its bush of hair and frown lines. Zero to sixty and solipsistic as hell. Solipsistic is a word the mother introject does not know.
publish post
old greying mare
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Losing my religion? It been done gone. So much cheerful bilge at a meeting last night, I removed my cross, placed it in my broke-down bag, and went to the other room to wait for a ride. The guy who'd indicated he would do so pawned me off on these two women. One was about my age, a hairdresser, looked pretty hip for an old chick, and I just knew she was the cheerleader turned punk for awhile; the other was this older woman whose makeup application seemed to cut her face into different zones--it was a long face, harsh slashes of makeup amid ghostly grease. Dark lipstick makes one's lips liook livid and small. But there was a big mouth behind those lips and judgement streaming fool's gold from heavily lidded eyes. Somehow I knew she was a lawyer. I did not like her at all.
I looked into her remote past and saw the Stevie Nicks-ian Rock Chick, all black lace and leather and long, layered skirt. Dark-eyed voodoo mama. Champagne, cocaine, Holiday Inn--I could see her, say what kind of shape she in. Ju know? She was a hit man then, a lawyer today (and the voice say, naw, she just a drunken housewife whose husband beat her, ju know?)
She got edjucation. Dry mind on a tight track. And why the fuck should I care? Talk down to you bitch, fuck her.
I'm out of AA, or at least out of that damned cliquey group at Second and Market (an address that makes me see Philadelphia, then adjust my lens rudely). Know one knows me, a real thing about me. I don't hug strangers. I should make a mist that drives them away.
Go on, igg me. I don't get--I really don't get why ppl read this thing, save to laugh among themselves, maybe? If they're sharing a possible way out of this situation, why can't someone among them pass it on?
Tired of this shit. Really and truly.
littlehoss
Friday, February 20, 2004
Welcome, my grand and generous public.
I wish someone'd pay me some attention. That much should be obvious. I'm feeling real sorry for myself, real bad, and I need a virtual pat on the head, I wish there was somebody out there who could say those wretched insipid words and tell me that things will be okay, and mean it like they know it. Somebody supernatural, ju know what I'm sayin'?
I hate this town. It's time to go, but in order to do that, I gotta have money, and nobody seems willing to hire me. I'm burnin down, a house on fire in a spring rain, the kind of mist that can fall forever. The library today is full of big mouths and unwashed stink, clothes with shit ground into the crotch seams, vague piss smell in the talking elevators. Police. Their third-degree eyes.
I have grown fat again. Free groceries for the indigent tend to have a lot of carbs, and I do nip a bit at night to set off the trazadone and Neurontin. Can't nip tonight, though--no money. DAMN I wish these men would shut up. (Stuffs grimy earplug deeper into ear canal.) Today this place, the central library of this forsaken land of snobs and their SUS, today this place beggars suicide. It has a great round hole in the middle, in which a pendelum swings slowly, and four stories of ripe slippery medal to dangle from and them fall. Before, of course, the omnipresent police arrive upon the scene. There is a temporal imperative there: Woman over the edge! Come quick! Save her, then arrest her for causing a public disturbance. Upsetting the good wives of Lexington whose husbands work better jobs, allowing them to loiter here with the homeless and out-of-synch for a little while.
I could use some good karma. Maybe someone will give me a car. I have a license, never mind that I haven't owned a car for over ten years. That's to say that I probably cant drive gud.
Just a blip on the small, damaged screen
damn, I hate this world.
czyhs
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Well. Court was painless, and the Lord with me. I just have to pay 95 bucks by late April. The way my luck (grace, they call it in AA) is running, I'm not sure that is gonna happen. It's another Bluegrass Conspiracy (the first about a bunch of drug runners and rich people in the 80's--one guy parachuted from a plane he was flying, and landed in a bloody heap with a bunch of coke strapped to his pack): this town is determined to see me homeless again. No one will hire me. This sucks royally. Whatever sense of possibility I had yesterday has been shot down. I may have said this, but a phone call from the staffing coordinator of a place I applied to Tuesday was kind enough--and she did sound sorry, in its usual sense--to tell me not to come to orientation, as the DON didn't want a former drunk on her staff, wiping the arses of people better off dead. And the problem of the buses. The buses, the buses. There are places I could have gone after my court date, but did not, I felt so down and flat-out scared. Now, borderline folks' emotions are thought to fluctuate all over the place and stay stuck for a while, then return to baseline. I haven't done that yet.
Chirren should not be allowed to play on public computers. I have NO IDEA what they are laughing at, but I wish they would laugh at it elsewhere.
I wish my mother would quit with her repetitive e-mails. These reiterate her thoughts about my reading up on conditions that have personal relevance, keep thrusting at me the virtues of stinginess (actually they've gone above, beyond, whatever [now dont be hostile, grasshopper])., and the galling implications that I am naive. That I can't walk at 3:30 a.m. to the nearest day labor agency, and that I can't say that I trust a man that worked with me at that warehouse job I had, and that most ppl where I live are out to deceive me. Not a one has gotten over on me--when I see where they are going, I pull out, back off. Now Mother, who is truly naive, leaves her doors open when she drives into her tiny town; my father locks them. She believes her world is a safe place, and that she is safe in it, and that I would be safe, and be cleansed, and be brought to wholeness and health if only I shared it. Problem is, they don't want me there in their soft, smoke-smelling basement--they keep a fire going until spring has established itself firmly. She's the one who slyly comments things like "We could never live together"--we could, if I didn't have to talk to her a lot, and if she'd let me take an active part in the care of the horses. She is quite strange about that. Jerry-built barn, wouldn't handle the shade of a tornado (we have some tornadic activity here in March, April, May); gated and tied and chained together, and she--SHE--is the only one who knows how to disentangle her common-senseless messes. 65-year-old woman, whose body looks a slim forty and face looks seventy-seven, up on a stall wall made of rotting grey boards. She has somehow induced feelings of inferiority in me with this stunt, and others. Oh yes, there are others.
She won't let me vaccinate the dogs and horses, and I'm the one who knows how to give injections. Dewormer, sometimes. But there is always this sucking inferiority that comes out when I am around her. Sometimes, this is tinged with annoyance, and that would be the part where we would get into it, if I hadn't had some skills training (BPD stuff) awhile ago.
It's getting late for me, I have someplace to go, someplace I both hate and love deeply. If only that bastid time would let me, I'd gladly blather on.
Say a prayer, do a good spell, a vodoun ritual, a benediction for my big hoss's ass.
drownong hoss (I'm actually a good swimmer, but there is no water here.)
|
rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
|
