Monday, July 25, 2005
Considering filing a Chapter 7--bankruptcy; all debts except those to the guv'mnt discharged. Understand that I would not be eligible for credit for the next seven years. All well and good, but for the fact that I do not intend to stay here. I intend to fly, to stay in lowly hotels (motels, if it comes to that), drive rentals. Will I be able to do these things in the absence of a credit card? I'd like to know before I go ahead and file that Chapter 7.
I apologise for the hystrionic wheezing about breast cancer and bodily fluids. I've gained weight, although I seem to be losing a little, and by no accident either, and fat cells secrete estrogen, and it flows around and causes boob pain. I must see a doctor. I muist, just as I must see a dentist. In fact, I fear the loss of teeth more than I do the loss of a breast or two (I am dead serious about the double, though--I'm not one who could live at all with that dread of cancer returning), for a person can conceal--or not, if she chooses--the loss of breasts a lot easier than she can the loss of teeth. She can lie on her flat scarred chest alone beneath her sheets: it would not be a matter of "taking (off) her breasts", whereas the thought of ugly nasty gummed-up false teeth in a telltale cup of stale water is nasty. As is the reflection of a younger person who is missing teeth, IMNSHO (read: not so humble, at least here). I don't want "meth mouth" when I haven't had a proper chance to use any.
Okay--back to da Lex, any time now. We are going to try an ear jack for the noise problem. (So far, I have had two persons in that elephant warren, and though both know me as something of a drama queen, they admitted that I had a point about the upstairs noise.) We'll see.
And if anyone can speak to my concerns about being able to travel w/o a credit card, or refer me to a site that can, please do. I'll be working--at something--soon. I'll be able to afford a Chapter 7 for $75 bucks at Legal Self-Help.
c h, three days of foal slobber and clover spit (the bigger mares and the donkey eat it and slobber, much like that lemon gum of years gone by--for cottonmouth). Remember?
Saturday, July 23, 2005
The foal, in miniature, is stretching. All of us, horses and humans, do this if we can, but this foal, a colt of many colors, extends his neck, then one fragile-seeming hind leg, until it is nearly level with his back. Though his round and hungry little mother bumps up against him, he holds the posture, unfazed. He is six weeks on the ground and three weeks old.
This was the amazing thing I saw this morning. I'd never watched a foal stretch before. Called Sergeant Friday, the colt and his fawn-like sister Sonata are each three weeks premature. He's feisty, awash in hormones and sweetness; the filly is also sweet--possibly sweeter--but shy.
Not so shy, however, as to want to taste the neighbor man's jeans. He'd climbed his own rusty fence to come over to see them. Sonata turned to him and immediately began to nibble, nibble here, nibble there; anything she can reach she wants to taste. I am in shorts. I am in the country. When I am in the country (though developments approach here like sharks to chum), I no longer have the demonic physical mperfections that plague me elsewhere. The little horses are not much on mouthing bare skin, but they continue to lick me as many animals will. I seem to exude salt. I will have to ask the doctor about that too.
After the neighbor left, I took a seat on some sort of ancient hauling apparatus--rotten wood and rusted metal. The metal burned with the heat of the day. The foals, and their yearling brethren Sparkle and Bubba, jockeyed for position around me. With my left,I scratched one neck; my right, another. And I felt something then weird and perhaps threatening, a sensation foreign to this well-attenuated conisseur of the human body's strange ways: a teardrop of wet on or about my right nipple. It didn't seem at all sweaty, even though sweat was very much warranted. It felt nearly cool.
Now I was not so crass as to take the fearful thing in hand right there--I got up, the hauling apparatus bouncing a bit, and I continued on into the barn, to the feed room. In the feeble yellow light cast by one swinging bulb, I raised my shirt and attempted to "express", as medical types say, more of this perceived fluid from the offending nipple. I squeezed it from different angles--hard. I "expressed" nothing that I could see or feel, so with a degree of relief proportionate to the heaviness and resignation I'd experienced at first damp, I locked up. Outside, the little horses were gathered. If I was indeed ill, the horses were not fazed.
And once inside, I repeated the process in the guest bedroom, several times, squeezing, "expressing", hard enough to bruise, using cheap toilet tissue to mop up the fluid I was once again sure would fountain from my right gland.
Did it fountain? Spew; dribble? I can't say, for it was hard to tell. To this day, I fear the long white coat with the c-word in its mouth far more than the boggle of treatments that exist for that condition. That I'm indigent likely amplifies this fear (ordinarily I like doctors, too, at least as they appear in their offices), creating an inviolate schematic that includes the phrases "breast cancer" and "no treatment".
I have always hated my breasts. Little uglies, I called them, misshapen and small. At one point, I was told that I had "fibrocystic syndrome", more medicalese that can mean different things to different doctors. Put those two things together, and you might have a risk factor, one right up there with obesity, age and alcohol consumption. I used to boast to fellow hypochondriacs, and others who probably did not care quite as deeply, that I'd have a double mastectomy--a prophylactic--if I ever learned I'd benefit by having just one. Yes, one's chances increase with that, too, a previous lesion, that is. So maybe this is God saying, "Get it done."
And then I will go to heaven, having stuggled and striven and all that. After my tenure in this world, I will be grateful. For if heaven has horses, with their fine feet and muscle and sweet honey eyes, I'll live very well there,even if they eat me alive.
ch
They all asked about [me], down on the farm.* That's where I am right now. Spent about an hour with mother, talking to her cousin of unknown degree, and the cousin's daughter, a farmer, a woodcarver and my Juneteenth cousin. I recall from my bank of summer visits that this cousin, some more of her [and by some vague proxy, mine as well], had a big sweet all-white mare named Daisy. Cousin J rode Daisy, and left me to ride the septic tank in the yard. She's much softer now, I think. It's been awhile.
Mother and I spent so long out there--and it got tense for me--that dinner (supper, they call it here) never got made, and once we were inside, she would not allow me to help her whip something up for all of us. Papa John was mowing the yard again, shaving it bald, it grew so lush and fast after the recent hard rains. Obsessions and compulsions, and lions and tigers and baby miniature horses. Oh my.
Tim Burton did something recently--oh, yeah. The Willy Wonka thing. That was one of my wee childhood favorites, and those darn boxcar children, and in kindergarden, a story about a little girl who seemed to own only one dress, the one she wore to school every day; the child bragged to her classmates that she had one hundred dresses. No one believed her. One day the kid didn't show up for school. The kid kept ditching for some reason, so her Heathers--her tormenters; see the movie by the same name-- decided to check out the location where the one-dress kid had said she lived. No one was home, everything gone, everything but the hundred dresses. They were THERE, man. SaLEED.
Anyway, I loved that story for some innately twisted reason. Just thought of it now in my 'inwardness', H, that you say you appreciate above all I've ever put down in this space. You know, the very sad thing about blazing out in an inward direction is that it becomes a prison, a been there/done that kind of deal. I don't know how to make it really work b/c my own life experience is so impoverished to date. I can't study and record bodily fluids and reactions to nasty eaters forever.
Perhaps hanging with those two women who are blood relations of some sort is a start: indefinite, hard to nail down with labels or analyse to death, but a start. I hung in there. I asked questions. I admitted that I was afraid of bulls . Didn't try to show off my so-called medical and equine knowledge.
Anyhow, mother is calling. I had a laying on of hands, entirely by accident this Sunday. A married couple, who kept asking me if I saw or felt anything extraordinary. I didn't--just a fierce blush rising, deep and warm to the skeletal core--and then he asked God if He could locate for me a computer. Here I am puling again, but my Church Friend is on the lookout too.
Peace in the valley
c h
Thursday, July 14, 2005
That, H and anybody else, was the pitiful inception of my Faulkner contest entry. Of course, I have lots of time to first finish, and then edit, and then rewrite--a frequent, almost obsessive occurrence--if I must, the thing. It is about a horse that is in love with a tractor. I am just waiting to drop the name "Husqvarna"--as did semis, many years ago, it still scares me a bit. Brings to mind hairy pillaging men, maybe gang rape, and that inviolable wall between Real Men and most women, except for the really dumb and scared ones who come to see their behavior as love.
Reminds me of greasers in high school. Always dropping names. Mopar is the name I remember best, although I never learned what it referred to.
I hate the restrictions of this place, and of course, the noise. Like a massed knot of gnats, noise follows me everywhere I go. I gave in to retaining what sanity I have, and rode that damnable bus through a long and nasty stretch of town. I am thinking of Richard Price's Clockers. Fine book, fine writer, crackheads and their victims, the limbo they all inhabit, and the cops who would bring them down. Every time I get sick for the city, I read a bit of that book. I fear, more and more often anymore, that I will never get back home.
Now I must go to the other blog.
c h, away from the jesus joseph and mary-inducing men upstairs
Case knew the beauty was coming. The old man, white hair and vitiligo, never smiled, was steaming downhill on the tractor; its faintly threatening growl intensifying as he drove it across the drying creek bed and headed uphill, where the beauty and several others walked the pasture, socialising, engaging in a bit of horseplay here and there.
She was hot. Reserved as he was, Case agreed in his rusty heart, without words, that he would enjoy her touching him all over, her fleshy lips nibbling at his spare, straight frame, her baby's breath warm upon him. The two women were forever extolling the beauty's gifts--a strange thing, thought Case: women were so often catty, always laquered nails at the ready. They called one another "honey" for no apparent reason, and then the knives came out, the lovely curves of their backs almost tattooed with the words "Stab Here." Basically, Case did not trust the creatures. Honeyed eyes, impossible lashes, the [---] arcs of their hair against the high, possibly evil sun.
He saw her brighten as the old fellow brought the steaming monster (truly, the thing recalled images of wild and toothy beasts, waiting in the wings of their intended victims' paths through the world) uphill and toward the barn. The man had been spreading manure, piles and piles of the stuff, and the old wooden spreader was empty, and jouncing along. Beauty--for a moment he forgot her name--was undeterred by the clattering thing's air of incipient danger, fear, even pain. He knew what would come next, then: prior to setting out with his stinking load of [----] and hay, the man had locked a gate, the purpose of which he did not quite understand. And returned, he would get off the still-growling tractor, drive the monster on through, and once he was clear of any obstacle [........], he would rapidly, almost jauntily, dismount, and move to close the purposeless gate again.
Case watched him remount the thing, watched him drive it up a little hill composed of stones, mainly, and lots of rocks, plates of them. The man, who had left the door to the tractor part of the barn, was going to back it into its cubby. Case had seen this again and again, and had grown bored. It was like going to the airport (pick one, pick any: people line up to watch them fly*, and so had Case lost interest in watching mechanical things doing exactly the things they had been designed to do. (Sometimes, Case thought that the only interesting thing anymore about the airplanes was when they crashed, sort of like Nascar.)Then, the man would come out of the loamy grey light of the cubby, heave its door shut, drop some kind of board intended long ago to keep it closed once it was in place.
It was, then, in place, and so the old man, his blue workshirt damp with triangles of sweat, opened the gate again, pinned it back with a concrete block, and took his old self to the house. Case knew that the beautiful one would be there soon, with her swoons of surfer girl hair, endless legs, forgiveably diry feet, and eyes, and lips. She would approach him where he was resting, relax against the rotten fencing of the cubby, and just stare. Sometimes she would reach across, her bearing now the bold of the truly innocent, and touch him for one heated moment. With this, Case's rusted old heart--more like an engine block on its last legs--would flutter up into his throat, fall back to his belly, and gibber there like junebugs, like horseflies. Eventually, she would pull back, puzzled, perhaps, at Cases' seeming lack of interest. She was putting it out there, having it, flaunting it, strutting her broad, fleshy hips like a strumpet might do. But she wasn't a strumpet. She was just a girl.* Eventually, her older friend would join her. And they began the [......] alleged to have [---'ed] the libidoes of males everywhere. They would almost groom one another. Sometimes Case saw a little tongue, which always caused his masculinity to whimper, dwarfed by the throes of his lust.
________________________________________ ________________________________________________
Harmony--no last name, was her philosophy-- had had herself a good day. Although everything around her was a brush fire about to happen, the earth scorched, she dared say, with draught, there was a lilt to her walk, a gentle hipsway that seemed to have a spellbinding effect on the men around her. She did not get this: it was simply the way she walked, no conscious sexualisation to her movement. She didn't get men, either--that Case, reserved as steel, apparently hired to guard something, the manure spreader maybe--had to be reeling with feeling, that feeling, like the one she held dear for him. The breadth of this emotion, its fire and reach, breadth and soaring heights and much like dreams of flying, was staggering at times. But the manly Case never staggered, never stumbled either. He just stood there at his post, confident, self-contained. These traits were voraciously sought by many ladies as they searched for that one man that they thought--and what a stupid thought--would complete them. Harmony, looking forward to her supper and occasional dessert (the ladies who tended to the little ones sometimes responded to the [--] in her eyes. Confused as she was about that old Case, who sent her big, generous heart soaring, the women confused her a little more. The old one thought she--Harmony--should be on a diet. Thought Harmony, with her man-pleasing curves, should lose some weight. But the other one, herself on the round side, seemed to respond to Harmony's passions, although both she and the old one treated her like a pet.
But that's asylum, Harmony thought--rest, relaxation, and just that niggling pinch of condescenscion that sometimes made her want to [}.
2-minute warning and out
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
I've finally taken the long ride away from the precinct of the dancing Shires on Quaaludes, and into town. A young man on the bus made my fifteen minutes: said he thought I was "twenty-five, twenty-six." I told him I was in my late thirties. Sadly this is about to change.
When I was in Mt. Sterling, thinking I'd finally get in some face time with my brother, I was disillusioned, filled with bile: his wife, the gum-smacking, food-slurping deferent I've come to really dislike plus some, made some really audacious comments that made me want to rip her lips off. We're at the dinner table, eating junk food off of plastic non-biodegradable plates, and she uttered the 'F' word, which I informed her was a dirty word. (We will both be that age this year.) I forget what the mother did, but sis in law only snarked, "I guess 'reality' is a four-letter word too." I got too wedgied out to think of anything to say, so I said nothing and listened to the liver-toned bird lips smacking counterpoint to my mother's too-large and very cheap dentures rattling at food that looked like vomit in her mouth. Later on, after the whole brood had taken the SUV back to Georgia, something came to the marquee: "I would assume, then, that you would be talking about something known as 'perception', because that's all that the precious animal 'Reality', the one that has been very very good to you, is. You learn how to perceive your 'reality' on the basis of your social learning experiences. Yours was in synch with your pleasant experiences and mine were not. I hate society. It runs on the hate it engenders. But anyway, dear hairy cunt woman, you're WAY OFF FUCKIN BASE!"
Man, this was a very nasty visit. Once the bad vibes were up and running, my very own demons delightfully producing more of the same, I saw immediately that retreat was my best option. Overstimulated, maybe, or just feeling how out of their loop I had been, and would remain. My brother is allowing that woman to raise children that smack and slobber and crunch, just not all at once. Two out of three, sort of. (I wish some influential person with both money and refinement would mount a campaign to abolish commercials featuring ppl who talk with their mouths full, actors who squinch their eyes shut and crimp mouth while making sounds like, "Mmmmm," in an apparent simulation of the moment of orgasm, something I actually know nothing about, even though I have seen a couple of pornos early in life. Bad table manners just fucking kill me.) He pets the not-so-small small of her back as though she were humping a rack of puppies, calls her things like 'Beauty' and 'Babe'. Both of them scratch at their second son's skin problem. Then they yell at him if he dares to scratch himself by himself.
She has been so thoroughly poured into the shape of ass-kissing Christian wifey that every statement she makes ends with this word: no. This is quite odd, not at all flattering. I hope I do nothing like it. She says something along the lines of ,"This cake is really good, Mom, um---high girlish voice dropping at least an octave here--no." And then she titters. Or: "I was thinking about going to nursing school when the kids are all over twelve (or when she caves in to demands on intellect and ego and sends them off to at least a private school, if not suburban public, where they belong), no." Then the cheap windchimes of her laughter. I do not understand this vocal tic outside the limits suggested to date here. Frankly, it gets on my nerves in a big bad way. I'd been thinking about "accidentally" imitating her until that got her thinking--she's the high IQ one misappropriating my damn parents, the one who looks as though she has two asses--one sewn on up front as a result of four boom-boom babies and a torn whatchamacallit, the thing that runs in a straight sheet from your last rib to your pubic bone, when you've had too many kids, the addled dipshit who has her intellect turned down so low most of the time who thinks it's cute to get old.
At any point in my life, would I have totally subjugated myself to the wishes-slash-demands of a man?
I haven't done that yet.
I do wonder about them, living where they live now in the burbs of Atlanta. There was serious flooding there this weekend. I do not wish my brother ill--I'd find no joy in learning that their cars had been swept away, or that their home, which I have not yet been invited to see, had sustained irrepairable damage as a result of all that water in their basment. Whatever. I wouldn't know, no, teeheeheefuckinghee.
Which brings me to this apartment, and the ballet of the drug-addled Clydesdales above my head. Even the day staffperson, not a large man, gives off seismic thuds as he traverses the kitchen, which sits right over my living area. I'd called the agency and left a request that a drop ceiling, living room only, be installed ASAP. The maintenance man, who is deaf as stone, thought, apparently, that running a box fan would allow me to watch TV--a meagre 22 channels, nothing provocative, which is how I like my television, there. I think his reasoning went something like this: she (the tenant) is bothered by upstairs noise; a fan cuts noise (lighter noise, such as other ppls' music, televisions, conversations); so we'll give her this here fan, so that she can turn up the ol idjit box so loud that she can hear it. Above the hurricane whir of the fan, and to the decline of the incessant stomping. The maintenance dude, a retired guy who used to be a mechanical engineer, in a factory, has lost his own hearing as a result of his occupation. He's a smart guy, mechanically inclined. And still I wonder THEN WHY DON'T YOU KNOW THAT MY HEARING IS STILL GOING TO BE DAMAGED BY THE DAMN TV?
I just couldn't stay there another afternoon. It was on me that if I did not start getting away of the noisome situation, instead of choosing to sit around in, or beneath, it, I would either say something to get my arse evicted, or show up half-tanked and combative. The woman working with me knows that I can't do that kind of noise. It's worse than living under a flight path at a major airport. I know this from experience.
And I've lost my narrative. My parents really, truly don't want me back there to languish in their basement. The mother, especially (or at least this time). My own father just hates me. It's worm-eatin time, cuz I left my food card (as if Fatty Needs Food) at the house, and I doubt if I will be lent money for Klonopin, seeing as I'm down to ten 1 mg pills, and exactly no money at all.
worms. bring em.
craziest horse in town
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Dang, man. I had a post here and just killed it. My brother is leaving early tomorrow morning. The picnic didn't kill me, the snobby ppl couldn't come. My sister-in-law has egregious table manners to offset her otherwise charming self-presentation. My brother has lived with this for thirteen years. Guess the pussy's good. Guess I'll live to regret this and know that I will cry a rivulet if something happens to her before something happens to me.
I was straight with him about the computer. He heard me out. That's about all we talked. He spent a lot of time trying to eat the lip-smacking wifey's hair off the nape of her neck. I must eat the sour truth that I will never have a deep relationship with my brother, will have to settle for banal paternalistic horsecrap. I must jam it down my throat like my well-scarred right index finger.
Someone wants to come in here, this room in which my own mother, the woman S calls "Mom" (and this galls me spastic), sleeps. A's family is packing for the early leave-out. I really wish he didn't have to go, didn't have to take his wife and kids back to his other wife--his job, which is located in Atlanta.
This life is too much pain. Someone wants to come in, and I need to go to the barn.
In the spirit if not style of Mr. Harry Crews,
crazier horse
Monday, July 04, 2005
Grisly afternoon. I could not buy enough time at the barn. I did the poop and played with the babies Sarge and Naughty, letting me suck on me and try to eat my clothing and all that. Still, the new white pickup of my wealthy cousin and his surgically enhanced wife, both thirty-five years old, remained in the driveway.
Really, I tried to sneak inside, but Northern Father had locked the door to his toolroom. So I had to come in upstairs, where my parents, my cuz and wife, and brother and sister-in-law were doing that thing I don't understand: talking loosely, with smiles, about people I have never met, probably never will meet (especially if they are already dead), and more people, none of whom I could reasonably be expected to weep for, nor use upon the word 'Hello'.
The 'hell' part is the one I understand. It's like that. And that's the way it is.
Tried to explain to the sister-in-law about how utterly freaked I get around what is essentially someone else's family. She's only 39/she's fat and doesn't mind/and she seemed astonished that I would admit to this. One of the ppl who will be at this cookout is the aunt-by-marriage who said of me--I was twelve--that I still didn't know how to make a bed? Well, that woman had a servant, who got fired because she drank. Some years later, the mistress of the house would develop an unattractive Xanax habit. There are extenuating circumstances revolving about the unexpected death of someone else I didn't 'know', and as such, I must do my best to keep in place my baser impulses. I cannot truly say that I know any of these ppl: my mother is continually coming up with new and improved jaw-droppers, like, 'You're not going to keep that money in your pocket, are you? Surely you gotta billfold." Another that floored me and my dropped jaw was, "NOOoooo. Don't hang (those Indian gauze throws) up again. I'll spring for some curtain rods."
My not liking the kind of tacky-arse curtains that I could accept or afford had nothing to do with any of this. I am too OLD for 'hippie' furnishings, and you, dear lady, are too OLD yourself to be dispensing judgements cached as advice to that rotten loser me.
Thirty-five years of evidence to the contrary, she keeps on uplifting for my adulation and eventual procurement that supernaturally slimy albatross of the will. The woman is a Christian--now, whose will is it that she should shake her pom-poms for?
This silicone sister--I'd wear 'em if she'd let me--has professed to have wanted to meet me. In response to that, I feel like something with one eye, no nose and the mouth of a frog, something dauntingly freakish, who happens to live in a jar.
And that ain't too far from da troof.
But really: what am I and my shivering mess of an ego supposed to do in the face of all that success, abundance of spawn, shared Christian values (of a highly specialised cell line), and silicone supposed to do? I'm a rotter. I look the part. My downturned mouth is stuck that way, and growing lines, and my nose is that forever kind of red.
It's five-thirty or so. Let's get this party started, so I can plow down and escape and pray that never again will I have to do this. So what if I gain another five pounds? I can make qualifying for a lap-band my next short-term gaol. And that was no typo.
New Rose, old horse
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Since I sat down here to write, someone, the little girl, I think, has been playing "Doe a Deer" (or whatever that thing is called) and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" again and again, halving the same whole interval over and over, not stopping to think about why it doesn't sound like it sounds in her head.
I can empathise with that. Probably had my ad-ults wanting to dig a mass grave for themselves when I was that age, around six or seven--but who would have shot them? There are some out there who think that the past-imperfect is completely useless and an almost physical drag to get through. Me, I just can't help it, in a way not unlike my inability to peacefully tolerate children's activities: they are lovely to look at; I simply do not want to hear them. (Nor do foals try to play the piano.)
This whole noise thing must be hard-wired. There is no way to force onesself through it. I have tried, and it's all tumours and sulfur and disintegrating tissue, rough if not impossible matter to transcend by mere, pathetic will alone.
Today is a day that needs water. The high headache sun rains its reptile fury on this little blotch of the world, heavy metal suggestion that all of this--this--will be over soon, at once, no prisoners, no questions to be voiced by the brand-new dead.
I crave the ocean, then. Rain in Kentucky would be nice, but just doesn't fit within the limits of my need right now. At home, I would visit the small grey Atlantic every summer with my best friend, in her family's little rental. It didn't seem so little, though, and the small grey Atlantic was then impossible and vast. My own parents aren't much for oceans, though I think my father was cowed by his Kentucky spouse in that respect. When I worked up the nerve to take the casino buses out to Atlantic City, free plus ten dollars in coins, I'd regret that the whole romantic if shark-laden nighttime sea was not accessible, that I had to be home by dinner, but the casinos struck me as creepy, the dirty old ocean as a bolt of furzy light, light and clean all around me.
God, I need the sea. A horse, a computer, with ocean vu.
The delusional army of John is on its way. John is my father. Let us all pray for peace, or at the least an end to this non-stop, all killing all of the time, crock in Iraq.
c h: too hot to mess with the horsies.
the family gathering gathers in the near-West. I still do not have a plan that does not involve vomit (and how much better I would feel for enduring the whole phony mess? Nup, nope, nada,not today).
Saturday, July 02, 2005
In the land of happy foals and noisy relations--brother, wife, four kids; and my mother is planning a family (hers) cookout, here, for tomorrow night. This is a no-alcohol nation, although I brought reserves of klonopin with me. Good thing, too--I don't know these people, and they don't know me. Doubtless, they have heard unflattering things about me, which tunes my nerves to an intolerable pitch. If I can figure a way--pretend to be sick, maybe--to ditch this event, it will be done.
My brother and his wife are computer engineers. When I got here, I walked into all but my brother A in the kitchen; apparently the drive from Atlanta had been long and tense, and he was sleeping. I talked perhaps too aggressively to his wife, S, about medical transcription and eBay, and how my writing was up and running again. I was hoping to make an impression, see, and I'll just bet that the word 'manipulative' came to mind.
S mentioned that a friend of hers, in the Atlanta area. was a transcriptionist, and that she raked it in from home. That was encouraging, though I doubt I could sustain the necessary tracks and trains of thought to do transciption--in often heavily accented or just plain wrong English--in my little apartment. The place is nice enough in its own right; it's simply too fucking loud. The sedated buffalo upstairs, car stereos outside, the conglomerate of hooting neighbors next door, always outside on the stoop. If I made some necessary modifications--serious earplugs and shooter's headphones, several fans blowing at once--I might be able to pull it off.
But I need a fucking computer. Left to my own devices, I could probably figure out, in much the same way I figured out geometry and trig, which is slowly with many unwise turns, a lot of what comes seemingly naturally to anyone who actually reads this. It simply cannot be done in the Land of the Loud, the library downtown--if I could get the fuck there.
I am perturbed. Transportation is definitely a problem. Not enough blue signs signifying 'LexTran'. Walking around in the heat, among thugs, might help the old weight problem, but is generally a bad idea. I might be able to get time and space in the medical library if I could get there, time and space in which to do enough transcription to let me put together two months' security and first month's rent. But I am ahead of myself.
Gotta get the education, the certificate, whatever. That would beat technically finishing nursing and working a year here in Mt. Sterling's vague imitation of a hospital, although the words 'travel nurse' sound pretty good right now. I am irritated. I am perturbed. In the face of such perfection--my brother A and his spawn and spoor are just about flawless, except that he probably won't give me a computer. I think that he thinks as does our mother: I have chosen this path for myself. To wind up at forty in low-income housing for the long-term disturbed. When I dream my lovely dreams of the boys I had crushes on in high school, the boys who fade away the moment the action is to begin, and to imagine what they are doing now--I've actually Googled them, so I guess I am terminally disturbed; it seems like stalking. I know that one of them is a hotshot, and the other one put down his music when he put down his drugs and drink and has a family in Cali, and when I think about either in real time, what comes to mind is the title of an old Peter Straub novel called If You Could See Me Now. It's pretty scary.
Please, somebody say something nice to me today. I have a few hours in which to devise a plan by which to avoid all of these phony people among whom I am desperately uncomfortable. I know a lot about illness, and that is the stuff I have to work with.
lonely hoss
and oh yeah: there is this man outside the Lex who has, in the last two months, gotten DUIs on horseback. That sucks if you're the horse.
|
rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
|
