Sunday, August 28, 2005
oh my darling boy, my baby, standing in the wet, ammoniac warmth of the afternoon barn. there is shit in your tail, i must remove it. unable to bear the hard dirt of your small pen outside, hemmed as it is by electric fencing and pebbled by stone, you piss with the strength left in you on a week's worth of straw--straw crawling with little black flies, suggesting the onslaught of bug larvae that will boil pale and plump in your ears, near your eyes when this is done
the vet will be out later, after he is done puttering on his cow farm. i know what he will say, placing resigned approval on the decision that the old woman, my mother, has to make: yeah, i'd put him down . you are an animal and a cripple, little fellow and friend of mine. you offer to me your small, fine head and i take it into the palms of my hands, and i hold it there, soft frissons of pleasure rippling my spine, and me feeling that smile thing, thing i cannot force upon the self i present to the rest of them, the world, settling down on and into my mouth. my lips relax, ratchet upwards, and
yes, you make me happy
you are not mine not mine, not in any sense of law, or paper, or money. she, your mama, likes to make this clear. i am at a point now where i can recognise, if not accept to the core, this distinction. this weekend, i forgive, i must do so, because anticipatory grief has come to linger like a stay of execution. there is worse to follow
although i cannot be there for you, for her if she'd have me, i think i will know when it happens: when a needle takes the burn in your feet that you cannot reason out and muscle through in your head . when all is a confusion of papery hands like a mother's tongue, and voices, and a good soaking hot summer rain, then absence, and then void--
the air wherever i will be will tremble, shimmer with the passage of your darling soul to wherever, i hope with tears, i will find it, maybe waiting--
gaa, i cannot do this, i am so small against this. the horse doesn't even belong to me. she's not let me completely caretake, and i resent this, but now is not the time. it just hit me now that the both of us are cringing before the storm. she's there to the right on the floor now, actually asleep (she can sleep anywhere, should've been army). if caretaking involves this, the nonstop tears near and at the end of some creature with whom i've come kinship, i don't know right now if i can do it.
but i know that i'll know when the little horse is gone. when my maternal grandfather died in 1986, after long ailing, I knew it one day in October, at home: i was in my last term of college. it was autumn. i picked up the phone to call my mother down here. the air sort of sucked back for less than a second. then she picked up, to confirm what i already knew.
and please forgive that pre-Alzheimer's attempt at a poem. that blip on the connexions has almost but not quite scared me off newspapers. yeah, i day dream a lot, and now i must find some kind of focus, outside of this, away
sorry. i just can't think right now. feel so small and have tried but cannot justify, with that damnable toolbar, my love
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Summer's last has come and gone. It may heat up again, probably will, but summer, always suspect and lately hated, is no longer with us. That's good; no sentiment or analysis there. I don't feel like it, and that's how it is. My little buddy Charger, a ten-year-old miniature horse, will probably be euthanised in the next few days. His chronic laminitis has come to a final, ugly boil. His little front hooves are warm to the touch. He lies down now, on straw bedding and old remnants of rubber mat, instead of standing, or moving, let alone bossing his herd. His once-bristling bush of mane has subsided. Today I sat with him, tried to pick a small part of the yuck and stones embedded in his small front feet, and he let me, myself inept, unable to see through the one lens of a pair of broken glasses I'm using: back at my sponsored apartment, I could not find the pair with two intact, although I had gotten back there Thursday evening at seven, and stayed inside until morning.
I picked--'hacked at' would be more accurate--at the tucked hooves, Charger continuing to lie down, and I gave up shortly after reaching the stink of the deep inside parts, and a stone in the lamer right. I could not get at it, the stone, from any angle. I thought that blind jabbing at dirt and possibly tissue was probably not good. I'd also begun to cry. I talked to him; he licked the salt from my hands and arms (apparently I excrete more salt than most people, although I do not sweat unless there is heat to provoke it), and then lay his head in my lap, collapsing into it where I sat. I stroked his neck through the warm waters of my emotion; said I was sorry for all the times I'd almost ignored him in order to play with the foals, generations of foals that have come in sets of two for the last couple of years. I felt back for his own foalhood, and remembered the first time I saw him.
It was summer, my second in Kentucky. My father, on flex time, was carting me back from where we worked near the university, John in computers on campus and me at a nursing home a half mile away. This job was my first at a nursing home. I was ten years younger, slender, dressed all in white and full of bright negativity about that job and my future in general; and as John slowed to turn into the driveway, I saw my mother Rose outside the barm. I got out of the car, she told me to go into the barn, which was odd: I was in my whites, and I'd surely get dirty. And in my distaste for that job, I'd forgotten entirely about her zeppelin of a foundation mare Maggie, pregnant eleven months and due to deliver at any time.
However, I did so at her urging, unsure what she wanted me to do there, to say nothing of why. (Maggie had been one of about fifty foals, pasture-bred, delivered there as well, and then pretty much forgotten about for two years. She was practically feral when Rose purchased her at an auction near the Ohio River. She had a foal at her side, and was already pregnant with Charger, but she was not too fond of people, and she had taught me not to try to mess with her simply by walking away when I tried.) I walked past the pale grey mare's stall, down toward where the standard-size horses were kept. Rose called after me that I had 'missed something', and I turned, saw her grinning. I stopped in my tracks, went back.
I looked into the muddy dark of her enclosure and saw Maggie there, only she seemed to be blocking something from my gaze. I'd recalled she was due, and she had been that: equal parts timid and curious, a tiny foal the color of dirt, a few shades darker than his surroundings, peeked around his mother's rump.
Though I should not have, I entered the stall, marvelled at the small of him. He had a disproportionately large head, however , and the legs of a newborn, not quite into their own. Short of my expectations in some watery way--when I wasn't busy hating my job--but as immediately endearing as only newborn mammals can be, the colt, who would lose his placental slickness and stand up on his pasterns, was called Chocolate Charger, later to be nicknamed 'Charge', then 'Sarge'.
Because there is no time here at the farm to post his biography in toto, I will not try to. I moved to the Lex following Charger's birth, and although I would return often each summer o play in the grass wth very set of foals, I paid less attention to Charger than was perhaps his due: he was a quick and engaging horse, a well-made liver bay whose appearance hinted at the impossibility of Freisian roots. Neutered at the appropriate age--regardless of their size, stallions tend to be temperamental, glandular individuals--he would possess a bush of mane, a tail that touched the ground.
There has been always something about this horse. A wise aura, maybe, an avuncular attitude with the foals. He played tough at feeding time, pinning his ears back into his great mane, baring teeth toward any other horse who might pose a threat to appetite, lifting a hind foot, as though he might actually kick at his caregiver, usually m=y mother. I think this became a game for him. People--women--would laugh, and the Charge hammed it up. One could later approach him with a few words, though, and pick up a hoof to pick out, and he'd do nothing. I think he came to enjoy this implicitly dangerous form of attention, with its sharp things, the knives that Rose used to trim his feet.
In his fifth or sixth year, the horse was trained to drive: to pull a miniature sulky around a gravel track at a trot, not breaking gait, racing one competitor to the prize of a ribbon. There is one, blue, posted to my left on corkboard. The little horse won one race. His second, he and his driver were standing still, and another horse passed him at speed, throwing a strafe of gravel that spooked him into a run. The sulky tipped, sent my mother up against a waist-high rail. She would be injured. Charger would not forget.
Some people think horses to be dim-witted, dull creatures. I don't agree; of course not. Hell, no. This little guy knew something was up today when I went down to his stall. He let me stroke him, let me poke and scrape at his feet. He extended his neck and put his head in my lap, which was when I took off my one-lensed glasses, the tears flowed that free. Talk was not necessary; I suppose it almost never is. Eventually I got to my feet, straw-covered at the rear and afraid that I was boring Charger, maybe even annoying him.
As I went to the feed room to put the hoof pick up, I had to brush away the foals Sergeant and Sonata, who now bite. It's hoseplay, yes, but it's still a pain in all the usual places. I locked up, saw that Charge was standing: front feet extended and locked at the knee, hind crippled up underneath him to take the weight off their counterparts. This is the endpoint of chronic laminitis, and it is ugly to look at, and full of pity. One does not want to pity a dignified creature. I know I don't.
I think what will hurt me the most is that my parents cannot dig a grave for him atop the hill out back, in their drought-alloyed dirt. A backhoe is about one hundred bucks, the dead wagon less. Charger will have to be measured to determine the operators' fee. My mother will probably do this while he can still stand. The wagon will come, then, when it can; until it does, little Charger will have to lie there on the hard barn floor, free of pain--but still.
I've officially been kicked off this computer. I've made many mistakes, since I don't touch-type well. There is more to this, and I will approach it when I am able. Right now, I'm just stuck in a blind hole, and bone-deep sad,
c h, in memoriam
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Though I may not be able to write well right now, I know I must spit something, anything, out every day, even if I must do so with pen and paper. I'm blocked. Can't say much about anyone or anything but myself and my miseries, perched as they are on my right shoulder. (There has to be a reasonable explanation for why that shoulder and surrounding areas ache all the time.)
Thought about this person at last night's AA meeting. A woman, my age, a hairdresser in tattoos and Capri pants, sporting a stiff little 'do. Something about this woman suggests that though she never finished high school, something she admits to at every turn, she had some heavy power to wield by virtue of her looks: petite frame strapped with large and shapely boobs, large light eyes, perpetual tan despite the surgeons' warnings.
From some personally-defined distance, there are people who would find her attractive today. Then they move closer, into the light around her and notice the grooves bracketing her lipsticked mouth, the spiders riding pale eyes, how she has ratted the top of her two-tone hair, and the descent of her chin into the tired flesh of middle age.
She does have a light, a calmness, and a resignation that no matter what happens in the day-to-day--getting cut off in the ubiquitous traffic of the Lex; a slow day; a cheating husband; a divorce; sorry-ass tippers--she will not drink alcohol. She will not take drugs either, although she used to. She uses the peculiar and insidious language of the long-term 12-step member: where I'm at today, bad heads and spaces, sit with the pain, ride it out like a big horse on a long journey and inspect her blisters later. (No, of course not. No one discusses blisters, although last night, I was talking about blackouts and inadvertantly mentioned a video I hadn't known I was in until I saw it. I had a lot of heavy black make-up on, and even then I had to ask if that person was me.) I opened my yap, feeling the absence of Klonopin in my blood and brain, and spoke to the death of a young University student who had outrun the police, who simply wanted to cite him for underage drinking, and wound up on the local tracks with a train eight minutes out, unable to stop even then. Once I got lost in a train yard in West Philadelphia. I was fucked up and starting to get nervous around all the big locomotives idling there. I was searching for my drinking buddy, and found a friendly engineer who led me up and out of that singular mess. Apparently that sort of thing happened not unoften. I don't know how I got to wherever I was staying, but I imagine I was glad to get there.
I try not to be what the pundits call an 'ageist'. For me, this is yet another strident effort to remain young. But I'd sometimes like to capture a bunch of teenage immortals over at the U of K and tell them that not knowing how you got home on a regular basis is not a usual thing for human beings to do, but rather the sign of a body that doesn't quite work like the other 85% of bodies do. I wouldn't anthromorphise them and allow them to talk, walk, and kick ass, as some 12-steppers refer to their 'diseases'. (This ticks me off: my physiological irregularities don't walk, talk, or do anything human, although I'll allow that they can sometimes influence my thinking, and that thinking, in turn, my behavior, such as going across the street to the beer store for a couple of tall boys--or going to bed.)
Grudgingly, I admire the hair stylist. I'd been working up the stones I do not have to ask her if she might want to have a go at my hair, to get creative, to help whip me back to the soft-focus suggestions of slacker-under-thirty. I didn't do this. I need a haircut bad. I want to change my name here to something like 'Cherokee Finger': three times, I've been noted by men that my fifth digit, or little finger, is curved in the manner of the Cherokee. Around here that's cool, although it limits one's ability to barre or play serious lead, if one happens to play the guitar. Both of my parents have high cheekbones, and my father, whose mother was from the Pittsburgh/West Virginia line, is dark-complected for an ostensibly white man. It wasn't so long ago that the Natives were unsettled by hubristic Scotch/Irish immigrants, so it could be that my lineage is both why I love drink so, and why I cannot play guitar like most men I've known or seen.
Ah, well.I wish I had a story to tell. The short-short story anthology is open to study. And I know that my daydreamy mind won't stay focused on things outside the limitations of misery for very long. (Also, I read a disturbing little article in yesterday's paper--ppl who daydream a lot, who don't stay focused, may develop Alzheimer's more often than those who do. That's enough to keep me off the paper, in addition to its being a rag put together by hacks and Jayson Blair types, ppl who research their stories from their computers, put them together with the details they've picked up, and send them off via email. I just finished his autobio. He's open about his disturbances, and as I read the book--not at all well-written, and at times a series of excuses designed to elicit sympathy from all elements of the reading public--one thought beat its way through my own attempts to focus; and that thought was not the first of its "I could do that" kind.
as always and per usual, c h datura finger
off to the country on the morrow, with this ultimatum for the mother: do not do not do not ever and I do mean ever bring up matters of pharmacology, psychology, or anything close to each or both. Your contempt before investigation pushes my fat-covered buttons. You may not be able to see them, but they are still there.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Caviar, caveat: there are a lot of errors that I couldn't manage to edit in the last post. Sorry. I need a catastrophe right nowl
It's official: I have become boring. I may also have lost part of the thing that drives me, as my prose has this mushy, ill-reasoned quality that frightens me almost as much as the Oak Factilly Kid. I'm bored and thus boring, my writing shows this; I have no doubt that the time limits placed on all writers here in the Land of the Loud affects my prose as well. I've broached the subject of creating an area for working writers/bloggers/researchers that would a) extend the time they are allowed to pursue their itchy dreams, and b) would also be much quieter than the rest of the labs here. I've broached this both verbally to a couple of library assistants, and in a suggestions box on the place's homepage. I have gotten no response. The suggestion box has been removed.
Earlier in the day I was pissed off, an '8' out of 10 on the pissedness scale. Though I'd applied for them a week ago, incorrectly assuming in the process that I would have funds applied to my food stamps card immediately. I called my incompetent and condescending outreach worker, R., a wonderful example of the Peter Principle in practise, and once again explained the bind in which having no funds puts me. She called me by my first name--something I am trying to get away from with these folks, who presume that because a person is not presently capable of steady, gainful work, they are dimwits to be referred to as ill-behaved children--and said a couple of things contrary to the message she left me yesterday. In it, she'd spoken to the 22-year-old food stamps worker and apparently obtained information that she denied in that message, which I have saved. I wanted to hurl it into that face of hers like a slab of bacon, but figured that that was a bad idea: I'd wind up throwing the phone. (Last time I used a phone as a weapon, I was in a blackout, and when I learned what I had done, was not amused in the least, and highly ashamed. I was not in a blackout this morning. Nevertheless, I wanted to throw that phone at Piglady. She tends to have that affect on me.)
That law of physics--brainlock has set in--that law, the one that says that things in motion tend to stay in motion, motivated me to get up and out of that apartment later than I had wanted to. All morning, heavy-footed ppl were slamming furniture at one another in the space above my bedroom. No one lives there; it's used both for storage and refrigeration of meat, and I can deal with the help up there going in and out to get food for the elephant men. Aware of my noise problems, they're usually decent about this, for I have made myself known in the least childish (or crazy) way I can--made phone calls, rhythmically poked at the ceiling with a broomstick.
I dearly want to leave this so-called social service agency. Pretty sure that its employees are not using the annoyance factor here to get my motor running, I'm reduced to using it myself to escape my newest placement. Because Lisa--therapist--let me know yesterday that several of her other clients who used this social service, were very much annoyed with the new director. I do not know if I have named the man, he's been there a year, but he's made a mess of what was when I agreed to accept the agency's services, a year ago in April.
Ironically, he and I seem to have a few traits in common: he is ill at ease in public; he dislikes his appearance; and has been all around town on mental-health jobs that don't last that long, two years tops, something like that. I have this last on hearsay; the rest is based on personal observation. I have a little sympathy for the guy, but I doubt that it's reciprocated. As he's someone I don't want to think about today, I'm done with him here: a new annoyance just clunked down beside me, a teenager by the looks of him, probably a gamer. Through my earplugs I hear him thundering the keyboard hard and heavy, and there comes to me no way to ask him to stop.
Some readers might know that a bad barfday is in sight. This knowledge just sits there in me, an unwelcome dumpling of shit that I don't want to think on at length: one more year of no progress, of seedy ongoing nothing. Perhaps the most significant thing that's happened since Sept. x, 04, is the recent realisation that my parents don't want me around to glom up their routine. I'd tried to ingratiate myself with my willingness to help them out in all aspects of running their farm and cleaning their little house (Ranch! That's another downright awful commercial.). I'd wanted to make use of their basement to taper myself down off Klonopin over, say, four weeks. There is no bright light there. The basement would be similar to the environments the real experts talk about--cool, dark, little noise, no social of vocational demands during the roughest part of the detox. Ideal. Watch TV, read, play with the little horses, and lose some fifteen pounds in the process, for my parents are 'restrictors' and insist that their guests do the same.
Although I'm never a guest there. Like butter, I am immediately reduceable to something else, but unlike the butter product, I'm never that good. I dredge up their shared parental guilt at having squeezed out a defective. They interrogate me at dinner. John, my father, bears down on me with his beetling brow and hard black eyes. Rose's dentures have no rudder or paste, and jiggle in her mouth when she tries to say something. They both talk with food in their mouths, something I deplore now, but will doubtlessly miss later as I gaze down upon them in their inexpensive caskets, as they prepare to be put in the ground.
I'm not a member of that family, but something to be thrown into the box of badness. I don't know why I'm feeling that so intensely today. I tried to explain the idea of introjects and how they develop to a couple of hard-core AA men, both residing in this bare-bones residential treatment center. They weren't getting it; the membranous curtain came down over their eyes, even though I had the dumb-down filter firmly in place as I explained that hearing the same awful thing about yourself, over and over, as you are trying to grow up, can embed a series of concepts that are distinctly unhelpful in later life.
That didn't make sense to them either. They blew nasty smoke at me; I took my leave. I do not know if I can hang around here long enough to make the 8 o'clock meeting over at the dungeon: I am monstruously hungry. Fuck that food stamp shit. Give me some speed, and to hell with the benzos. After all this time with a medicated mind, I think I can make that transition.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Hey there Lex, hope you're out there and have been watching some TV, for the Kid is back again, in his bed, with his perfect sister by his side. His head seems to have grown a bit since the last commercial. He can still spit with vigor, "Oak Factilly" something or other, and hurl his left arm and index finger, sure in his big head that neither will fly off with the effort. The camera lingers on the parents for a short time--the woman, with her long, greying hair and strident smile, is standing. You said, Lex, that she was wheelchair-bound; maybe something is propping her up.
Maybe the kid can't walk. I have a decent medical education--don't ask; I won't tell--and I've seen folks with cerebral palsy looking something like the Kid. I must wonder what lies behind those sunglasses, though. Is it a Joe Cool (like Snoopy, only scarier) thing? Are his eyes as frightening as the rest of him? Can he even see?
I have no idea. Nor do I know who, or why, these homemade commercials with damaged children in them seem to be so popular around here. I agree with Lex's ideas on the subject of exploiting these kids: beneath the presumable guise of good intentions, these parents are setting up their offspring for abuse at the hands of their peers, and I could write endless papers on how peer influence is often more powerful and pervasive than that of any parent. This business of "Hey, I'm putting my kid on TV! Don't all kids want to be on TV? It's so good for his self-esteem!" is not valid. Plus, to drive a personal and feeble point into the hard, cracked ground, that child is scary. Imagine being forty and considering having a kid. (I'm not, BTW, but this whole situation is analogous to the Frog Baby: about 20 years ago, this eminently real-seeming creature showed up on the face of the tabloid that comes in black and white only. I bought it, of course, as yet something else to percolate in my twisted grey. Every corner store I entered, there was the display of the usual suspect tabloids, the Frog Baby prominent among them. I had a friend, someone who is probably dead by her own hand now, who was practically phobic about the Baby.
In South America, there are deep lakes and rural myths about them. One such myth holds that if a virgin bathes or swims in these mountain lakes, she is in danger of becoming pregnant by some kind of monster frog. Consider the offspring of such a union, and then the Frog Baby, if you are old enough to remember it, or locate it on the Internet somewhere. Scary stuff. Shiver round the campfire stuff, and girrrrrrl, don't even think about going in the water.)
Here and there, I've stumbled across pictures of kids and other creatures--a six-legged foal comes first to mind, and oh my God--who were conceived around the time of the accident at Chernobyl. Some had coneheads, yes, and one huge eye in the middle of a forehead that overlooked the absence of a nose. What mankind will not do in the interests of body modification. Myself, I was downstream of the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979. Although this happened in March, I thought it would be cool to lay out and catch a few cold, early rays. I remember looking at the sun and thinking how it looked kind of scared somehow. Imagined something in that wind. People living closer to the accident reported that their plants underwent peculiar mutations, and that their children were coming down with leukemias and lymphomas. I don't know how true this is, although it would be easy to find out. Problem is, here, in the Land of the Loud, you can't look at Rotten.com, nor at other sites that embrace oddities of nature as their theme.
I'm not sure if the Kid would qualify as a genuine oddity, for there are more out there like him. And I take back the business about his peers ragging him--"Hey, the retard's on TV again!" at school, because he is probably home-schooled, or shipped off to a group setting, or something where he doesn't have to suffer daily at the innate cruelty of his classmates, who seem to come in clusters, as I recall.
Isincerely hope that this child doesn't fully understand the rangy implications of his role in the Oak "Factilly" commercials. The parents make enough money to get his stalagmatic--a few neologisms never hurt, or did they?-- teeth fixed, his ears trimmed and pinned, that sort of thing. (There is evidence that Downs' kids who receive tongue and eyelid modifications perform better across the socioacademic board, because the appearance of normalcy naturally dampens possible negative, hurtful interactions with their peers.
I never have the necessary citations for the studies I am prone to cite here. Nor do I know how to present an Internet-based citation. There are probably books out there that could help me figure out how to do so, but all that fuss and worry for someone who is not presently in school...as much as I hate ellipses, they seem to signify to me the hesitance and lassitude with which I approach most things, dry and uninteresting things, like citations.
I'll close here with a mention of a few commercial advertisements I do like: the morphing Mountain Dew guys and their car; the ever-evolving pillagers; the David Spade spots (I forget what he is selling, but the latest one, with the fat guy in the yellow shirt running from a large and enraged customer, destroying cubicles willy-nilly as he racewalks for cover, is pretty funny); an older ad, where sleek dark cars navigated a dark silent city to music; and I am having brain farts right now. Nobody understands me, especially not this moth-eaten library technician who thinks it's okay to talk at conversational volume in a computer lab.
I'm outta here, needing to scope the Sunday classifieds.
Although I know they probably will not be there.
c h: it's better outside.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
With this heat on, it's time for something light and refreshing: irksome comercials. However, before I continue, I must issue this caveat--in marketing, there is something called an annoyance factor, and it has been shown to have success in keeping a product or service in mind simply because the advertisement behind it is unbearably irksome. Sheer irksomeness resonates. The last time I tried to make a list of cringe-worthy ads, I got carried away with the first one. Let this not happen again, although it probably will.
I'll start with another local ad. This couple, Dan and Jane, sells cars. I don't remember what kind of cars they sell, perhaps because I don't have to think about cars too much at present. They--Dan and Jane, the representatives of Courtesy Auto, are a pair of pink-colored white people with yellow hair. Dan has a bit of a gut, Jane is growing flappy upper arms. Because they both resemble the animals, Dan and Jane apparently think that calling patrons as one would call hogs is going to increase business. Yes, hogs: twice in their current ad, once over a nervous highhat background, Dan calls hogs--"SOOOOOOO-EEEEE!". The second time, Jane toasts him with a glass of bubbly. I can only imagine what goes on in bed.
I'll try to set it up: some vocal intro to the product, a broad shot of the business, and then this tinny, mechanized background highhat drumming as the cars Courtesy Auto is trying to sell navigate the area, its backroads and major thoroughfares, its bridges. Voiceover, ticcy roadrace background music, and for some reason, a thoroughly frightening squeal. ssSSSSOOOOOOO--EEE! That's right--an exclamation point straight to whatever part of the brain processes apprehension, and then annoyance. (Even when one has anticipated that first outburst, its capacity to rattle one's limbic system cannot be underrated.)
More roadrace of monochrome cars, and then Dan and Jane in their showroom, or somewhere. Dan starts to rapidly drawl some sales mumbo-jumbo, takes a breath, and then. There it is. Again: he goes, "ssSOOOOOO-EEEEE!" The viewer is called like one calls a hog from it slop to dinner. Jane toasts him, grinning up at his height, against his gut, and tosses her considerable hair. Both then grin at the camera, and the commercial vanishes, to yet another, maybe, or some entertainment for brain-deads, for the three local channels--18, 27, 36, hut hut OOPS, wrong game--don't have much in the way of entertainment.
I just spelled the word 'of' like this: 'ov'. Not the first time this has happened. Getting old and remaining perpetually ticked off can do that to a fine mind, hah?
My father cannot hear well, but will not entertain the notion of a hearing aid. When I visit, which isn't often any more, we sometimes analyse the ads on TV (for some reason, he likes NASCAR, where men drive ugly cars endless left turns). Racing on television, ads for cars during the breaks. That makes sense to someone out there. So on Saturday, or is it Sunday, there are commercials for cars, and Dan and Jane are in some of them. After their first appearance one weekend, I asked him how it felt to be called like a pig, and how he thought that might entice potential buyers into checking out their product. My father, John here b/c it's shorter than 'my father', squinted his annoyance at me, and when I had gotten through what no longer works in his ears, he scowled at me and barked, "He's saying 'free'''.
I thought to myself that Dan squealing, "free" made even less sense than did hog-calling TV viewers. Nothing, not even the liquid in Jane's slender glass, is free. John knows this, and yet he ended that conversation right there. He fears deep thinking these days about as much as I fear Dan and Jane, or the Oak Factory Kid, for that matter. So, to extend the theme, I'll cut to the chase, no drumming please: with a few exceptions, those being ppl who can't hear continuing to 'listen at' the TV and being completely sober while they do this, the audience is aware that Dan is actually saying the word "sweet", drawing it out and twisting its britches for all he's worth. Most Americans under a certain age know that the word itself--'sweet'--hasn't much to do with sugar any more. It's first been sexualised, been used to describe the secondary sex organs of women (and the occasional bunghole or penis), and then neutered, so that it might refer to anything positive, except maybe the results of an HIV test. I think California had something to do with all of this. Stoner surfer slang has moved ever so slowly East, along with rap-isms and the ability to figure out what rappers are saying. Language shifts slowly, taking at times as many as ten years to make it to places like Kentucky. Kentuckyisms rarely go anywhere, except further up the holler, and there, they create more of the same, like rabbits, maybe.
But Dan overdoes it with the squealing. Although he can speak perfectly fine, if regionally slanted, English, he squeals. I call imaginary hogs, because I have heard it done. In the remote past, I have been likened to the animals. I have been called "sweathog", and this is not funny. Not funny at all. Back then I wouldn't watch "Welcome Back, Kotter". I was in middle school, sixth grade, and that's what the movers and shakers of my inner child thought about me, dang it. Still, the introject remains. It poisons my ability to tolerate commercial advertisements. It does something.
Truth is, it probably just lies there in my head someplace, awaiting real or perceived rejection. Then, it leaps to smelly life, and I must wash myself and curl up in the bed, tears mounting like yesterday's storm clouds, a wall that broke with a high gust of air and scattered, not bringing rain at all.
Now, I'm not entirely serious here. I hope that I've made that clearer than the mud that hogs seem to so enjoy. See, I've gotten my first warning about my time running down; the second will soon arrive, and I'll have to abort this mission, derailed as per usual, unable to clean up the mess I've made.
I hate this, too: computerless, I must go here, to try to work in noisy jots of hours. Not a sweet deal at all for someone like me.
soooooey dreams and fine things, et al
c. hoss. See P. Diddy.
Friday, August 19, 2005
This'll have to be solipsistic, for there is no getting away from it these days, nor it from me.
I'd been going on about this guy Will. Long to short, I had a monster crush on him as a kid, my second, and at that time had not gotten into any significant trouble, none that was any kind of common knowledge. Even though I was a generic weirdo, I had friends, darn it. I had friends, and my friends maintained their own crushes, a few of those on Will.
He lived a neighborhood over from me. His house stood out from the others, painted aquamarine, and at night, there would be the warm yellow light of living rooms and bedrooms, and the occasional, cooler light from the TV. This was some years before the ubiquitous subterranean glow of some screensavers I've recently seen. Will had a little sister, and I'd like to call her 'Grace' here, for she was nothing if not graceful. (Though she was nameless, I was nervous around her too, as though she was reading through my forebrow and its bangs and bone, seeing there these words: I love your brother!) In truth, I did not know much about Will, except for straight A's and advanced placement this, and swimmer's body and brown eyes, a quick blinding grin that could be focused on anyone, that. His yearbook photos seemed to telegraph a youthful serenity and lack of pretense, and I would give a lot of what I once had to contact the guy--now a man--who had recent possession of those yearbooks. I partied with him non-stop my first year at college, in the dormitories, for which we were both terribly suited.
I reached tenth grade, actually entered the building and its classrooms. There was the smell of the place that anyone who has been to any high school anywhere in this country will recognise. There was an ephemeral taint of meat-ness: this was back when boys, usually juniors and seniors, lined up along the hallways to rate the appearance of passing girls on a 1-10 scale, some with additional and graphic commentary. I consider myself then through the lens of memory--tears threaten--and I see a perfectly acceptable young white female, tall and built to scale and rosily tan from one final summer in the sun, brown and brassy midlength hair, decent teeth I was born with. (How often does that happen these days?)
I wore the glasses I needed as infrequently as possible, so that I often failed to recognise who was barking at me, or having a bit of fun with my rear view. A few times I blundered into Will, who seemed always accomodating and kind about that sort of thing, and into boys who would replace him soon enough, one in particular a rich druggie with a guitar whose name was Dave, whose self-possession rendered him even more remote. (I recognise today, and have for some years, that neither young man was actually remote: I was the one who kept my head down and said as little as possible, if anything at all.) Will had been a swimming star for three years going into his fourth, and I, well I could stay afloat, angular in my hand-me-down school colors, sometimes high on weed and wanting to do nothing other than kickboard back and forth, daydreaming. I was no swimmer. I'd never been coached, and my competitive instinct had been quashed throughout those years to a whisper of nil. So Will won and won his ribbons and trophies, and I cheered, and failed miserably in my own scant races. This put me in an embarrassing place--not my first, but a meaningful and soft beat-down at the hands of my own dumb idea. My mother had nurtured this one--join the team and this boy Will will like you.
Not if I didn't win, however, and I was allowing myself to fall without examination into daily weed smoking, food when I could get it, and academic failure. I had potential, d--- it, railed my geometry teacher, with his pale-as-water blue eyes. He was a football coach, used to yelling, most likely, and he had to tread softly with me. He had no idea that I presaged what would be identified by pop-psych people as a paradigm of adolescent depression. In his head, in those eyes cold as the vodka I was learning to choke down, I was simply refusing to try. You either muscled through, beat the sandbags down, or you did not.
I'd accepted that Will was dating Tammy--I never dreamed he might be interested in me, that those brown eyes and slices of brilliant smile might have been meant for me as well, and then away--and that I didn't have an actual chance with him, or with Dave, who was famous in his circle for uttering this phrase: "Cocaine gives you the soul of an N-word." How he avoided getting his a-- kicked is to this day impossible to figure. Tammy, all of five-foot-four, went to modeling school, had visible collarbones and hipbones that hung her jeans. She was not particularly bright, but contoured her blush, and had in middle school witnessed me trying on make-up in Wanamaker's, my mother nearby. (Not a pretty scene--the blusher was close to crimson--but good fodder for bulliettes. The reader gets that picture.) All of her peers slash supporters thought she'd make it as a supermodel, when in truth, she was plain and a little cruel. I went with her about four years later on a double date with the brother of someone I was dating then. I knew the brother thought I was horrible and gauche, and to that end, tried to drink around it. Can't say how that night ended, nor what Tammy might be doing today, for her name is entirely too hard to Google, and she is probably married at that.
Solopsism gets confusing sometimes, so I am not certain where I might be in this narrative, to say anything about what I've been trying to convey. I guess I thought that through osmosis I might absorb a few of Will's more self-evident qualities, namely insane adoration by almost everyone but the greasers, thugs, and druggies, who sometimes intermingled, but who also never gave the boy a hard time. He was born beyond bullies and appears to have lead an exemplary life to date. He is also someone's husband and without doubt, unless something extraordinarily awful happened along the way one is thought to this day to build a family, an equally exemplary father. He probably swims laps at some local Y, after his job, which might involve spying on potential terrorists (some who might have been stalkerettes, back in the golden few days of walking-past-houses, and then, driving).
When I met him at a party some couple of New Year's Eves later, I was thoroughly wasted: my own date hadn't shown up, I knew no one, and had decided to get drunk enough so that I could talk back to anyone who talked to me. Will was the first; and he told me that he had really liked me--had a crush on me was what he was saying, or just maybe he was that deep for his age--when he was 17 and I 15. Though his confession, don't know what else to call it except that he mentioned blushing Tammy as a foil, was stunning, I got drunker and drunker and don't know what I might have said in response to that. That was the last time I saw him in the flesh.
I'd find out in a few days that two boys, including the date, who had finally arrived, had had to drag me out, to a van parked in the garage. It was cold, and somehow I got wet. Shudder to think how. But I continue to dream about this guy--the Dave dreams have dropped back and out--and I'm becoming his nurse and isn't that weird, nurse to the one person who, if he had managed to get me aside at the right moment, just before I flowered into drugs and useless self-indulgence, and found out that I was basically just a nice girl who liked to read and write, had pets, that sort of thing plus a couple of odd ideas and difficulty with math.
It's time to go now, for two reasons: the computer timer, and AA.
This is just me talking. Not angrily--at least not yet.
c h
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The downtown library loudness index has been exceeded today. I must Radically Accept that, or "...accept [the loudness] I cannot change...", because the library aide on duty seems thoroughly disgusted by me already, and I have asked him only once to help minimise the screaming that emanated--guess he's done an acceptable job there---from the first floor. I don't much feel like screamking about anything, although a second group of mouths with legs and not much else has arrived, and soon will be screaming up here, on the second floor, where I have scored the worst seat in the house.
I'd planned on a long and backwards, due to the setup of this thing I cannot change, um, and I seem to have completely forgotten what it was that I wished to blog about. I do not have The Chip, which has not yet to my knowlegde been invented, a very small gizmo for artists who are prone to forget the source(s) of inspiration as the waking hours proceed, with their willy-nilly, often silly, interruptions to which the artistic types are obliged to respond to in some way. Although I remain unemployed, my waking hours--it's 4:03 PM where I am; I'd risen around 10 A, in order to prepare for a visit from my Voc. Rehab counselor. She called at 12 N, one hour before we were supposed to proceed out into the working world and make a few tracks there, and told me that something or other had come up. She's as good with appointment-keeping as I am. That says a lot, none of it good.
But I was actually happy at the way she'd framed the day for me. I could blog for three hours, with the necessary and annoying interrupts, of course, to throw me off whatever track I would eventually get onto--but I'd be out of there in my baggy clothers, with the $20 in hand that my infinitely beleagured ma had given to me yesterday. (Yes: the way I refer to her is a marker of how I feel about her in blogtime. Right now, that feeling is drippy, droopy, sad.) Since that little fellow over at the Food Stamps Office hasn't activated for me any benefits, I spent $4.00 on that on ten packs of Ramen noodles, a Pepsi Zero and a stick of string cheese. Then, I came over here, clueless.
Sorry Howard--there's not enough anger here to spark the style you most encourage. Solipsism is its loopy, ornery self, and I'm gonna try to avoid its traps this post. Last night, I had a dream. There was the predictable trouble at 2 AM--trazadone time, so I plucked another from my rapidly decreasing stores, and downed it, knowing that sleep would come to me in the darkness that remained, and that I would have odd, sideways dreams, those arriving with the imprint of the mattress pad on which I lie on recent nights, harsh and quilted.
There was mush, and then there was someone I refer to here as Will, perhaps because he has a lot of it, or got the genes for it. I'll never know the answer to that one, even though I have stooped to Googling the woman I believe to be his wife. (That felt like stalking right there--a lot more than driving past Someone's house repeatedly in the few hours I was allowed to use the car, back in the day. It was creepy, and I intend to let that one lie where it is, though the dreams of her husband persist.) In this instance, Will, and my brother Adam (there is some resemblence of character between the two, who are separated by almost ten years), and a few cousins and minor others from our high school days, Will's and mine. We were overseas in a bright place, although things like rocks and walls kept falling in our general direction, partially obscuring the swimming- pool blue sky.
As did the others, I wore a uniform identifying me as one in combat. The colors of the outfit were not apparent. I was fuzzy about the apparent Army I was in, for at 39, I tried to enlist in the Guard as a Lt. Jg, but was told that I could not because I was taking Prozac. (In my remote and recent pasts, I've tried this several times, always with the same answer and the same response to it: tell my why this nation's young enter the service with visions of education in their eyes and wind up either dead, maimed, or with several prescriptions wetly mashed in hand.) I know crazy. Dunno what goes on with the younguns freaking out over there, but I've been pushed, pushed myself in fact, to some scary edges. Why can't I take myself and my prescriptions to Eye-Rack and leave my old self open to whatever comes through the cardboard-and-sheetrock reinforcements of the overamped pickups that they drive over there? Deathwish? Sure. Acquired heroism [v. that arises from character} would be a boon on the face of my person and that of my resume' as well. But back to the subject, the surface, which would be this guy Will.
In my dream, I could see him in profile, sometimes in three quarters. Face to face, he was elusive. I knew he was highly decorated and flew stealth missions. (This part is supposed to be true. I hope he didn't kill anyone when he did this--this Will as a killer is an image I cannot reconcile with that of his youth. I am getting insight bombs every which way. I plan to ignore them.) He was the leader of whatever mission we were on, and there was this giant canyon in our skyblue fireball place. The fire, it would come on sneaky, but somehow it lacked the power to burn . Nevertheless, I was paralytic with terror. Me, at the rear of the mysterious convoy, me and my untouched gun.
That terror was focused on natural-born hero Will: he was to fly his bomber into the heart of this canyon, which looked alternately yawning and then small. I never got to see who or what was supposed to be bombed. Though the genius of physiology had crerated for me an exoskeleton of skin, bone, and the muscles which would move my big body, I was trembling in mind and heart for Will. Sort of like I did for Speed Racer.
So the boy who watched over the high school girls at the pool during summer vacation had assumed mythic, almost cartoon dimensions for me in dream. I don't know what he bombed or what he missed back there; suddenly, my almost-nursing degree had crowned me, Will was down and bleeding, and there I was, this person who has never had anything like authority, has in fact shunned it, with a couple of other faceless men, ordered or maybe impelled to rescue our captain, determine the extent of his injuries, and heal him. Restore him, as it were, in dream.
I have ten minutes here. Insight bombs dropping all over this noisy place, subtle, evasive as my boys of crush and summer ever are in dream. Soon I will have to move. Soon, I will get up and go to another computer, one I hope will be on the fourth and quietest floor. After that, there will be Gerald who drinks, at the Carnegie Center. I have brought books. They will tide me over, those and another soda, which I was supposed to buy with food stamps today.
Will is probably against food stamps for anyone who can walk and use their hands.
Oh well. Back to dreams of a glorious return to the place that almost killed me.
(But with on-line bullying, the halcyon days would be incredibly different: I'd flame my bullies, maybe correct their grammar in the process, and most likely get my arse whupped on my long and convoluted way home.)
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Hey you, Lex. Didn't know anybody else was out there. I tried to post a comment to your blog, but for some reason my email address was rejected. It had to do with a story I wanted to write, something about that kid's craniofacial difficulties scaring heck out of TV viewers, especially a single mother on welfare trapped alone with a black and white in the kitchen of her double-wide (or Eastland hovel apartment). I'm nobody's mother--good genes?--but that child, who may well be of average of above intelligence, could send me running, if I actually had someplace to go.
I had no clue he scared other ppl. Sorta like this old book, yellow pages, that my deceased grandfather had. It came in volumes, so there was a lot of time to build up anticipatory anxiety, to decide if I was going to look at this or now: a pen/ink reproduction of a little girl, ca 1910, who appeared to be under the consideration of a large and hungry, somehow obviously male, wolf. I used to enjoy scaring myself any way I could figure out how. Lovecraft's "The Thing in the Basement" was the heart, soul, spit and crux of my thirteenth year.
Maybe that explains me.
I think as well that if there isn't one already, somebody should start a band, any genre or mix thereof, called "Oak Factory Kid". Knowing such an outfit was out there might actually encourage the parents to pull the commercial. Ya think?
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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