As Ben rode the bus downtown to work his head was bouncing on the window. He stared out the window, fully aware of the great noise and pain the constant brutality the window inflicted on his head. Across the street were trash bags, men walking swiftly and women swishing carefully past each other. It was a little after ten in the morning, and he should have been at work already. Since he wasn't drinking, he wasn't hungover. He wasn't right though.
The rattling of the bus window in his scull became too much for him so he lifted his head. He drifted off in reverie. It was comfortable, more comfortable than imagining what it would be like to walk through the enormous lobby he had to get through to get into his office and what he might say to his director if he encountered her. Instead, he was sipping his coffee with Robert Downey Jr. His friend Jason International had become RDJ and they sat on the sofas in Jason International Downey Jr's. modest house in a small university town. It was small, and familiar. They were manning their battle stations, their respective sofas where they would entertain the hours with wit and semantics that for the most part only served to justify their wasteful ways.
Robert Downey International Charles said to Ben, "We have chosen to take the path of least existence." Ben liked the supposition of the wordplay. All of this was going on in his head, a reverie of solipsism on a bus with late morning sun fighting through the human oils on the windows. "You're an old deuce, my boy." Ben liked to acquiesce to Jason Downey International Jr., even though in most ways he was Jason's junior. The bus seemed to make every stop. It was the city, and if he really wanted to get to work he would have taken the train. The problem was that he was already late and he was trying to delay having to confront the spy of a receptionist or whomever else he might encounter on his way into his office late. The stops were welcome and the theater of his daydreams was a comfortable escape.
He didn't have a real reason for why he was late. The alarm had gone off after he woke up, but when he woke up he laid in his bed and stared at the ceiling. His heart was empty. Life had shown him some pretty amazing turns but he was more and more dissatisfied with himself, life, expectations, obligations, reputations, his occupations and preoccupations. The more he talked, the less be believed anything anyone said. The Village Voice seemed like it was written for an audience of another time, 100 years ago or 100 years from now. Television made him throw up. The only thing that seemed like the nectar and ambrosia that could satisfy him were cigarettes and red wine, or water and C13H16ClNO. What a fucker he was.
Ben loved when the bus sped up, the smoothness of the engine as it was summoned without the shrieking brakes. He thought of how much Robert International Jr. Charles wanted to punch people in the face. It made him smile. So this lost young man was smiling on a bus full of late morning riders in the city, late for work and in unironed clothes, and with an imminent embarrassment when he arrived at work to look forward to. He felt like punching someone in the face, just for the effect. Like he wanted someone to notice, he wanted to make a scene that the whole city stopped to stare at. The feeling of so much meaninglessness and loss of fear, hope, or ambition and all of the magical nights gone without potions and scrying glass plates, it was overwhelming and he needed someone to tell him that he was right or to tag him in the jaw and tell him what's what. The seeing-eye dog next to him across the aisle on the bus farted unusually prominently. It was very unlikely that Ben misread the source of the sound and the encroaching vapors, but it brought him back to the brutal reality of the bus so very quickly. The blind master of the guide dog flared his nostrils and turned his head. He probably had heightened senses of sound and smell.
The wind of a dog like striking Ben like a punch in the face had brought Ben out of his imaginary friend reveries and back to a grimy metal and glass flask of a bus, where he bobbed around in a funky float of brake screeches, vapors and hair greases, unnecessary barking voices, bulky and rustling plastic bags and discordantly choreographed passengers interfering with their own boarding and disbarking by their own selfish disregard for the rest of themselves. Ben sat there in the stench waiting now for his stop to come. For the wasteful way he spent his morning he now wished only to get to work and deal with that, because sitting there on a bus seat at nearly 11 in the morning for no reason other than it prevented him from getting where he needed to go made him more nauseated than television. He forced himself to fart when he got up in a tit-for-tat against the dog, and though it was stifled he saw the blind owner turn his head in his direction. Maybe he could get the bastards after all.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
About the Author
Watson woke up in a panick, as usual. "Shit! What time is it?!" He wasn't asking his girlfriend who was sleeping next to him, he was thinking out loud as he woke. She answered him anyway, "Ten Forty." After he flung himself out of bed, he could feel his broken fibula shifting around and making movements that seemed like they should have accompanying sounds. Still, he hobbled around looking for clothes. It was too close to 11:15, and his daily appointment required that he make it by 11:15 at the absolute -latest-. The doctor had prescribed him 30 nicotine patches, 21 mg each, so that he would stop smoking. She explained that patients with tourette's, she read, had been observed in research studies to try to manage their tics with nicotine. So she tried to help him quit smoking and standardize the nicotine with patches.
A clinical application for nicotine gave him a great respect and interest for this doctor. Synchronicity had been making it's comical appearances, like mythical creatures hiding behind light poles, behind doors, outside windows, on roofs sticking their heads around, up and over and their tongues out to mock him. Synchronicity reminded him that living was as much comedy as tragedy. It was a perfect relief to the stress that life creates and how unequipped Watson was in dealing with it.
The student doctor had asked him if he were interested in quitting and Watson was commencing to equivocate when the doctor came in and told him about Tourette's and nicotine and wrote the patch script. It often felt like the gods positioned cosmic punchlines in media, television and sometimes even books or emails, which could be shared for verification between he and his girl. Watson was superstitious, but synchronicity was a "faith-based" sense like deja vu, presque vu, or jamais vu.
So he made his appointment, made his way back home, smoked a cigarette that had broken and he repaired for his last one, and put a patch on his ass. Watson chose to put transdermal patches on his ass, because he believed that when you sat down, it gave you an extra boost of the pharmaceutical nicotine delivered. This was probably not scientific, and he really started this because when the generic and store brands of patch came onto the market, their adhesive properties were somehow inferior to the original ones, and when you sat on them, the adhesion was reinforced if you can follow the thinking. Try it out if you can't.
Two hours passed as he and his lover watched the third season of the wire. The show always moved him with it's characters and their addressing ethical, personal, strategic and related challenges of what were to Watson the most important conflicts he could imagine. The challenge of feeling whole and succeeding in making your heart sit well in your chest, and being able to see eye to eye with yourself in the mirror.
A clinical application for nicotine gave him a great respect and interest for this doctor. Synchronicity had been making it's comical appearances, like mythical creatures hiding behind light poles, behind doors, outside windows, on roofs sticking their heads around, up and over and their tongues out to mock him. Synchronicity reminded him that living was as much comedy as tragedy. It was a perfect relief to the stress that life creates and how unequipped Watson was in dealing with it.
The student doctor had asked him if he were interested in quitting and Watson was commencing to equivocate when the doctor came in and told him about Tourette's and nicotine and wrote the patch script. It often felt like the gods positioned cosmic punchlines in media, television and sometimes even books or emails, which could be shared for verification between he and his girl. Watson was superstitious, but synchronicity was a "faith-based" sense like deja vu, presque vu, or jamais vu.
So he made his appointment, made his way back home, smoked a cigarette that had broken and he repaired for his last one, and put a patch on his ass. Watson chose to put transdermal patches on his ass, because he believed that when you sat down, it gave you an extra boost of the pharmaceutical nicotine delivered. This was probably not scientific, and he really started this because when the generic and store brands of patch came onto the market, their adhesive properties were somehow inferior to the original ones, and when you sat on them, the adhesion was reinforced if you can follow the thinking. Try it out if you can't.
Two hours passed as he and his lover watched the third season of the wire. The show always moved him with it's characters and their addressing ethical, personal, strategic and related challenges of what were to Watson the most important conflicts he could imagine. The challenge of feeling whole and succeeding in making your heart sit well in your chest, and being able to see eye to eye with yourself in the mirror.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Les Criptes Sota Sagrada Familia
When Francis looked up at the gargoyle caught leaning out into the sky in stone, he thought to himself "fucking ass weasels. fucking butt ferrets." Gaudi pissed him off, even in death. I suppose that is the privelege of architects. They make men and women fall in love and perhaps even nauseate in the street long after their deaths. Their work stands and we stand in their work for centuries, even millenia after they die. So Francis hated the Apse gargoyles. They weren't even chimera. They were far from scary.
An African woman addressed him as Guapo, then Italian, French. She grabbed his arm and batted her fake black eyelashes. Her dress barely covered her ass, and she had a friend. The two of them invaded his personal space as they confronted him. Pulling back his arm, he re-created a safe zone between them. She was asking if he had a hotel room in spanish, or something about a room. He wasn't very good at Castillano and she surely had some sort of accent. All he understood was something about a room, that she was a prostitute, and as flattering it may be to be called handsome by a prostitute, his amusement was quickly exhausted by the wiley predation. They obviously profited from the weakness of tourists, young men, and their naivety, conceit, and appetites.
He told the woman that he'd surely love to fuck her but his mother would be very unhappy with him. To him, this was funny. It seemed that she wouldn't understand English, and that what he was saying to her was a bizarre statement. Her response was, "Comment? Qu'est-ce que c'est?" He repeated, "Jesus would be pissed off at me." She looked at her friend, who had a similarly scant dress, blue eyeshadow and black cleopatra whore eyes. They sort of laughed with big, african laughs that betrayed their coquettish characters they were playing. For prostitutes or anyone for that matter, they had shiny white teeth that were very healthy. Francis was struck that it seemed that these whores probably brushed their teeth more regularly than his own loathesome self.
Breakfast seemed like an unlikely meal here. Iberia was a magical terre, and he was foreign to it. Looking out down the street, he saw the warm mediterranean sun casting warm and seemingly eternal vernus over the edges of the roofs. The whole city was life and love. He smoked a lucky strike and thought to himself that trying to legitimize living here would be exceptionally difficult. Still, he had achieved more improbable and unlikely things, overcome more impossible challenges and he knew that he -could- if he committed to it. By the time he finished the cigarette, he mind had run along to contrive magical experiences that he could write about. He recalled the day before when he had gone swimming and seen butterfly wings floating on the surface of the sea. They were somehow one of the most beautiful things he would ever see. Childhood wishes, even demands that he should be allowed to breathe underwater like Jacques Cousteau, romanced the butterfly wings. He set about writing it, and was quickly perverted and the documentation was destroyed by his anxious restlessness.
There was an anxiety that pounced upon him from the pit of his stomach. It was almost persistent. He knew as soon as he was inspired or began to daydream something good that the chimera of his gut would spring into action. They would go for his eyes, his throat and his lungs. Often a voice told him, "Watch your lungs." Surely he was crazy, and yes he heard voices. They were his own. When the anxiety electrified him, he flung his hands around like trying to free them of egg. He was compelled to make a noise, a gutteral cry of agony. Unfortunately he had to stifle this cry, for socially it would alarm those who heard it. That would just compound the problem. He concluded his tale with abruptness and dischord and bought a bottle of water, two cokes, and a cafe con leche. Paradoxically, the coffee and water calmed his writhing. Now though, he had abandoned his documentation. The sun was up and the street seemed barometrically heavy.
Francis had nowhere to go. It was the day after his birthday and he was alone in a country far away from where he lived. He went to the shoestore and bought a pair of white leather shoes. Then he stopped at a strange little clothing store that seemed to be in a space designed for a cafe. The clothing cafe was on a corner in the old junkie ghetto side of the main drag, with glassed windows all around the space. Inside, two men tried in a language Francis didn't speak to sell him clothing he surely didn't want. In the end he bought a pair of off-white trousers to spruce himself up along with the new shoes, which were already scuffed and spoiled from the short walk from the zapateria. There was a man outside when he left the store. This man was unwashed, his hair matted, and his fingers black and dirty. It was apparent that the man was a tramp, but how he survived in such a state was a mystery. He asked Francis for change. This man almost seemed like a character, like he had come out of a theatre, like he couldn't possibly be that wrecked and free to roam the streets.
Reaching into his pocket, Francis pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered the man one. The man accepted. They both lit their cigarettes. Interestingly, the tramp didn't say anything. He wasn't trying to talk to him, wasn't trying to plea for or swindle money out of Francis. It was almost as if he had given up. The street seemed to be emptying, and the city seemed to be retreating. As the man looked up, for the first time Francis could see his eyes. Up to that point, his long and matted hair veiled his face as he hung his head. They were clear, and the cleanness of them stood out against the rest of him. He asked Francis in some strange language a question. He could very well have been wrong, but for some reason he felt like the man was asking where he was from. "Nueva York." The tramp nodded his head in acknowledgement.
Previous nights had been full of sangria and beer, and the morning and the coffee and the coke had rehydrated and settled him, but now everything began to take on a surreal tone. It could have been the cigarette. Something was making his stomach turn. The light began to take on a dreamlike way, his teeth became a great distractor, and his sweaty skin was again a suit he wished he could take off. Gravity became stronger and a pain in his back and neck saddened him. He contorted to try to relieve it. The tramp looked at him with curiousity. Something desperate struck Francis in a hide-and-seek way that defeated him. There would be no escaping it.
An African woman addressed him as Guapo, then Italian, French. She grabbed his arm and batted her fake black eyelashes. Her dress barely covered her ass, and she had a friend. The two of them invaded his personal space as they confronted him. Pulling back his arm, he re-created a safe zone between them. She was asking if he had a hotel room in spanish, or something about a room. He wasn't very good at Castillano and she surely had some sort of accent. All he understood was something about a room, that she was a prostitute, and as flattering it may be to be called handsome by a prostitute, his amusement was quickly exhausted by the wiley predation. They obviously profited from the weakness of tourists, young men, and their naivety, conceit, and appetites.
He told the woman that he'd surely love to fuck her but his mother would be very unhappy with him. To him, this was funny. It seemed that she wouldn't understand English, and that what he was saying to her was a bizarre statement. Her response was, "Comment? Qu'est-ce que c'est?" He repeated, "Jesus would be pissed off at me." She looked at her friend, who had a similarly scant dress, blue eyeshadow and black cleopatra whore eyes. They sort of laughed with big, african laughs that betrayed their coquettish characters they were playing. For prostitutes or anyone for that matter, they had shiny white teeth that were very healthy. Francis was struck that it seemed that these whores probably brushed their teeth more regularly than his own loathesome self.
Breakfast seemed like an unlikely meal here. Iberia was a magical terre, and he was foreign to it. Looking out down the street, he saw the warm mediterranean sun casting warm and seemingly eternal vernus over the edges of the roofs. The whole city was life and love. He smoked a lucky strike and thought to himself that trying to legitimize living here would be exceptionally difficult. Still, he had achieved more improbable and unlikely things, overcome more impossible challenges and he knew that he -could- if he committed to it. By the time he finished the cigarette, he mind had run along to contrive magical experiences that he could write about. He recalled the day before when he had gone swimming and seen butterfly wings floating on the surface of the sea. They were somehow one of the most beautiful things he would ever see. Childhood wishes, even demands that he should be allowed to breathe underwater like Jacques Cousteau, romanced the butterfly wings. He set about writing it, and was quickly perverted and the documentation was destroyed by his anxious restlessness.
There was an anxiety that pounced upon him from the pit of his stomach. It was almost persistent. He knew as soon as he was inspired or began to daydream something good that the chimera of his gut would spring into action. They would go for his eyes, his throat and his lungs. Often a voice told him, "Watch your lungs." Surely he was crazy, and yes he heard voices. They were his own. When the anxiety electrified him, he flung his hands around like trying to free them of egg. He was compelled to make a noise, a gutteral cry of agony. Unfortunately he had to stifle this cry, for socially it would alarm those who heard it. That would just compound the problem. He concluded his tale with abruptness and dischord and bought a bottle of water, two cokes, and a cafe con leche. Paradoxically, the coffee and water calmed his writhing. Now though, he had abandoned his documentation. The sun was up and the street seemed barometrically heavy.
Francis had nowhere to go. It was the day after his birthday and he was alone in a country far away from where he lived. He went to the shoestore and bought a pair of white leather shoes. Then he stopped at a strange little clothing store that seemed to be in a space designed for a cafe. The clothing cafe was on a corner in the old junkie ghetto side of the main drag, with glassed windows all around the space. Inside, two men tried in a language Francis didn't speak to sell him clothing he surely didn't want. In the end he bought a pair of off-white trousers to spruce himself up along with the new shoes, which were already scuffed and spoiled from the short walk from the zapateria. There was a man outside when he left the store. This man was unwashed, his hair matted, and his fingers black and dirty. It was apparent that the man was a tramp, but how he survived in such a state was a mystery. He asked Francis for change. This man almost seemed like a character, like he had come out of a theatre, like he couldn't possibly be that wrecked and free to roam the streets.
Reaching into his pocket, Francis pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered the man one. The man accepted. They both lit their cigarettes. Interestingly, the tramp didn't say anything. He wasn't trying to talk to him, wasn't trying to plea for or swindle money out of Francis. It was almost as if he had given up. The street seemed to be emptying, and the city seemed to be retreating. As the man looked up, for the first time Francis could see his eyes. Up to that point, his long and matted hair veiled his face as he hung his head. They were clear, and the cleanness of them stood out against the rest of him. He asked Francis in some strange language a question. He could very well have been wrong, but for some reason he felt like the man was asking where he was from. "Nueva York." The tramp nodded his head in acknowledgement.
Previous nights had been full of sangria and beer, and the morning and the coffee and the coke had rehydrated and settled him, but now everything began to take on a surreal tone. It could have been the cigarette. Something was making his stomach turn. The light began to take on a dreamlike way, his teeth became a great distractor, and his sweaty skin was again a suit he wished he could take off. Gravity became stronger and a pain in his back and neck saddened him. He contorted to try to relieve it. The tramp looked at him with curiousity. Something desperate struck Francis in a hide-and-seek way that defeated him. There would be no escaping it.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
qui dolorem ipsum
There is a lie I tell myself and have told and told against
All that I live, and see, and feel, in life -
That it does not hurt, I am not sad, or weak, or in lament
In no way am I pained or weighed with strife.
So I have taken to the ways of tramp and dope-fiend joker
Have lost my youth, wasted love and my hope
To gain none more than what I stole from the world that gives much more
To those who feel honesty, not in trope.
All that I live, and see, and feel, in life -
That it does not hurt, I am not sad, or weak, or in lament
In no way am I pained or weighed with strife.
So I have taken to the ways of tramp and dope-fiend joker
Have lost my youth, wasted love and my hope
To gain none more than what I stole from the world that gives much more
To those who feel honesty, not in trope.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
I Feel Like Withnail
I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and queen moult no feather. I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
-Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act II, scene II
Friday, October 31, 2008
Sunlight
The espresso machine made a high-pitched action sound, like it was calling to a great choreography. The dark coffee dripped out with tension and purpose that overcame the grinds. The pressure itself lent the espresso a vibrance and a fortitude, so the potion would yield its drinker with an exactitude and a grace. Joseph anticipated the bitter sharpness with a patience he only had when he first woke up before his psyche kicked in with the expectations and frustrations and demands. The sun gave the floor a golden and natural beauty.
He lit a Lucky Strike Light and sipped the dark liquor. The cigarette tasted like a cigarette, but somehow it left him with the smells and tastes of marshmallows and caramel. The morning was breezy and the window was open. The smoke when he exhaled was pushed past him, so there was no cloud lingering and crowding him. There was a clarity this morning. His sense of the cosmos, his sense of self as a man were not discordant. Every day, to a degree, his heart contorted in rebellion against being, but some days were worse and others were naturally free of this pain unless he made an effort to tune it in.
He finished the small cup of coffee and took four deep drags of the cigarette to finish it off. It was his habit to smoke cigarettes to finish them, not to enjoy them. When both his cup was empty and the cigarette end was in the ashtray, he was struck with a feeling of emptiness. He looked out the windows at the sun reflecting off of the faces of mans' works and saw a stark and unloving world. It was unloving because he didn't love it. He knew he hurt the world and the world hurt him. Still, they were stuck with each other.
He looked through the craigslist ads for any sort of inspiration. This was the beginning of a quest. Somehow, the decision had made itself that he was going to make some sort of criminal profit. It was true that he had no money, and his appetites were ones that absolutely had to be sated or he would suffer in many ways. Harming other people was profane and unacceptable. Property and numbers, money and things like that were abstract. It was even too much for him to cause someone any amount of fear that they would suffer. His modus operandi was to steal that which was available without making threats, without even making the trespass known.
For a long time, he had romanced the crooks who thieved from pharmacies. The apothecary was the keeper of much comfort, much ease. There were movies about such capers, and there were occasionally police blotters of such fiends that managed to rob a chemist with force or threat, or even pull the thievery off with the grace that Joseph might at night with clever and creative problem solving. The craigslist posts provided no idea to make golden twinkle in his eyes, no opportunity to bend a deviant smirk on his face. He sighed and lit another cigarette. Staring out a window in the slanted ceiling, he saw the sky slide by. He thought about the chemist he went to for a prescription and how there was an apartment above it. The visual memory, a picture, struck him that this apartment was empty and undergoing construction. The obsession for a caper set in. For now, he would be consumed with working out a solution to the problem that was defining itself.
Louise was wearing blue scrub trousers and two white hospital gowns with tiny blue lillies. He was shaking with anxiety and brimming with rage because the arrogant nurse wouldn't give him lorazepam. The nurse, William, said that Louise already had some 4 hours ago at six AM. Louise was suffering. William was a nurse, not a doctor. In an idealistic sense, those who would swear by and honor Asclepius and that which he represents should be wont to alleviate pain and suffering. William had a mustache and ears that had grown callous to the pleas and petitions for drugs by patients on the psych ward. He did not have any allegiance to Apollo, but he had all of the superciliousness that someone emulating a doctor's erudition and the weight of a doctor's experience would have. William was an asshole, the kind of asshole that worries that people will take advantage of him if he isn't a selfish asshole.
Louise went back to his room on the psych ward. There was no art on the walls, nothing but an empty wardrobe and plastic covered bed with thin, cheap linens. The window was on the 4th floor and it most certainly didn't open. He could see where the wall had been patched up after patients had punched, kicked, or otherwise destroyed it. This was obviously a common voice for protest on the psych ward. Less common, but infinitely more profound a voice was coprography. Still more pointed an argument came naturally to Louise. In fact, few things had ever come to or felt more naturally than what he had for William. After pacing around in a tight circle until the pointlessness of it overwhelmed him, he half-squatted in the bathroom and defecated into his left hand.
Grinning a grin not because of the perversion he'd committed himself to but the great satisfaction he felt knowing that the contention he was about to make was irrefutable. He was walking down the hall of the psych ward with a winning argument in his hand. William would have to concede that medication isn't some sort of privilege for those who deserve it but a mechanism to treat suffering in those who need it. The fear that people will somehow feel good because of a chemical was old, tired, and the suffering that was left to fester because of this fear was much greater in sum than all of the destructive and unjust catastrophies cast on the reputation of chemicals used as drugs. In fact, the outlaw of narcotic chemicals had led to the abuse of much more savage ones like alcohol, and indirectly to more deaths and injuries physical, emotional, and spiritual of many people. The pervasive and misprescribed social substitution of booze in lieu of ancient communions like opium was a loss.
Only since about 1914 in the USA, with the Harrison Narcotics Act did Joseph's appetite for soul-soothing agents become conventionally immoral. Alcohol was briefly made immoral, but unlike narcotics that mistake was corrected shortly thereafter as society illustrated the absurdity. Interestingly, more deaths have occured from legal alcohol than from true narcotics in nearly any period in history. Still, the taboo and stigma of opiates has become fixed and petrified as a convenient culprit, an affectionate evil, a comfortable notion to pity, fear, hate, and absorb contempt.
Joseph was aware that both Galen and Hippocrates acknowledged the benefits of elixirs derived from papaverum somniferum. The Hippocratic Oath was probably not actually written by Hippocrates, but it seems worthy of note that medical men and women by tradition subscribe to a creed credited to a man who extolled the healing of the poppy flower. Being aware of this made no difference for him in a society where those seeking relief and comfort were regarded as sick at best and subhuman at worst. Joseph woke every morning suffering pain physically, and at 30 had only began to accept that this pain would not decrease as time passed.
He walked in front of the Burrows & Close chemist. There did not appear to be anyone living on the third floor, and the second floor apartment had no windows. Only the ground floor, the pharmacy, appeared to be occupied in the building which did not share any walls as the building which once laid adjacent and shared a wall was long gone save for the sidewalk windows of a retail shop. He entered the store and noticed magnetic sensors on the door and cameras in the northwest corner of the shop floor and behind the counter facing the counter from the pharmacy area. There was a shelf, like a bookshelf in a library, standing into the middle of the pharmacy area that divided the pharmacy into two long aisles. Smiling at the nice pharmacist, who would fill his script even if he had to pay her later because he was such a regular customer, he left and walked up the block to see the back of the building.
The back of the building was where the stairs to the upstairs apartment was. The contractors had made the apartment as secure as they could. Joseph realized that he would have to recon this setup after hours when they'd gone home to drink black label, read the Sun, and watch football while they ate their kebabs. He hoped, in his anti-hero villainous ways, that their kebabs were as tasty as his medication was. That was what he prayd: "God, I'm not asking for any special favors for me today. The good men who have made the effort to secure this building -- may you bless them and guide them, may they know love and calm, may their women love them and they their women, and may their kebabs taste as tasty to them as the dope is to me."
Joseph lit a cigarette and looked up at the grey sky as it misted down cool droplets at him. The double decker buses in England always made things feel surreal, like he was living in some magical old book. The complexity of that surreal feeling was that often he wished that he could get home, and he didn't know where 'home' was. At times, it felt like some sort of curse or the answer to a wish that he should have been more careful in making. This evening he had a purpose. If he concocted a sound plan, and executed it perfectly he wouldn't even need luck. The only fortune he would require was not to have very improbable misfortune, that no cosmic anomaly crop up that would throw a wrench in his sweet machine.
He went home and curled up under a blanket and dreamt of the cards with the contacts for a chip, ones for telephones, credit cards, parking meters. In waking, he had recently encountered these devices in the Netherlands and was certain that it was an omen that the US was lagging behind in technology that would ultimately doom the individual in society for the sake of (or the pretense of) security for the collective. The street interrupted his rest, with horns and diesel engines and alarms and voices. It was time for the men to eat their kebabs, time for television, time for the secure to rest. Out of bed and into his blackest pants he climbed. He brought along a crow bar.
Louise marched up to the nurse station door. The top half of the door was opened in, leaving the bottom half of the door to prevent the likes of Louise from invading the dispensing nurse and the precious pharmaceuticals. William shook his head and told Louise sternly, "I -told- you, you won't get any sedatives from me until 6 PM -tonight-. You're -here- because you abuse drugs, and I'm not letting you do it. Not on my watch!" Louise replied, "Are you sure? That's your stance? You'd rather that I suffer than give me a drug that I want that alleviates my suffering?" William interrupted, "Look, you're not suffering, you're just trying to get over on me, on the system." "I promise you, I -am- suffering. This conversation and your morality aren't making it any better." warned Louise. William asked, "You want an acetaminophen?" "Do I look like an acetaminophen will help? I'm shaking, sweating, and all of my muscles are contorted and grinding my bones." Louise demonstrated and issued this final point, "Mr. William, I am suffering from a physical anxiety that is causing my physical pain. Lorazepam alleviates the anxiety, the contortion, and the pain. I don't get high when I am given a therapeutic dose. I am merely relieved of the burden of pain. Is that wrong?"
William smirked. "You're a junkie. If you don't change your ways, you're going to die." he said. Louise looked down at the poop in his left hand then he looked up at William who was smirking smugly at Louise, content in his domination of a patient making an effort to get a drug on the patient's terms. It was William's house, not Louise's house. They had to learn, William was no sucker, he thought to himself. He knew their tricks, he knew they were sick and greedy and would do anything to get a fix, a high, to take drugs. Louise couldn't understand how it was a bad thing to take something that made anguish go away. Louise wondered why William controlled it like it was something that had to be earned by merit rather than by necessity, something that he didn't deserve? Louise watched William give up his smirky stare of pity and go back to looking at whatever he fancied on the internet. He saw the clean shaven jawline and he raised up his left hand. With a left-arm pitch, he flung the turd at William's head. It broke into two parts, one of which hit his ear and the other his neck. William wasn't immediately clear about what had hit him, but he was sure that Louise had thrown it. Before the stink hit him, he got up and walked towards Louise. On the way to the door, he reached into a drawer and uncapped a long syringe that was pre-loaded.
Joseph climbed up the scaffolding on the back of the building. He clinked the crowbar hanging from his belt on the metal bars of the scaffold. This made him fearful and he became completely still and quiet, using his black clothing to dissolve back into the night. He sang a song in his head of tragedy while he waited for the quiet of the night to soothe him back into confidence. The moon was barely there, a waxing crescent. He slid through the windowframe into the apartment. The floor was being redone, and as lucky as he could be he paced out to about where he imagined the counter of the pharmacy to be. He pried up the floorboards to find some wiring and boarding which drywall was mounted from inside the pharmacy. In spite of feeling how wrong the action was, he hammered out the drywall from below the floor of the apartment, opening up the ceiling of the pharmacy. He was practically inside the candy shop, and had been nearly perfectly quiet. Looking around with light from his mobile phone, he found a cord the contractor were using in lifting and lowering a large rubbish bin. He tied the cord to the middle of the crow bar and wedged the bar across the two strong supporting beams of the ceiling.
Lowering himself enough that he was comfortable dropping, he did so and found himself standing behind the counter of the pharmacy in the middle of the night. The metal grates were pulled down and locked over the windows, so he had little fear that he would be discovered. So, he began his catalogue of the bottles, throwing anything he liked into the backpack he had. He was disappointed in himself. He was disappointed that his successes had been relegated to this, that his appetites were so base and insistent, and that he as a man and as a monkey, could not survive without chemicals. Mostly he was disappointed that he would unlikely find this opportunity again, and furthermore he was all too aware that this fortune wouldn't last him half a year. It was just happening and he was lamenting its inevitable passing.
William opened the door and called for nurses to help him subdue Louise. When he touched the crap on his ear, saw the brownness on the floor and smelled the ultimate in disrespect, all of the condescending pity for Louise left his eyes. His lips puckered together in rage like some sort of pissed off anus and his motions became jerky and violent. Louise was just standing there, smiling, but William employed his Aikido training to crash Louise into the floor. Kneeling on Louise's head, he injected him with Lorazepam in the ass and as the other nurses arrived he increased and maintained pressure on Louise's head with his big asshole of a knee. Louise was no longer human to William. It wasn't on camera, but Louise wished that it had been. The words they exchanged would surely have been important to anyone reviewing the incident. Louise wanted desperately to wash his hand. They had no intention of prioritizing this need. As the high dose of lorazepam set in, he was strapped in 4 point restraints to a bed mounted to the floor.
Joseph filled his bag with all of the wonderous items he'd coveted for so long. He became sick with withdrawals from just being around so much chemicals. He went through some drawers and found a bag of syringes that looked like they would work. Considering all of the bottles he chose to be of similar function, he chose the smallest dose of hydromorphone. The decision he made was just to get himself comfortable enough to get up the rope and out. After a long time dependent on opiates, they have a fortifying effect on the user, they give the habitual user strength and energy, they settle the stomach and turn gravity down. As he fixed and the hydromorphone crossed the blood brain barrier and settled into his delta and mu receptors he began to feel normal and hopeful again.
He didn't feel any better about the caper though. He still felt that the whole cycle, the appetite, the need and the satiety of the panicky appetite was just more of the same world that he did not love. All too aware of the lie that was the sense of warmth and ease that washed through him as the hydromorphone did what it does, he was still bereft of meaning and hope. The drugs didn't work. They alleviated his physical pain to a degree. The cost for this was the pendulous oscillation between anxious exhaustion, sweaty weakness and soporific sanctuary, fuzzy clarity, and gritty points in between. What he hated most about his life was that he was a coward. None of his failures pained him more than his subservience to fear. An anger swirled through his brain, like the chemicals meant to grant him peace and ease.
Louise woke up with his scrub trousers wet and grim. He had pissed himself. Someone had cleaned his hand for the most part, but he was still irritated by the feeling under his fingernails. He hollered out for help. With no special hurry, a nurse came in. It was late at night. He asked the nurse what her name was. She calmly replied, "Andreea. Are you going to be nice? No more monkey business?" "Yes," Louise said, "Can I have my lorazepam now? It's after 6." "Absolutely." Andreea left returned with his sedative. This struck Louise as phenomenally bizarre. He'd been heavily sedated for who knew how many hours on the very chemical that he was denied -because- he had been denied and so threw feces in primitive protest. When he woke, and didn't need it, he was just pressing buttons on the off chance that his madness would be validated. He was in fact proven. Andreea handed him a towel and a fresh set of hospital scrubs and gowns. Louise went directly to the shower.
In the shower he washed himself from the top of his head down to his toes. In a way he was cleansing his conscience, trying to redeem his motives to himself and reclaim a constitution of sanity. He was ashamed. Not because he threw poop at an asshole with glaring self-righteousness but because he was reduced to living with circumstances where that action actually seemed appropriate to his addled mind. Where had he become lost? When had he lost his way? Medically, he would benefit from the chemicals, but he was unable to administer them to himself responsibly. He was a darwinian failure, and as he washed himself he was sure that he wasn't qualified to reproduce. It seemed sad and quiet but true that he should be responsible enough to let the bloodline of pain and suffering stop with him. When he began to consider the role of environment, culture, and custom in his plight he stopped. The mental acrobatics were a waste of everything, an internal dialogue that needed to be stifled. When he finished washing, he felt better.
Joseph sat on the floor of the pharmacy. He looked up at the ceiling. There were surely ways for him to build a platform in the room that would allow him to jump up and grab a supporting beam, but the cord hanging down was nothing but a precarious menace. Reclining on his elbows, he looked across the store at the door and the light from the street reaching through the small spaces in the rolled-down grates protecting the glass. He had plenty of time to work on his escape. They didn't open until 9am, so he imagined that he had until at least 7 before the sun came up and he'd have had to make his way out. Somehow he felt safe in here, like there was nothing he needed outside of this small space.
Truthfully, he wasn't safe in there and there wasn't much of anything that he actually needed in there. He needed much more, more than he had ever given and more than the world could ever give. There was an infinite array of reasons and culprits he could blame for his misery, his meaninglessness, his human condition. Still, he found that he could only hold himself responsible for his own and the suffering of those he loved most. He was capable of love. Where he came up short was in tolerating himself; loving himself was well beyond the realism of being a consideration. For so many times he'd declared a new course, and set the course and charted a better way, he'd more often than not abandoned the voyages before he began.
As he sat comfortably on the floor in the middle of an extended serious crime, having mainlined hydromorphone to quell his sickness, the levity of being began to console him. After all, part of his metaphysical affliction was that it all was a comedy as much as a tragedy. To find his way, he'd have to remember the comedy and make the ways he had been blessed to succeed with in earlier years and much better days as a younger man. Why be afraid; what was there to lose?
Louise breathed deeply and watched the television in the common room on the ward. They served snacks. White bread and little single servings of peanut butter and jelly were laid out for the patients to eat. He watched the television, but he couldn't bear to give any attention to what was -on- the television. In the morning, he'd surely have to speak with the doctor about the poop throwing, and he was certain that the antic was going to cost him more time, potentially much more time, in the custody of the mental health medical service. It was worth it. What had he learned, he asked himself. The lines for moral right & wrong were always going to be overextended. He fully respected the golden ethic of reciprocity. It seemed like the most perfect and simple and true law that man has ever learned, known, or written. He learned today though that there will always be others who will not tolerate your own needs, and your own comfort and well-being will be imposed upon, interfered with, stolen, or broken at times for any of a variety of irrelevant reasons.
In this case, throwing poop paid off in the short term but it was no great revelation that this was the exact -wrong- thing to do. The full consequences, the full price of this victory and this need being met would become clear tomorrow. It was useless to speculate what that cost may be, but he was sure that it would be more than he would have had to pay by just waiting 6 more hours for his medication, and speaking with the doctor tomorrow to resolve the problem. He definitely learned that games you may play just once can have gross repercussions and impact much more than the features of the game. His internal dialogue spun its wheels while he breathed a deep breath and said to himself, "I'm a man. Not a monkey."
Joseph wished that he was agile like a monkey. He had to figure out how to get out of this pharmacy that he had broken into. It amused him, his predicament. For so many years, he had envisioned the great cat burglary of a pharmacy. Now, when he'd realized that dream, he'd managed to trap himself in the greatest cache of drugs he'd ever seen. It was poetic how well he'd fucked himself. Far too many times he'd got himself off by observing how unique and clever he was. This time he was just a little too clever for his own good. When he came in through the ceiling, he was aware that he'd have to get out, but he had a cocksure feeling that he could just figure that out when it was time to. Having looked around the shop, he could only find flimsy cardboard boxes to stack, none of which would hold his weight. The only thing he could think to do as his anxiety rose and a panick set in was to IV more hydromorphone and take 4mg of alprazolam.
He fell asleep with his head on a stuffed animal. He had munched on a fruit & nut chocolate bar, and the half-eaten bar lay next to him. He heard the metal grate sliding up and he saw through narcotic eyes the early morning sun as it crept in through the glass windows. The chemist unlocked the front door. He looked up and smiled. She looked confused, not afraid, then he saw her lips contract and he could tell she understood what had happened. Without any grace at all, he hopped to his feet and made for the door. The chemist shouted, "I know who you are, Joseph!" She did. He saw her several times per week. She had his address. He was fucked. Turning around, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" She shook her head and picked up the phone, presumably to phone the police.
He said he was sorry and then went out the door. The same surreal buses, the double deckers were lined up at the bus stop. Hopping on the front one, he sat down without any destination in mind. The only thing he knew was that this had to stop. He would talk to a doctor. Maybe medicine could help. He prayed that whatever god's plan was, whatever the universe had in mind, that he would be able to honor it and that he be an instrument of god's will. He felt alone but not lonely. Somehow he knew the universe had a plan. The sun gave the bus an auspicious glow. That sunlight and how his eye took it in was all that he had.
He lit a Lucky Strike Light and sipped the dark liquor. The cigarette tasted like a cigarette, but somehow it left him with the smells and tastes of marshmallows and caramel. The morning was breezy and the window was open. The smoke when he exhaled was pushed past him, so there was no cloud lingering and crowding him. There was a clarity this morning. His sense of the cosmos, his sense of self as a man were not discordant. Every day, to a degree, his heart contorted in rebellion against being, but some days were worse and others were naturally free of this pain unless he made an effort to tune it in.
He finished the small cup of coffee and took four deep drags of the cigarette to finish it off. It was his habit to smoke cigarettes to finish them, not to enjoy them. When both his cup was empty and the cigarette end was in the ashtray, he was struck with a feeling of emptiness. He looked out the windows at the sun reflecting off of the faces of mans' works and saw a stark and unloving world. It was unloving because he didn't love it. He knew he hurt the world and the world hurt him. Still, they were stuck with each other.
He looked through the craigslist ads for any sort of inspiration. This was the beginning of a quest. Somehow, the decision had made itself that he was going to make some sort of criminal profit. It was true that he had no money, and his appetites were ones that absolutely had to be sated or he would suffer in many ways. Harming other people was profane and unacceptable. Property and numbers, money and things like that were abstract. It was even too much for him to cause someone any amount of fear that they would suffer. His modus operandi was to steal that which was available without making threats, without even making the trespass known.
For a long time, he had romanced the crooks who thieved from pharmacies. The apothecary was the keeper of much comfort, much ease. There were movies about such capers, and there were occasionally police blotters of such fiends that managed to rob a chemist with force or threat, or even pull the thievery off with the grace that Joseph might at night with clever and creative problem solving. The craigslist posts provided no idea to make golden twinkle in his eyes, no opportunity to bend a deviant smirk on his face. He sighed and lit another cigarette. Staring out a window in the slanted ceiling, he saw the sky slide by. He thought about the chemist he went to for a prescription and how there was an apartment above it. The visual memory, a picture, struck him that this apartment was empty and undergoing construction. The obsession for a caper set in. For now, he would be consumed with working out a solution to the problem that was defining itself.
Louise was wearing blue scrub trousers and two white hospital gowns with tiny blue lillies. He was shaking with anxiety and brimming with rage because the arrogant nurse wouldn't give him lorazepam. The nurse, William, said that Louise already had some 4 hours ago at six AM. Louise was suffering. William was a nurse, not a doctor. In an idealistic sense, those who would swear by and honor Asclepius and that which he represents should be wont to alleviate pain and suffering. William had a mustache and ears that had grown callous to the pleas and petitions for drugs by patients on the psych ward. He did not have any allegiance to Apollo, but he had all of the superciliousness that someone emulating a doctor's erudition and the weight of a doctor's experience would have. William was an asshole, the kind of asshole that worries that people will take advantage of him if he isn't a selfish asshole.
Louise went back to his room on the psych ward. There was no art on the walls, nothing but an empty wardrobe and plastic covered bed with thin, cheap linens. The window was on the 4th floor and it most certainly didn't open. He could see where the wall had been patched up after patients had punched, kicked, or otherwise destroyed it. This was obviously a common voice for protest on the psych ward. Less common, but infinitely more profound a voice was coprography. Still more pointed an argument came naturally to Louise. In fact, few things had ever come to or felt more naturally than what he had for William. After pacing around in a tight circle until the pointlessness of it overwhelmed him, he half-squatted in the bathroom and defecated into his left hand.
Grinning a grin not because of the perversion he'd committed himself to but the great satisfaction he felt knowing that the contention he was about to make was irrefutable. He was walking down the hall of the psych ward with a winning argument in his hand. William would have to concede that medication isn't some sort of privilege for those who deserve it but a mechanism to treat suffering in those who need it. The fear that people will somehow feel good because of a chemical was old, tired, and the suffering that was left to fester because of this fear was much greater in sum than all of the destructive and unjust catastrophies cast on the reputation of chemicals used as drugs. In fact, the outlaw of narcotic chemicals had led to the abuse of much more savage ones like alcohol, and indirectly to more deaths and injuries physical, emotional, and spiritual of many people. The pervasive and misprescribed social substitution of booze in lieu of ancient communions like opium was a loss.
Only since about 1914 in the USA, with the Harrison Narcotics Act did Joseph's appetite for soul-soothing agents become conventionally immoral. Alcohol was briefly made immoral, but unlike narcotics that mistake was corrected shortly thereafter as society illustrated the absurdity. Interestingly, more deaths have occured from legal alcohol than from true narcotics in nearly any period in history. Still, the taboo and stigma of opiates has become fixed and petrified as a convenient culprit, an affectionate evil, a comfortable notion to pity, fear, hate, and absorb contempt.
Joseph was aware that both Galen and Hippocrates acknowledged the benefits of elixirs derived from papaverum somniferum. The Hippocratic Oath was probably not actually written by Hippocrates, but it seems worthy of note that medical men and women by tradition subscribe to a creed credited to a man who extolled the healing of the poppy flower. Being aware of this made no difference for him in a society where those seeking relief and comfort were regarded as sick at best and subhuman at worst. Joseph woke every morning suffering pain physically, and at 30 had only began to accept that this pain would not decrease as time passed.
He walked in front of the Burrows & Close chemist. There did not appear to be anyone living on the third floor, and the second floor apartment had no windows. Only the ground floor, the pharmacy, appeared to be occupied in the building which did not share any walls as the building which once laid adjacent and shared a wall was long gone save for the sidewalk windows of a retail shop. He entered the store and noticed magnetic sensors on the door and cameras in the northwest corner of the shop floor and behind the counter facing the counter from the pharmacy area. There was a shelf, like a bookshelf in a library, standing into the middle of the pharmacy area that divided the pharmacy into two long aisles. Smiling at the nice pharmacist, who would fill his script even if he had to pay her later because he was such a regular customer, he left and walked up the block to see the back of the building.
The back of the building was where the stairs to the upstairs apartment was. The contractors had made the apartment as secure as they could. Joseph realized that he would have to recon this setup after hours when they'd gone home to drink black label, read the Sun, and watch football while they ate their kebabs. He hoped, in his anti-hero villainous ways, that their kebabs were as tasty as his medication was. That was what he prayd: "God, I'm not asking for any special favors for me today. The good men who have made the effort to secure this building -- may you bless them and guide them, may they know love and calm, may their women love them and they their women, and may their kebabs taste as tasty to them as the dope is to me."
Joseph lit a cigarette and looked up at the grey sky as it misted down cool droplets at him. The double decker buses in England always made things feel surreal, like he was living in some magical old book. The complexity of that surreal feeling was that often he wished that he could get home, and he didn't know where 'home' was. At times, it felt like some sort of curse or the answer to a wish that he should have been more careful in making. This evening he had a purpose. If he concocted a sound plan, and executed it perfectly he wouldn't even need luck. The only fortune he would require was not to have very improbable misfortune, that no cosmic anomaly crop up that would throw a wrench in his sweet machine.
He went home and curled up under a blanket and dreamt of the cards with the contacts for a chip, ones for telephones, credit cards, parking meters. In waking, he had recently encountered these devices in the Netherlands and was certain that it was an omen that the US was lagging behind in technology that would ultimately doom the individual in society for the sake of (or the pretense of) security for the collective. The street interrupted his rest, with horns and diesel engines and alarms and voices. It was time for the men to eat their kebabs, time for television, time for the secure to rest. Out of bed and into his blackest pants he climbed. He brought along a crow bar.
Louise marched up to the nurse station door. The top half of the door was opened in, leaving the bottom half of the door to prevent the likes of Louise from invading the dispensing nurse and the precious pharmaceuticals. William shook his head and told Louise sternly, "I -told- you, you won't get any sedatives from me until 6 PM -tonight-. You're -here- because you abuse drugs, and I'm not letting you do it. Not on my watch!" Louise replied, "Are you sure? That's your stance? You'd rather that I suffer than give me a drug that I want that alleviates my suffering?" William interrupted, "Look, you're not suffering, you're just trying to get over on me, on the system." "I promise you, I -am- suffering. This conversation and your morality aren't making it any better." warned Louise. William asked, "You want an acetaminophen?" "Do I look like an acetaminophen will help? I'm shaking, sweating, and all of my muscles are contorted and grinding my bones." Louise demonstrated and issued this final point, "Mr. William, I am suffering from a physical anxiety that is causing my physical pain. Lorazepam alleviates the anxiety, the contortion, and the pain. I don't get high when I am given a therapeutic dose. I am merely relieved of the burden of pain. Is that wrong?"
William smirked. "You're a junkie. If you don't change your ways, you're going to die." he said. Louise looked down at the poop in his left hand then he looked up at William who was smirking smugly at Louise, content in his domination of a patient making an effort to get a drug on the patient's terms. It was William's house, not Louise's house. They had to learn, William was no sucker, he thought to himself. He knew their tricks, he knew they were sick and greedy and would do anything to get a fix, a high, to take drugs. Louise couldn't understand how it was a bad thing to take something that made anguish go away. Louise wondered why William controlled it like it was something that had to be earned by merit rather than by necessity, something that he didn't deserve? Louise watched William give up his smirky stare of pity and go back to looking at whatever he fancied on the internet. He saw the clean shaven jawline and he raised up his left hand. With a left-arm pitch, he flung the turd at William's head. It broke into two parts, one of which hit his ear and the other his neck. William wasn't immediately clear about what had hit him, but he was sure that Louise had thrown it. Before the stink hit him, he got up and walked towards Louise. On the way to the door, he reached into a drawer and uncapped a long syringe that was pre-loaded.
Joseph climbed up the scaffolding on the back of the building. He clinked the crowbar hanging from his belt on the metal bars of the scaffold. This made him fearful and he became completely still and quiet, using his black clothing to dissolve back into the night. He sang a song in his head of tragedy while he waited for the quiet of the night to soothe him back into confidence. The moon was barely there, a waxing crescent. He slid through the windowframe into the apartment. The floor was being redone, and as lucky as he could be he paced out to about where he imagined the counter of the pharmacy to be. He pried up the floorboards to find some wiring and boarding which drywall was mounted from inside the pharmacy. In spite of feeling how wrong the action was, he hammered out the drywall from below the floor of the apartment, opening up the ceiling of the pharmacy. He was practically inside the candy shop, and had been nearly perfectly quiet. Looking around with light from his mobile phone, he found a cord the contractor were using in lifting and lowering a large rubbish bin. He tied the cord to the middle of the crow bar and wedged the bar across the two strong supporting beams of the ceiling.
Lowering himself enough that he was comfortable dropping, he did so and found himself standing behind the counter of the pharmacy in the middle of the night. The metal grates were pulled down and locked over the windows, so he had little fear that he would be discovered. So, he began his catalogue of the bottles, throwing anything he liked into the backpack he had. He was disappointed in himself. He was disappointed that his successes had been relegated to this, that his appetites were so base and insistent, and that he as a man and as a monkey, could not survive without chemicals. Mostly he was disappointed that he would unlikely find this opportunity again, and furthermore he was all too aware that this fortune wouldn't last him half a year. It was just happening and he was lamenting its inevitable passing.
William opened the door and called for nurses to help him subdue Louise. When he touched the crap on his ear, saw the brownness on the floor and smelled the ultimate in disrespect, all of the condescending pity for Louise left his eyes. His lips puckered together in rage like some sort of pissed off anus and his motions became jerky and violent. Louise was just standing there, smiling, but William employed his Aikido training to crash Louise into the floor. Kneeling on Louise's head, he injected him with Lorazepam in the ass and as the other nurses arrived he increased and maintained pressure on Louise's head with his big asshole of a knee. Louise was no longer human to William. It wasn't on camera, but Louise wished that it had been. The words they exchanged would surely have been important to anyone reviewing the incident. Louise wanted desperately to wash his hand. They had no intention of prioritizing this need. As the high dose of lorazepam set in, he was strapped in 4 point restraints to a bed mounted to the floor.
Joseph filled his bag with all of the wonderous items he'd coveted for so long. He became sick with withdrawals from just being around so much chemicals. He went through some drawers and found a bag of syringes that looked like they would work. Considering all of the bottles he chose to be of similar function, he chose the smallest dose of hydromorphone. The decision he made was just to get himself comfortable enough to get up the rope and out. After a long time dependent on opiates, they have a fortifying effect on the user, they give the habitual user strength and energy, they settle the stomach and turn gravity down. As he fixed and the hydromorphone crossed the blood brain barrier and settled into his delta and mu receptors he began to feel normal and hopeful again.
He didn't feel any better about the caper though. He still felt that the whole cycle, the appetite, the need and the satiety of the panicky appetite was just more of the same world that he did not love. All too aware of the lie that was the sense of warmth and ease that washed through him as the hydromorphone did what it does, he was still bereft of meaning and hope. The drugs didn't work. They alleviated his physical pain to a degree. The cost for this was the pendulous oscillation between anxious exhaustion, sweaty weakness and soporific sanctuary, fuzzy clarity, and gritty points in between. What he hated most about his life was that he was a coward. None of his failures pained him more than his subservience to fear. An anger swirled through his brain, like the chemicals meant to grant him peace and ease.
Louise woke up with his scrub trousers wet and grim. He had pissed himself. Someone had cleaned his hand for the most part, but he was still irritated by the feeling under his fingernails. He hollered out for help. With no special hurry, a nurse came in. It was late at night. He asked the nurse what her name was. She calmly replied, "Andreea. Are you going to be nice? No more monkey business?" "Yes," Louise said, "Can I have my lorazepam now? It's after 6." "Absolutely." Andreea left returned with his sedative. This struck Louise as phenomenally bizarre. He'd been heavily sedated for who knew how many hours on the very chemical that he was denied -because- he had been denied and so threw feces in primitive protest. When he woke, and didn't need it, he was just pressing buttons on the off chance that his madness would be validated. He was in fact proven. Andreea handed him a towel and a fresh set of hospital scrubs and gowns. Louise went directly to the shower.
In the shower he washed himself from the top of his head down to his toes. In a way he was cleansing his conscience, trying to redeem his motives to himself and reclaim a constitution of sanity. He was ashamed. Not because he threw poop at an asshole with glaring self-righteousness but because he was reduced to living with circumstances where that action actually seemed appropriate to his addled mind. Where had he become lost? When had he lost his way? Medically, he would benefit from the chemicals, but he was unable to administer them to himself responsibly. He was a darwinian failure, and as he washed himself he was sure that he wasn't qualified to reproduce. It seemed sad and quiet but true that he should be responsible enough to let the bloodline of pain and suffering stop with him. When he began to consider the role of environment, culture, and custom in his plight he stopped. The mental acrobatics were a waste of everything, an internal dialogue that needed to be stifled. When he finished washing, he felt better.
Joseph sat on the floor of the pharmacy. He looked up at the ceiling. There were surely ways for him to build a platform in the room that would allow him to jump up and grab a supporting beam, but the cord hanging down was nothing but a precarious menace. Reclining on his elbows, he looked across the store at the door and the light from the street reaching through the small spaces in the rolled-down grates protecting the glass. He had plenty of time to work on his escape. They didn't open until 9am, so he imagined that he had until at least 7 before the sun came up and he'd have had to make his way out. Somehow he felt safe in here, like there was nothing he needed outside of this small space.
Truthfully, he wasn't safe in there and there wasn't much of anything that he actually needed in there. He needed much more, more than he had ever given and more than the world could ever give. There was an infinite array of reasons and culprits he could blame for his misery, his meaninglessness, his human condition. Still, he found that he could only hold himself responsible for his own and the suffering of those he loved most. He was capable of love. Where he came up short was in tolerating himself; loving himself was well beyond the realism of being a consideration. For so many times he'd declared a new course, and set the course and charted a better way, he'd more often than not abandoned the voyages before he began.
As he sat comfortably on the floor in the middle of an extended serious crime, having mainlined hydromorphone to quell his sickness, the levity of being began to console him. After all, part of his metaphysical affliction was that it all was a comedy as much as a tragedy. To find his way, he'd have to remember the comedy and make the ways he had been blessed to succeed with in earlier years and much better days as a younger man. Why be afraid; what was there to lose?
Louise breathed deeply and watched the television in the common room on the ward. They served snacks. White bread and little single servings of peanut butter and jelly were laid out for the patients to eat. He watched the television, but he couldn't bear to give any attention to what was -on- the television. In the morning, he'd surely have to speak with the doctor about the poop throwing, and he was certain that the antic was going to cost him more time, potentially much more time, in the custody of the mental health medical service. It was worth it. What had he learned, he asked himself. The lines for moral right & wrong were always going to be overextended. He fully respected the golden ethic of reciprocity. It seemed like the most perfect and simple and true law that man has ever learned, known, or written. He learned today though that there will always be others who will not tolerate your own needs, and your own comfort and well-being will be imposed upon, interfered with, stolen, or broken at times for any of a variety of irrelevant reasons.
In this case, throwing poop paid off in the short term but it was no great revelation that this was the exact -wrong- thing to do. The full consequences, the full price of this victory and this need being met would become clear tomorrow. It was useless to speculate what that cost may be, but he was sure that it would be more than he would have had to pay by just waiting 6 more hours for his medication, and speaking with the doctor tomorrow to resolve the problem. He definitely learned that games you may play just once can have gross repercussions and impact much more than the features of the game. His internal dialogue spun its wheels while he breathed a deep breath and said to himself, "I'm a man. Not a monkey."
Joseph wished that he was agile like a monkey. He had to figure out how to get out of this pharmacy that he had broken into. It amused him, his predicament. For so many years, he had envisioned the great cat burglary of a pharmacy. Now, when he'd realized that dream, he'd managed to trap himself in the greatest cache of drugs he'd ever seen. It was poetic how well he'd fucked himself. Far too many times he'd got himself off by observing how unique and clever he was. This time he was just a little too clever for his own good. When he came in through the ceiling, he was aware that he'd have to get out, but he had a cocksure feeling that he could just figure that out when it was time to. Having looked around the shop, he could only find flimsy cardboard boxes to stack, none of which would hold his weight. The only thing he could think to do as his anxiety rose and a panick set in was to IV more hydromorphone and take 4mg of alprazolam.
He fell asleep with his head on a stuffed animal. He had munched on a fruit & nut chocolate bar, and the half-eaten bar lay next to him. He heard the metal grate sliding up and he saw through narcotic eyes the early morning sun as it crept in through the glass windows. The chemist unlocked the front door. He looked up and smiled. She looked confused, not afraid, then he saw her lips contract and he could tell she understood what had happened. Without any grace at all, he hopped to his feet and made for the door. The chemist shouted, "I know who you are, Joseph!" She did. He saw her several times per week. She had his address. He was fucked. Turning around, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" She shook her head and picked up the phone, presumably to phone the police.
He said he was sorry and then went out the door. The same surreal buses, the double deckers were lined up at the bus stop. Hopping on the front one, he sat down without any destination in mind. The only thing he knew was that this had to stop. He would talk to a doctor. Maybe medicine could help. He prayed that whatever god's plan was, whatever the universe had in mind, that he would be able to honor it and that he be an instrument of god's will. He felt alone but not lonely. Somehow he knew the universe had a plan. The sun gave the bus an auspicious glow. That sunlight and how his eye took it in was all that he had.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
What it Feels Like to Break Your Tibula
When you wake up, you get ready for work. You put on a nicer, less comfortable pair of shoes, and you look at them. Then you grab another pair of black sneakers and bring them with you. You work from early in the morning until 1pm, it's rather uneventful. Then you drive back to the office and home. You start to park in a spot, and a man prevents you. He yells, "I'm waiting for someone!" This frustrates you, but you decide that it's probably just better to just park somewhere else. So you do. Then you collect the lunch, the bags, and the stuff and cross the street. You see that cars will be coming and in your nervousness jog across the street. Then you keep on jogging because it's raining. Five steps later you slip, attempt to catch yourself on a wet metal grate with slippery shoes and get no traction. You find yourself on the pavement, wet and in the rain. You hear a crack, and it hurts. You're unable to breathe, it's raining and you're on the ground. You pray that it's not broken, "god, please don't let my leg be broken".
You somehow collect yourself but when you attempt to put weight on it you know that it's broken. It's a challenge to hobble the rest of the block around the building and you're still praying that you don't hurt it worse.
You somehow collect yourself but when you attempt to put weight on it you know that it's broken. It's a challenge to hobble the rest of the block around the building and you're still praying that you don't hurt it worse.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
trepanning
The man said, "That's the way the Universe works." It was a good omen. The man spoke like Joshua. He spoke of accepting the little losses and a faith that life works its own way out. Joshua noted this well. The ideology was not novel to him, but he was very comforted that he encountered it outside of his own hamster wheel of a head.
Rebecca slept in her bed, her hair snaking a semicircle around her eye. He loved her. She was beautiful in so many ways. Today would be a good day, and he was glad to be alive. For whatever reason, life had dealt him a 50/50 hand. He'd play today. It looked good.
Hours before the sun lit the horizon, he arrived at the small, spartan headquarters for the banquet server staffing company. It was his first shift. When he walked in the door he felt his whiteness, like all the african eyes were responding as one would to a prominent skin disorder with averting, staring, making contact with other dark eyes, dancing eyebrows and creeping smirks. His reasoning quicky neutralized the fear, a rationale that they wouldn't have asked him to come work if they didn't want him to, further rationale that no one cared or should care, and still a still further case for the defense of his skin that it didn't matter and if it did it shouldn't.
With all of that early morning darkness, his body language became rigid, it became jerky. He was so aware of his stride, how his arms hung, how his eyes and their tell-tale brows tuned the focus of his insecurities, his lips and creeping warm smile that, so paralyzed with anxiety, just wouldn't bloom. His presence became uncomfortable. The awareness of all of this made it worse. Still, he spoke with a projected voice and made eye contact with whomever he was speaking to. The test of endurance came when he wasn't speaking to anyone, and he fell to feel like a pink elephant no one wanted to think about.
He was asked what size uniform shirt he wore. Somehow he was comfortable saying "small" even though he didn't like the fact that he had to wear the clothes for small chested men. In spite of self-appraisal that his greatest present growth was in learning to be small, it was a challenge to voice this to Miss Mystic in the presence of other black men. Wondering if anyone felt he was challenging their entitlement to work, he spent his psyche on quelling a chromatograph of defensiveness.
They asked him to drive and to follow Michael. After Miss Mystic finished photocopying his license and social security card that was made of paper as weakly constituted as his sense of self, he went out to the car and the intersection to wait for the blue van that Michael would clip down i-95 to Wilmington for the gig. He left the radio to Baron, but Baron chose not to bother with the suffrage. This evoked more neurotica, more suffering for Joshua. Around then, he fell into the mode of driving, with great concentration to safely follow the speeding, careening blue van down the dark highway where police cars gauging speed could make nice pickings of them. The hyperfocus was a relief from the racial anxiety, the insecurity, and the exhausting self awareness.
By the time they arrived at the client, Joshua was exhausted. He followed the rag-tag army into the building and stood around visibly uncomfortable waiting for a mission to start, something to rescue him by consuming the time left to steep in his anxiety. Nervous smirks and nearly constant repositioning behind men and women who seemed more at ease with the environment, the client's site, and comfortable in their own skin. He imagined he'd be more comfortable in their skin and he felt a silent nervous twitter that emitted and resounded in his innate encyclopedia of mendacity, bringing the ordeal closer to an end. His clothing was clean and sharp, the only flaw he felt was in the very unnoticeable white branding text on the tops of the tongues of his shoes. Even though he looked around at the escape of the floor and observed two other pairs of the same shoes, he was tolerably dissatisfied.
Without further ado, they took up the list of items to check off in setting up the immense banquet hall. Quickly he encountered the house-employed banquet servers taking turns making a point of correcting him one way, then the next in contradiction until he voiced his frustration to an approachable waitress and carried on with the best, most obvious compromises he could find. The clock began to pick up momentum and the service swayed into seating, pouring, and slinging plates. To his own pride, he wisely anticipated some questions the guests would conjure up, and asked the team captains for those resources before the guests even seated themselves. Things like tea, lemons, napkins, etc. can cripple a server during service if the waiter has to take the time to find them or find someone who knows where to find them.
The choreography for this lot of rag-tag jolly-roger varlets needed work. There was a sadness for him that such a crew were in parts and at times stifled when it came to working together. The same selfishness, contemptuousness, and arrogant sense of self so painfully out of scale that singed him when he watched television or encountered cavalier personalities in social life crept between and divided the mates as they handled the business. One of our number was asked to leave the client site, leave the building, and do so presently or greater problems than the exile itself and its inconvenience would follow. He was unable to rally behind this mate, because in truth the cur was out of order. The occluded message he saw was that these transgressions were ones that he himself had made, thus so much less tolerable. It was beautiful somehow, that what he could not accept for himself was understandable when he witnessed it as it clashed for another misadjusted personality.
As he worked, he identified his errors and corrected them. He observed banquet servers who moved with confidence and natural grace and purpose and emulated them, he saw that planning and experience in seeing what was to come next granted him this ease. Once he saw how something was convened upon to do, he quickly fell into sync and felt that comfort. In a way, it was a competition with himself. He thrived on competition, even when it consumed him and even when the way he thrived was not more than superficial and dismissive.
At the end of the service, a team leader came to Joshua and asked, "Are you working tomorrow, Saturday & Sunday?" "No, I don't thi..." "You are now. Can you?" "Not tomorrow if it's before 12, but this weekend absolutely."
It was a great compliment. In a way he was, as he had been called, "a machine". He -could- handle it. Even when he couldn't, he did. Most women and men have that characteristic. It's one of the beautiful ones, the trait that we just find a way. For someone that capitulated so often the minutae before beginning for the childish fear of fucking it up, Joshua managed very well when the pressure was on.
There were times when he cried because he could not solve a math problem. There were times when he cried because he could not meet his own expectations of surpassing expectations. There were times when he cried because he, for everything he tried, could not manage to live as a modern man. This small day set up a frame for yet another new way, a way to win. He loved Rebecca and the image if her with her hair curled around her heavy eyelid stayed with him. She deserved to sleep and sleep well. He had miles to go before he wept, and miles to go before he wept.
Rebecca slept in her bed, her hair snaking a semicircle around her eye. He loved her. She was beautiful in so many ways. Today would be a good day, and he was glad to be alive. For whatever reason, life had dealt him a 50/50 hand. He'd play today. It looked good.
Hours before the sun lit the horizon, he arrived at the small, spartan headquarters for the banquet server staffing company. It was his first shift. When he walked in the door he felt his whiteness, like all the african eyes were responding as one would to a prominent skin disorder with averting, staring, making contact with other dark eyes, dancing eyebrows and creeping smirks. His reasoning quicky neutralized the fear, a rationale that they wouldn't have asked him to come work if they didn't want him to, further rationale that no one cared or should care, and still a still further case for the defense of his skin that it didn't matter and if it did it shouldn't.
With all of that early morning darkness, his body language became rigid, it became jerky. He was so aware of his stride, how his arms hung, how his eyes and their tell-tale brows tuned the focus of his insecurities, his lips and creeping warm smile that, so paralyzed with anxiety, just wouldn't bloom. His presence became uncomfortable. The awareness of all of this made it worse. Still, he spoke with a projected voice and made eye contact with whomever he was speaking to. The test of endurance came when he wasn't speaking to anyone, and he fell to feel like a pink elephant no one wanted to think about.
He was asked what size uniform shirt he wore. Somehow he was comfortable saying "small" even though he didn't like the fact that he had to wear the clothes for small chested men. In spite of self-appraisal that his greatest present growth was in learning to be small, it was a challenge to voice this to Miss Mystic in the presence of other black men. Wondering if anyone felt he was challenging their entitlement to work, he spent his psyche on quelling a chromatograph of defensiveness.
They asked him to drive and to follow Michael. After Miss Mystic finished photocopying his license and social security card that was made of paper as weakly constituted as his sense of self, he went out to the car and the intersection to wait for the blue van that Michael would clip down i-95 to Wilmington for the gig. He left the radio to Baron, but Baron chose not to bother with the suffrage. This evoked more neurotica, more suffering for Joshua. Around then, he fell into the mode of driving, with great concentration to safely follow the speeding, careening blue van down the dark highway where police cars gauging speed could make nice pickings of them. The hyperfocus was a relief from the racial anxiety, the insecurity, and the exhausting self awareness.
By the time they arrived at the client, Joshua was exhausted. He followed the rag-tag army into the building and stood around visibly uncomfortable waiting for a mission to start, something to rescue him by consuming the time left to steep in his anxiety. Nervous smirks and nearly constant repositioning behind men and women who seemed more at ease with the environment, the client's site, and comfortable in their own skin. He imagined he'd be more comfortable in their skin and he felt a silent nervous twitter that emitted and resounded in his innate encyclopedia of mendacity, bringing the ordeal closer to an end. His clothing was clean and sharp, the only flaw he felt was in the very unnoticeable white branding text on the tops of the tongues of his shoes. Even though he looked around at the escape of the floor and observed two other pairs of the same shoes, he was tolerably dissatisfied.
Without further ado, they took up the list of items to check off in setting up the immense banquet hall. Quickly he encountered the house-employed banquet servers taking turns making a point of correcting him one way, then the next in contradiction until he voiced his frustration to an approachable waitress and carried on with the best, most obvious compromises he could find. The clock began to pick up momentum and the service swayed into seating, pouring, and slinging plates. To his own pride, he wisely anticipated some questions the guests would conjure up, and asked the team captains for those resources before the guests even seated themselves. Things like tea, lemons, napkins, etc. can cripple a server during service if the waiter has to take the time to find them or find someone who knows where to find them.
The choreography for this lot of rag-tag jolly-roger varlets needed work. There was a sadness for him that such a crew were in parts and at times stifled when it came to working together. The same selfishness, contemptuousness, and arrogant sense of self so painfully out of scale that singed him when he watched television or encountered cavalier personalities in social life crept between and divided the mates as they handled the business. One of our number was asked to leave the client site, leave the building, and do so presently or greater problems than the exile itself and its inconvenience would follow. He was unable to rally behind this mate, because in truth the cur was out of order. The occluded message he saw was that these transgressions were ones that he himself had made, thus so much less tolerable. It was beautiful somehow, that what he could not accept for himself was understandable when he witnessed it as it clashed for another misadjusted personality.
As he worked, he identified his errors and corrected them. He observed banquet servers who moved with confidence and natural grace and purpose and emulated them, he saw that planning and experience in seeing what was to come next granted him this ease. Once he saw how something was convened upon to do, he quickly fell into sync and felt that comfort. In a way, it was a competition with himself. He thrived on competition, even when it consumed him and even when the way he thrived was not more than superficial and dismissive.
At the end of the service, a team leader came to Joshua and asked, "Are you working tomorrow, Saturday & Sunday?" "No, I don't thi..." "You are now. Can you?" "Not tomorrow if it's before 12, but this weekend absolutely."
It was a great compliment. In a way he was, as he had been called, "a machine". He -could- handle it. Even when he couldn't, he did. Most women and men have that characteristic. It's one of the beautiful ones, the trait that we just find a way. For someone that capitulated so often the minutae before beginning for the childish fear of fucking it up, Joshua managed very well when the pressure was on.
There were times when he cried because he could not solve a math problem. There were times when he cried because he could not meet his own expectations of surpassing expectations. There were times when he cried because he, for everything he tried, could not manage to live as a modern man. This small day set up a frame for yet another new way, a way to win. He loved Rebecca and the image if her with her hair curled around her heavy eyelid stayed with him. She deserved to sleep and sleep well. He had miles to go before he wept, and miles to go before he wept.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
To Be So Fortunate
Melvin was wrought with anxiety. He sat in the group on the edge of the patio and looked up at the flashing apocalyptic thunderstorm. The stalls of rain, backlit an electric grey, ordered their way to the horizon where the setting sun was calling a close to travels. Expecting to have left already, he had packed all of his clothes in perfect arrangement in his suitcase, leaving no room for waste or disorder. The others on the patio, his family of youths, were all better positioned so they would not be struck by lightning. They had congregated like a litter of puppies in the corner. Carl, Davina, Mario, Isaiah, Gideon, little Embily, Elizabeth, and Gerald were all smiling nervously, and all touching each other with one part or another. The parents, uncles Mike, Franklin, and Francis and the childrens' mothers Helen, Louise, and Andreea all sat calmly in a ring concentric to the corner, facing out and allowing their arms to hang comfortably over their chair arms.
He had been tricked, Melvin. In Harlem, he had an apartment where even now the roaches were surely conspiring to take it over as he sat helplessly in the bouncing rain in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was his impression that he'd be back on his way to the city after lunch with his distant cousin Elizabeth. She was an uppity bitch. When they met, she had come in from some friend's living in Philadelphia, and was on the phone with a friend explaining that she'd try to get out of going back to NYC today and make it down to DC to get together. Melvin listened in and tried to find ways that he didn't understand the conversation and it wasn't his business, that the transgression of his nosiness did nothing but cultivate frustration and should be dismissed until she presented her new agenda and it became an issue for him. Just listening, he thought, he hadn't encountered any issue, it was only his ears and mind attacking him.
When the rain began, the families unpacked their rain clothes. All of them seemed to have come prepared for this storm, bringing galoshes, plastic raincoats, brimmed hats and extra pants to change into when it was over. Somehow this thunderstorm had made its way through the roof and second floor, and there was no sanctuary anywhere in the house. Melvin's suitcase was getting wet. They spoke of "the one who would be hit by lightning" like it was an expected seasonal event. Little frogs in the springtime, lightning bugs, nighttime cicadas, the baseball season and "the one who would be hit by lightning". They didn't look at him when they had been speaking about it over the weekend. Their disregard wasn't just natural disinterest, it was a sympathetic method of not informing Melvin, like they all knew or believed they were safe because Melvin was going to be struck, not them.
He could reason that this made no sense, but his heart knew better. For whatever he owed to the universe, he would be settling that debt shortly. The strikes of lightning got closer and closer. The storm got louder. It became evident that Melvin would, in fact, be struck by lightning. Perhaps that was why the other youngsters had left him out by the corner of the patio, exposed like some sacrifice to the fates.
He had been tricked, Melvin. In Harlem, he had an apartment where even now the roaches were surely conspiring to take it over as he sat helplessly in the bouncing rain in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was his impression that he'd be back on his way to the city after lunch with his distant cousin Elizabeth. She was an uppity bitch. When they met, she had come in from some friend's living in Philadelphia, and was on the phone with a friend explaining that she'd try to get out of going back to NYC today and make it down to DC to get together. Melvin listened in and tried to find ways that he didn't understand the conversation and it wasn't his business, that the transgression of his nosiness did nothing but cultivate frustration and should be dismissed until she presented her new agenda and it became an issue for him. Just listening, he thought, he hadn't encountered any issue, it was only his ears and mind attacking him.
When the rain began, the families unpacked their rain clothes. All of them seemed to have come prepared for this storm, bringing galoshes, plastic raincoats, brimmed hats and extra pants to change into when it was over. Somehow this thunderstorm had made its way through the roof and second floor, and there was no sanctuary anywhere in the house. Melvin's suitcase was getting wet. They spoke of "the one who would be hit by lightning" like it was an expected seasonal event. Little frogs in the springtime, lightning bugs, nighttime cicadas, the baseball season and "the one who would be hit by lightning". They didn't look at him when they had been speaking about it over the weekend. Their disregard wasn't just natural disinterest, it was a sympathetic method of not informing Melvin, like they all knew or believed they were safe because Melvin was going to be struck, not them.
He could reason that this made no sense, but his heart knew better. For whatever he owed to the universe, he would be settling that debt shortly. The strikes of lightning got closer and closer. The storm got louder. It became evident that Melvin would, in fact, be struck by lightning. Perhaps that was why the other youngsters had left him out by the corner of the patio, exposed like some sacrifice to the fates.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Somn Usor
The quilt had a pattern that made its orientation on the bed so conspicuous that Oscar was compelled to adjust and readjust it every time he looked at it. There was a file of geometric deer, beige and contrasted by a muted, almost sealike green. There was no sky for the deer, but they were separated into strata by aquamarine banners as wide as the little deer. It made for a calm magic, the Cherokee quilt that Oscar flew through his dreams under.
The ceiling was slanted, as the second floor was once an attic. Roy had built and finished the second floor of his one story house in the 1970s. There were windows on each side of the long room, one facing the front of the house and the other looking out over the back. He had painted the eaves a light green, the color of the fields the deer coolly graced through on Oscar's quilt. The steps to the front of the house were also painted a rubbery blue grey. Roy painted his fence a bright silver, and the long separate garage in the back was painted to match the house. He cooked his steaks with tender loving care on a small cast iron hibachi grill. The cucumbers and tomatoes that grew up the fence made a humble, clean salad. The trees smiled down on the whole affair, and Oscar smiled up.
Polly, Roy's wife, spread her fingers out over the formica and looked out the double windows over her sink at Roy in his slacks and white undershirt at the hibachi. She loved him. His sense of humor was perpetually antagonistic, but his smile made his barbed affection warm and kind. He loved her. For all the world had cheated them, they stayed fast.
He had escaped death underground as a coal miner, and she had escaped with him from a mountain hell where the ladies were bent on gossipy judgement of each other in an infinite cycle of hypocritical tsks. They loved each other, and their love was carried through sighs and eyebrows and morning coffee and evening television. Roy called television the "boob tube". Oscar liked to watch Knight Rider. Oscar would look at Roy watching television, then look at Polly watching television and catch her stopping to look at Roy. Then she would acknowledge Oscar and purse her lips in some unconscious expression of maternal generosity.
It was Halloween. Polly was full of tales about razorblades and LSD in candy, and insisted that Oscar not cheat and take any pieces before he got home. Oscar was worried and tried to make her sure that she knew he wouldn't. She took a valium and stood by the storm door and waited for the neighborhood kids to come by with their costumes and contorted faces and spastic antics. Roy sat on the sofa and used the box with 14 buttons and a mode switch to control the channels on his boob tube. Polly had a way of talking to Roy with soft, almost silent words issued when facing away from him that he could hear, like vibrations through the air weren't necessary for them. They spoke a different way. He grinned a grin and pulled his chin down to mute his laugh.
Oscar was Coca-Cola. His arms were dressed in thermal underwear and they stuck through holes in the top of the Coke can he wavered about in. The large cardboard costume was painted perfect red and the cursive script in painted white read "Coca-Cola ®" down the can. He loved Coca-Cola like grown-ups love coffee. Oscar's father was like his brother in some ways. Roy & Polly took care of him, and his father was subject to the same approval and disapproval that he was, though it was certain that he was a better boy than his father. Dad was taking him out for trick or treating, and he insisted that the best approach was to walk out and then work their way back to the house. Oscar loved walking through the neighborhood with his dad. It was even night, but they were allowed.
The first house was on the uphill side of the street. It was simple and unconfrontational and Oscar felt eased as he climbed up the three stairs and knocked on the door. A young wife opened the door and asked Oscar what he was. "Coke!" he said, and then held his pillowcase up. Oscar didn't pay attention to what she placed in his bag, he just gave her an excited "Thanks lady!" and hopped down the steps. His dad was smiling. They carried on through the neighborhood and Oscar explained what his costume was and the wives gave him candy. Soon, his dad said they were finished and they made their way down the last street to the house.
The lights were on and he could see Polly's silhouette in the storm door. She tilted her head back and Roy leaned forward from the sofa to look out past her at Oscar and Charles. Oscar could see him look back up at his wife and then lean back. His dad opened the gate and he ran up the walk with his swinging bag of candy. Polly opened the door and said, "Look what the cat dragged in!" He looked up at his grandmother with a big smile and opened his bag so she could see all the colors. She asked him if he had eaten any. "Nope, but I gave one to Dad! He said you wouldn't mind." Then she followed him to the kichen table, where he emptied the candy onto the top and she began to inspect each piece. When she gave them the pieces, he put them in separate piles by candy and counted them. 11 Reese's peanut butter cups, 8 Jolly Rancher sticks, 14 Butterfingers, 18 Snickers, 4 Mary Janes, and so on. She let him eat a peanut butter cup. Then it was time for him to get ready for bed she said.
Oscar loved to go to sleep like most kids don't. She made him brush his teeth, but she was less bossy about how he should do it than his other grandmother who he also loved but in a different way. They were both pretty and they were both nice but Polly was -his- grandmother. He changed into his pajamas. She washed his face, something he never liked because the cloth was all scratchy but afterwards the dry towel made it all feel nice. He could feel the water evaporate and a cool sleepiness start to settle in. He told Roy goodnight and that he loved him from the hallway and padded upstairs to the attic bedroom. On the way up the stairs he liked to try to fart at his grandmother who was walking behind him. When he did this, he made like he was being propelled with great velocity up the stairs. One time he was trying to fart so hard he accidentally pooped right into his pants. That night wasn't funny.
The backyard was brightly lit with a great halogen light, and it reflected brightly off of the white ceiling. There was a cardboard with St. Pauli Girl on the wall from when his uncle slept here. She seemed really pretty, like Polly. Oscar was afraid he'd see a ghost, but when he prayed he felt better. So Polly asked him if he was alright, if he needed a glass of water. He was fine and wasn't thirsty. Then he prayed that there wouldn't be any ghosts. His father said that once he woke up in this house and there was a ghost, so he bit the ghost's hand and the ghost slapped the shit out of him. The ghost was of Oscar's great grandfather, Poppy. Oscar played a movie of the day through his head, he thought of St. Pauli girl and he thought of multiplying numbers. Then he was aleep.
Polly was sleepy. She took another valium. Roy finished smoking a cigarette, stubbed it out and then took the ashtray into the kitchen. They took turns in the bathroom, Polly first and then Roy, and then got into their bed. On the dresser a large mirror reflected the bright light onto a wall. Roy watched as the timer cut it off at 11:30. Then he unwrapped his arm from Polly and rolled over onto his back. He was glad the day was through. Polly slept like a baby, like Oscar, and the valium kept her breath slow and silent.
Charles sat up in his bed in the unfinished basement. He wrote a letter to a friend. She was one of many people he'd been unable to show love for, where circumstance had prevented him from giving. He writhed around periodically, his back a stiff and and twisted braid of knots, then recomposed himself and wrote out another sentence. At the end of the letter, he signed "Love, Charlie" and folded the pages into uneven thirds. He laid back onto his bed and slowly fell asleep on his side with a pillow between his knees, still in his clothes, with the light on.
The ceiling was slanted, as the second floor was once an attic. Roy had built and finished the second floor of his one story house in the 1970s. There were windows on each side of the long room, one facing the front of the house and the other looking out over the back. He had painted the eaves a light green, the color of the fields the deer coolly graced through on Oscar's quilt. The steps to the front of the house were also painted a rubbery blue grey. Roy painted his fence a bright silver, and the long separate garage in the back was painted to match the house. He cooked his steaks with tender loving care on a small cast iron hibachi grill. The cucumbers and tomatoes that grew up the fence made a humble, clean salad. The trees smiled down on the whole affair, and Oscar smiled up.
Polly, Roy's wife, spread her fingers out over the formica and looked out the double windows over her sink at Roy in his slacks and white undershirt at the hibachi. She loved him. His sense of humor was perpetually antagonistic, but his smile made his barbed affection warm and kind. He loved her. For all the world had cheated them, they stayed fast.
He had escaped death underground as a coal miner, and she had escaped with him from a mountain hell where the ladies were bent on gossipy judgement of each other in an infinite cycle of hypocritical tsks. They loved each other, and their love was carried through sighs and eyebrows and morning coffee and evening television. Roy called television the "boob tube". Oscar liked to watch Knight Rider. Oscar would look at Roy watching television, then look at Polly watching television and catch her stopping to look at Roy. Then she would acknowledge Oscar and purse her lips in some unconscious expression of maternal generosity.
It was Halloween. Polly was full of tales about razorblades and LSD in candy, and insisted that Oscar not cheat and take any pieces before he got home. Oscar was worried and tried to make her sure that she knew he wouldn't. She took a valium and stood by the storm door and waited for the neighborhood kids to come by with their costumes and contorted faces and spastic antics. Roy sat on the sofa and used the box with 14 buttons and a mode switch to control the channels on his boob tube. Polly had a way of talking to Roy with soft, almost silent words issued when facing away from him that he could hear, like vibrations through the air weren't necessary for them. They spoke a different way. He grinned a grin and pulled his chin down to mute his laugh.
Oscar was Coca-Cola. His arms were dressed in thermal underwear and they stuck through holes in the top of the Coke can he wavered about in. The large cardboard costume was painted perfect red and the cursive script in painted white read "Coca-Cola ®" down the can. He loved Coca-Cola like grown-ups love coffee. Oscar's father was like his brother in some ways. Roy & Polly took care of him, and his father was subject to the same approval and disapproval that he was, though it was certain that he was a better boy than his father. Dad was taking him out for trick or treating, and he insisted that the best approach was to walk out and then work their way back to the house. Oscar loved walking through the neighborhood with his dad. It was even night, but they were allowed.
The first house was on the uphill side of the street. It was simple and unconfrontational and Oscar felt eased as he climbed up the three stairs and knocked on the door. A young wife opened the door and asked Oscar what he was. "Coke!" he said, and then held his pillowcase up. Oscar didn't pay attention to what she placed in his bag, he just gave her an excited "Thanks lady!" and hopped down the steps. His dad was smiling. They carried on through the neighborhood and Oscar explained what his costume was and the wives gave him candy. Soon, his dad said they were finished and they made their way down the last street to the house.
The lights were on and he could see Polly's silhouette in the storm door. She tilted her head back and Roy leaned forward from the sofa to look out past her at Oscar and Charles. Oscar could see him look back up at his wife and then lean back. His dad opened the gate and he ran up the walk with his swinging bag of candy. Polly opened the door and said, "Look what the cat dragged in!" He looked up at his grandmother with a big smile and opened his bag so she could see all the colors. She asked him if he had eaten any. "Nope, but I gave one to Dad! He said you wouldn't mind." Then she followed him to the kichen table, where he emptied the candy onto the top and she began to inspect each piece. When she gave them the pieces, he put them in separate piles by candy and counted them. 11 Reese's peanut butter cups, 8 Jolly Rancher sticks, 14 Butterfingers, 18 Snickers, 4 Mary Janes, and so on. She let him eat a peanut butter cup. Then it was time for him to get ready for bed she said.
Oscar loved to go to sleep like most kids don't. She made him brush his teeth, but she was less bossy about how he should do it than his other grandmother who he also loved but in a different way. They were both pretty and they were both nice but Polly was -his- grandmother. He changed into his pajamas. She washed his face, something he never liked because the cloth was all scratchy but afterwards the dry towel made it all feel nice. He could feel the water evaporate and a cool sleepiness start to settle in. He told Roy goodnight and that he loved him from the hallway and padded upstairs to the attic bedroom. On the way up the stairs he liked to try to fart at his grandmother who was walking behind him. When he did this, he made like he was being propelled with great velocity up the stairs. One time he was trying to fart so hard he accidentally pooped right into his pants. That night wasn't funny.
The backyard was brightly lit with a great halogen light, and it reflected brightly off of the white ceiling. There was a cardboard with St. Pauli Girl on the wall from when his uncle slept here. She seemed really pretty, like Polly. Oscar was afraid he'd see a ghost, but when he prayed he felt better. So Polly asked him if he was alright, if he needed a glass of water. He was fine and wasn't thirsty. Then he prayed that there wouldn't be any ghosts. His father said that once he woke up in this house and there was a ghost, so he bit the ghost's hand and the ghost slapped the shit out of him. The ghost was of Oscar's great grandfather, Poppy. Oscar played a movie of the day through his head, he thought of St. Pauli girl and he thought of multiplying numbers. Then he was aleep.
Polly was sleepy. She took another valium. Roy finished smoking a cigarette, stubbed it out and then took the ashtray into the kitchen. They took turns in the bathroom, Polly first and then Roy, and then got into their bed. On the dresser a large mirror reflected the bright light onto a wall. Roy watched as the timer cut it off at 11:30. Then he unwrapped his arm from Polly and rolled over onto his back. He was glad the day was through. Polly slept like a baby, like Oscar, and the valium kept her breath slow and silent.
Charles sat up in his bed in the unfinished basement. He wrote a letter to a friend. She was one of many people he'd been unable to show love for, where circumstance had prevented him from giving. He writhed around periodically, his back a stiff and and twisted braid of knots, then recomposed himself and wrote out another sentence. At the end of the letter, he signed "Love, Charlie" and folded the pages into uneven thirds. He laid back onto his bed and slowly fell asleep on his side with a pillow between his knees, still in his clothes, with the light on.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
A hill of beans
When the sky lays so heavy on this dark, northeastern city I am drained of hope. My eyes take on weight, and the eyelids are unable to comfort them. Men vary in their ability to virtuously accept and practice what is suggested to them, ideas and approaches alien to them and even contrary to their hearts. The great challenge for me is to take what I know is right and stand by it against all of the rationale or notions others may present. When you're right, you are right. If it's about you, your perspective may be muddled by your psyche and it's possible to have the mental battle forever, but when your heart tells you over and over there comes a point when it's time to listen. The road to perdition is paved with good intentions and clean, crisp, holy ideals. My strength is not in following that road.
I'm not smarter than everyone, I don't know more than many people. After an encyclopedia of evidences that somehow I'm different... not better, not stronger, not wiser but different than a lot of people a new approach is warranted. I can talk to someone forever, I can give them all of the essential elements to come to my conclusion, I can parrot out the standard issue arguments but ultimately I have to make my own decisions and stand by them. So many times I have gotten lost by following other mens' directions that it feels like it makes no difference if I choose or not. So I will choose, and I will choose what I feel to be the wisest.
If you don't agree, I am ok with that. After all, it's my adventure. The universe has never abandoned me.
I'm not smarter than everyone, I don't know more than many people. After an encyclopedia of evidences that somehow I'm different... not better, not stronger, not wiser but different than a lot of people a new approach is warranted. I can talk to someone forever, I can give them all of the essential elements to come to my conclusion, I can parrot out the standard issue arguments but ultimately I have to make my own decisions and stand by them. So many times I have gotten lost by following other mens' directions that it feels like it makes no difference if I choose or not. So I will choose, and I will choose what I feel to be the wisest.
If you don't agree, I am ok with that. After all, it's my adventure. The universe has never abandoned me.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Pretense and Paradox
The weather was academic. It reminded Jesus of Argentine winters, growing old, oblique light and compromised dreams. The years he would have spent between rooms at University and libraries, young lovers and Camel lights were instead spent in New York City. When he woke up in NYC he could feel the city hum. Being so small would have frightened him, but instead he was prodded into action. The great metallic city became organic and warm; it was kind to him.
Now, ten years later he looked in the mirror and resigned the ambition that one day he would look old enough to take seriously. In truth, it wasn't the way he looked that made his antics so dismissable, but his awareness -- nearly an obsession -- of how he was regarded physically was a comfortable culprit for what was wrong with him. There was less ownership. Even still, the malt liquor had surely stunted his growth, and he had a narcotic youth about him. In a different life he may have been closer to six feet tall.
Titus Andronicus was but a name for him. He could tell you that it was thought to be possibly Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, but no more than this. A beautiful girl had informed Jesus that he had done a lot of things in his life, but had not truly lived much. As an example, he had never read the play. A dilettante, Jesus was superficial and teased himself with art, culture, history, and language, never consummating any love for one study, never building a foundation on erudition and never raising a cathedral honoring the more divine works a human can invest one's life, mind, and heart in. He had spent his youth on the doorsteps of such edifices, only speculating on the meanings of the architecture and art of life.
For whatever reason, against whatever odds, he was still alive at 30. This was unexpected. Now his bones complained that the stone was cold and hard, and his psyche was less airy and flexible. His heart felt glassy and brittle, and he imagined it like some piece of art, clear glass and mechanical valves, sliding shells and red, red, red through perfect wet transparence. He didn't care to romanticize the other organs, and the idea of his lungs cast a shadow of fear into him like the mention of the most savage ghetto in the biggest city.
When he was young, in the fourth grade, he vomited the day he slowly realized that his own body, the one he was living in, had veins and intestines, a liver, bile, lungs, kidneys and everything that was in the diagram on a poster next to the chalkboard. It felt like he was being made to eat it all, that each organ had to be chewed and swallowed and in his body became covered in blood and veins; this long, protracted, psychic meal was the gory death in life. He still had to look away from the the television when there was any opened body, and he was 30. The nausea hadn't helped.
Now Jesus was made to move his arms and legs, his neck and head and back and chest against gravity's will. A wiser man once told him, "Save some of your rebellion for later, when you need it." The cool, grey air moved Jesus to consider capitulating some of his defiance, to try to play by the rules and find beauty and comfort in pedestrian progress. After all, he was sure he would still be able to conjure up the miracles he needed when the tides were right. There were a fine register of battles to fight without having to resort to fight himself. Another symbolic idea that followed this train of thought was his experience playing chess with himself. He always lost, because he always fell short of playing a perfect game on both sides.
Now, ten years later he looked in the mirror and resigned the ambition that one day he would look old enough to take seriously. In truth, it wasn't the way he looked that made his antics so dismissable, but his awareness -- nearly an obsession -- of how he was regarded physically was a comfortable culprit for what was wrong with him. There was less ownership. Even still, the malt liquor had surely stunted his growth, and he had a narcotic youth about him. In a different life he may have been closer to six feet tall.
Titus Andronicus was but a name for him. He could tell you that it was thought to be possibly Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, but no more than this. A beautiful girl had informed Jesus that he had done a lot of things in his life, but had not truly lived much. As an example, he had never read the play. A dilettante, Jesus was superficial and teased himself with art, culture, history, and language, never consummating any love for one study, never building a foundation on erudition and never raising a cathedral honoring the more divine works a human can invest one's life, mind, and heart in. He had spent his youth on the doorsteps of such edifices, only speculating on the meanings of the architecture and art of life.
For whatever reason, against whatever odds, he was still alive at 30. This was unexpected. Now his bones complained that the stone was cold and hard, and his psyche was less airy and flexible. His heart felt glassy and brittle, and he imagined it like some piece of art, clear glass and mechanical valves, sliding shells and red, red, red through perfect wet transparence. He didn't care to romanticize the other organs, and the idea of his lungs cast a shadow of fear into him like the mention of the most savage ghetto in the biggest city.
When he was young, in the fourth grade, he vomited the day he slowly realized that his own body, the one he was living in, had veins and intestines, a liver, bile, lungs, kidneys and everything that was in the diagram on a poster next to the chalkboard. It felt like he was being made to eat it all, that each organ had to be chewed and swallowed and in his body became covered in blood and veins; this long, protracted, psychic meal was the gory death in life. He still had to look away from the the television when there was any opened body, and he was 30. The nausea hadn't helped.
Now Jesus was made to move his arms and legs, his neck and head and back and chest against gravity's will. A wiser man once told him, "Save some of your rebellion for later, when you need it." The cool, grey air moved Jesus to consider capitulating some of his defiance, to try to play by the rules and find beauty and comfort in pedestrian progress. After all, he was sure he would still be able to conjure up the miracles he needed when the tides were right. There were a fine register of battles to fight without having to resort to fight himself. Another symbolic idea that followed this train of thought was his experience playing chess with himself. He always lost, because he always fell short of playing a perfect game on both sides.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Hyperion
The prime experience is birth. Then, the next shift in consciousness is sleep. Whether infants' argillaceous brains mesmerize them, grant them a trance as passage through the great conduit of beauty and hope that their mothers are or in different terms they are souls endowed with the reflective consciousness we all learn to carry with us I do not know. It seems that the next common event where the psyche shifts is sleep. The measurable and indicated change in brain state must be a sole souvenir of the young person's experience, the only familiarity carried through the maternal love that bears the new adventurer into the world. Instinct and appetites, crying and growth, the efflorescence of the heart that is a purer mind meant to be endowed to any given soul are granted.
For the rest, we learn the game. Somnolence is the sanctuary of both the young and the old. I've heard that no one has ever died from a lack of sleep, but the life never lost has surely become unlivable. And more often than is considered, a man has killed another for sleep. Then a man, driven by desperation and fiendish madness, whether in war or in peace, would be charged to carry his laden conscience through sleep. There are no ways around it.
The alpha state before entering sleep is thought to be supportive of learning and memory. Humans have long been moved by the magical and symbolic experiences they share with themselves in their dreams. So valuable is sleep, like water, air, and light, that there is no earthen thing which I could not relinquish given an ultimatum between any imaginable treasure and to be able to sleep. When one sleeps well, one lives well and the days and nights assume their more vibrant and enriched textures, colors, lights, and sounds. The curse of ethereal days is lifted and gravity becomes more merciful and affectionate.
Love and death are so woven with sleep, with their pedestrian evocations and heavenly invocations, that they can be directly mated with the most innocent and warm-hearted fertilities of humilities. (sure: spectacular vernacular, amazing phrasing, goatherds words(coelho's alchemist)). What is meant is that Love can be sleepy and magical, all synchronicity and auspice when fine, painfully poetic and exhausting when mean. Similarly, Death is directly associated with a great sleep.
One great irony is the one Erik L-V observed: when your sheets are clean, and you are clean, and your bed is so nice you would gladly be its prey if such a predator it were, it's that one can actually resist drifting off to cool and quiet slumber so as not to miss out on the experience of beautiful and perfect comfort, as one exhales their burdens and begins to float lightly in the universe.
Human drama, purveyed for example by Shakespeare's Juliet and Chechen extremists in a theater in Moscow on October 23, 2002, in interests of forms of Love & Death, has established use of instruments to induce sleep. Both Juliet's romantic burden and the Chechen misadventures resulted in death. There is such a broad catalogue of characters and personalities of culture in the great soporific library of history that a list would be a work in its own. Theater is of no unique or articulately exemplary interest in focus or representation of the enormous symbolism of sleep and its arts & sciences, though the thespian superstition of sleeping with a script under one's pillow is a lovely cultural manifestation of the alpha brain state memory aggregation notion.
Whispers and traffic wake me. Dogs and sunlight call for me to come and fight. My own body rebels against my more divine psyche and leaves me reeling with pain, and the anticipation of seeing a dark ceiling causes me to hold my eyes tightly closed and shake and twist with panicked agony. The relief Juliet found was in a dagger. The Chechen brutes were made dead by the strongest variety of narcotic in gas form.
Cleanness and comfort, showering, and knowing that you are secure and sound are great rituals and accommodation necessary for rest of the restorative. Those moments before sleep are the best moments in one of this author's days, and those moments just after are some of the most challenging moments in this author's lifetime.
Somnus quiesco, my friends and enemies, somnus quiesco.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Love & Death
Listening in his head to "Homeward Bound", he considered that love and death are seemingly the most common and terrestrial of muses. Matters of profound mythical and magical significance, they're bandied about like so many pieces of candy on Halloween. Something powerful, bloody, and staged with smoke and mirrors contrasted with a frame of infinite compliment to the experience, love and death are somehow not antipodes in the globe of his mind. They are complimenting each other. One gives birth to hope and renewal, the other subtracts the divinity from the walking man. All his words and all of their boomeranging and gallivanting, this internal dialogue was also mounting an attack of mediocrity. Undermining himself, he too wished he were homeward bound.
The weather: The most satirical of symbols. Even it held some sort of meaning, some representation of the macrocosmos, the scale and scope so calm and cool and clear. The air which betrayed him, abandoned him to some barometric prison at times was taking a breath; it was resting and catching its wind, this air. The sunlight moved through it with a rain of illustrative depth and glinted in his lenses with a sound of pianos. His own psychotica sounded like the resonant and percussive melody that pianos prodouce, like his living was a very well timed and gently played rhythm, one hand meting out time and the other dancing around on it. This orchestra of light, this symphony of energy on all of small, large, and undefined scale and proportion reminded him of the square beliefs that some people espoused so vehemently. There was a magic in life, and it didn't seem to die. Most often, he didn't have to look for it, it found him when he wasn't hiding and left him with the impression that he wasn't very well hidden when hiding so.
Small victories held as much meaning and were of such laughable importance to him as the small defeats which could drain his very heart of blood, though that afternoon he would attest to a revelation that the victories somehow enveloped their defeats. The idea that one of a pair of opposites can not exist without its twin was not a new one, but the great and mystical roles of all that is good and all that is bad seemed to have the surety that they have been attributed for so long. In a way, he was finding the specie for hope of his own. When he read Keats' Hyperion that afternoon it moved him to tears. He was a crying bastard, Mr. Snachron. Mr. Snachron cried at the strangest things. Love and Death, he considered, precipitated so many tears. Yet they were as common as tariffs and as magical as the most epic of triumphs.
The weather: The most satirical of symbols. Even it held some sort of meaning, some representation of the macrocosmos, the scale and scope so calm and cool and clear. The air which betrayed him, abandoned him to some barometric prison at times was taking a breath; it was resting and catching its wind, this air. The sunlight moved through it with a rain of illustrative depth and glinted in his lenses with a sound of pianos. His own psychotica sounded like the resonant and percussive melody that pianos prodouce, like his living was a very well timed and gently played rhythm, one hand meting out time and the other dancing around on it. This orchestra of light, this symphony of energy on all of small, large, and undefined scale and proportion reminded him of the square beliefs that some people espoused so vehemently. There was a magic in life, and it didn't seem to die. Most often, he didn't have to look for it, it found him when he wasn't hiding and left him with the impression that he wasn't very well hidden when hiding so.
Small victories held as much meaning and were of such laughable importance to him as the small defeats which could drain his very heart of blood, though that afternoon he would attest to a revelation that the victories somehow enveloped their defeats. The idea that one of a pair of opposites can not exist without its twin was not a new one, but the great and mystical roles of all that is good and all that is bad seemed to have the surety that they have been attributed for so long. In a way, he was finding the specie for hope of his own. When he read Keats' Hyperion that afternoon it moved him to tears. He was a crying bastard, Mr. Snachron. Mr. Snachron cried at the strangest things. Love and Death, he considered, precipitated so many tears. Yet they were as common as tariffs and as magical as the most epic of triumphs.
Friday, August 15, 2008
The art of not dying.
First, you have to not care. If you want to stay alive, you may end up dead unawares. Second, you need to provoke it, like raising your fist at god on the mast of a swaying sea in the least gentle of storms. Finally, you will fail. Someday you will fail. This is the most important part of the art, the failing. If you learn to fail with perfection you may end up failing at the very moment you're supposed to die and live until, well, the next time. The difficulty you may find is in between those visits from machinery and reapers, in the moments you have to listen to a storm brew in a coffee cup with torrents and gales of caffeine and norepinephrine, with tides and swells of anxiety and serotonin all overwhelming and drowning and leaving you without enough air.
Still, you live. Through every memory, reliving every desperate moment and dark swirl in your teacup of a psyche. Hell is not other people, it is you without air, without peace or breath. You can clutch at your throat, you can blow your nose, and you can open the window but all you will find is city exhaust. The wings of pigeons will blow dirt into the uprise of exhaust, and you will choke on your uvula. And still, you will live.
The quietest part of the night will be too not quiet, and your asphyxiated sleep will be ravaged by dreams where you are one of the pigeons with no legs anymore that must fly with your exhausted fat belly, your pendulous corpse on tired and dirty wings that are broken and torn. You will choose to land in your dream on the river, to find respite in buoyant and iridescent oil but that water will weigh your wet feathers down until you wake up in panic, gasping for air in the tomb that is your room.
This is part of the art of not dying. It has nothing to do with vitamins.
Still, you live. Through every memory, reliving every desperate moment and dark swirl in your teacup of a psyche. Hell is not other people, it is you without air, without peace or breath. You can clutch at your throat, you can blow your nose, and you can open the window but all you will find is city exhaust. The wings of pigeons will blow dirt into the uprise of exhaust, and you will choke on your uvula. And still, you will live.
The quietest part of the night will be too not quiet, and your asphyxiated sleep will be ravaged by dreams where you are one of the pigeons with no legs anymore that must fly with your exhausted fat belly, your pendulous corpse on tired and dirty wings that are broken and torn. You will choose to land in your dream on the river, to find respite in buoyant and iridescent oil but that water will weigh your wet feathers down until you wake up in panic, gasping for air in the tomb that is your room.
This is part of the art of not dying. It has nothing to do with vitamins.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
My heart is an apple. There's a worm in the apple. A heartworm. The tell-tale heartworm.
Helen wanted to give her heart to someone or something, but she felt it was too deceitful to share. She'd be embarrassed should someone find out that the worm had finally turned for her, and turned right into her heart.
Of the 4 chambers, it made the upper right atrium a study & library, where it did all of its bookworming. In the upper left atrium, her worm, who was named Annalida, had her home-brewed supercomputer cluster, powered by the natural electric muscle pulses of her heart. The supercluster was named Hermes. She was writing a computer worm that used TCP traffic to store its intentions as memory. This computer worm was named Caduceus. The network she was was experimenting with was named Icarus. She loved the worm enamoured and encircled Caduceus with romantic Icarus wings. She also played a vintage video game called "Snafu" on her supercomputer cluster, which generated randomness for ever changing encryption keys she used to guard her most sleepy secrets.
The lower left ventricle was where Annalida did her epicurean business. She was nearly genocidal about trichina worms. They were the termites of her iron and ironic bloody world. Pork was not allowed in the kitchen. When Helen had bacon, Annalida nearly lost her mind trying to keep all of the bacon fat out of her house. It stuck to the walls and the doors with a grotesque slovenly desperation.
The lower right ventricle was where the magic happened. It was her symbolic opium den, where she scryed the past with her scrying glass. She was her own divining rod for hope. She lived in that midland between wake and sleep, and left her pulsing drumming home on a magical carpet of dreams. She was reading:
At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. — They were these:
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly —
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama! — oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude! [page 460:]
It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out — out are the lights — out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
And she felt life was something, in the face of death. Helen could never give her away.
Of the 4 chambers, it made the upper right atrium a study & library, where it did all of its bookworming. In the upper left atrium, her worm, who was named Annalida, had her home-brewed supercomputer cluster, powered by the natural electric muscle pulses of her heart. The supercluster was named Hermes. She was writing a computer worm that used TCP traffic to store its intentions as memory. This computer worm was named Caduceus. The network she was was experimenting with was named Icarus. She loved the worm enamoured and encircled Caduceus with romantic Icarus wings. She also played a vintage video game called "Snafu" on her supercomputer cluster, which generated randomness for ever changing encryption keys she used to guard her most sleepy secrets.
The lower left ventricle was where Annalida did her epicurean business. She was nearly genocidal about trichina worms. They were the termites of her iron and ironic bloody world. Pork was not allowed in the kitchen. When Helen had bacon, Annalida nearly lost her mind trying to keep all of the bacon fat out of her house. It stuck to the walls and the doors with a grotesque slovenly desperation.
The lower right ventricle was where the magic happened. It was her symbolic opium den, where she scryed the past with her scrying glass. She was her own divining rod for hope. She lived in that midland between wake and sleep, and left her pulsing drumming home on a magical carpet of dreams. She was reading:
At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. — They were these:
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly —
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama! — oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude! [page 460:]
It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out — out are the lights — out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
And she felt life was something, in the face of death. Helen could never give her away.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Garden Variety
He sat in front of a computer, having painted the staircase walls and ceiling and resting now that he had made a contribution to the house. Looking out the window to the east, he saw flowers, small red flowers in lines where the cauliflower or corn had grown and been harvested. The small red flowers reminded him of the Wizard of Oz poppies. He looked them up on the computer in front of him, and discovered them to be corn poppies. The sky was a heavy and grey one, an English sky weighing down on the fields and the horizon.
He went out and had a closer look at the flowers. Vladimir stood above them and tried to eat them, to see what they tasted like. They were caustic, bitter, and sour. Continuing on a walk, a longer walk through the quiet and ethereal country side, he passed tall purple flowers and their large globes of seeds, each one some magical wand of sleepy witchery, a cold and white green. They caught his eye. They were tall and beautiful. He felt, as usual, that he was somehow dead, wandering the earth as some ghost in search of rest. Peace only came in transient and fleeting nods.
Something told him to pick the tall witchwand flower stalks. They bled from the places where he broke them off. The long fibers oozed a sticky red blood, like they had human souls or they bled in sacrifice or lament of sadness itself. He chewed the woody fibers, and salivated the bloody pulp until he could swallow it. Vladimir felt like he was invested in some witchly ritual for peach. A spherical ritual of a three dimensional pentragram, and with each ancient mastication, some peace crept into his heart. The stark sky seemed to begin to let the sun through.
When he got back to the house, Vladimir broke the fibrous globes into smaller bits with a scissors and poured hot water over them like the oldest cup of tea. They bled the water red and brown, like the rusty sanguine peace the water now held. He let it steep until it was cold, then drank it with a cigarette that he rolled. In front of the computer named "trimagestus", the peace from his caduceus tea crept in to his heart. The documents he read on trimagestus showed the purple and white flowers to be setigerums. He was amazed, so he lit another cigarette.
A year later, he was smoking a cigarette talking to Paul. Paul spoke about a book that indicated that the flowers Vladimir was finding along the banks of the dikes were of ancestry from flower growing competitions of 100 years before. The book was about opium and the masses. Vladimir was mystified and amazed. He lit another cigarette. The smoke coiled up to the hermetic sky. He thanked the ancestors for their honesty.
He went out and had a closer look at the flowers. Vladimir stood above them and tried to eat them, to see what they tasted like. They were caustic, bitter, and sour. Continuing on a walk, a longer walk through the quiet and ethereal country side, he passed tall purple flowers and their large globes of seeds, each one some magical wand of sleepy witchery, a cold and white green. They caught his eye. They were tall and beautiful. He felt, as usual, that he was somehow dead, wandering the earth as some ghost in search of rest. Peace only came in transient and fleeting nods.
Something told him to pick the tall witchwand flower stalks. They bled from the places where he broke them off. The long fibers oozed a sticky red blood, like they had human souls or they bled in sacrifice or lament of sadness itself. He chewed the woody fibers, and salivated the bloody pulp until he could swallow it. Vladimir felt like he was invested in some witchly ritual for peach. A spherical ritual of a three dimensional pentragram, and with each ancient mastication, some peace crept into his heart. The stark sky seemed to begin to let the sun through.
When he got back to the house, Vladimir broke the fibrous globes into smaller bits with a scissors and poured hot water over them like the oldest cup of tea. They bled the water red and brown, like the rusty sanguine peace the water now held. He let it steep until it was cold, then drank it with a cigarette that he rolled. In front of the computer named "trimagestus", the peace from his caduceus tea crept in to his heart. The documents he read on trimagestus showed the purple and white flowers to be setigerums. He was amazed, so he lit another cigarette.
A year later, he was smoking a cigarette talking to Paul. Paul spoke about a book that indicated that the flowers Vladimir was finding along the banks of the dikes were of ancestry from flower growing competitions of 100 years before. The book was about opium and the masses. Vladimir was mystified and amazed. He lit another cigarette. The smoke coiled up to the hermetic sky. He thanked the ancestors for their honesty.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Suspicious
He laid down under the tower, and stared up at the dark blue, early light sky through its iron. This was as personal as he needed to get with the tower, under its arc, near its foot. It looked suspiciously sturdy. It was cold, but he was drunk and still had a liter of wine. His lips and teeth were the same red of a bulls mouth in tauromachy. He drank the wine like it was blood for him, like he was losing it through holes in his skin, like he needed it to stay alive. His own tongue felt like it should hang out of a mouth like a bull's that is being killed. The sun would be out soon with the Parisians. He was not good at dying.
He let the earth spin him into the sun, under this tower, this defiance, like he was hiding comfortably under it. Still on his back, he let the morning street cleaners come into earshot and then couldn't bear it. He had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn't matter anyway. He piled his skeleton up and walked. Marcel was sure he was already dead, that he was cast into a purgatory, heaven or hell that looked and behaved like the world he knew around him. The woman who squatted over a stream of urine that ran down the slope of the street he lived off of was a sentinel, a psychopomp. With her dirty and dried skin draped naked with a veil of a white dress and her endless stream of urine, she kept a sinister and quiet guard that he didn't challenge. She didn't seem to acknowledge him when he passed anyway.
It was endless, and timeless. When he went to the ATM, it gave him money. When he took money to Chateau Rouge, they would give him Skenan. When he woke up, he was usually in his or a familiar bed, though sometimes he would see a ceiling and have no idea where he was. He liked the idea that a Lama once said that the experience of not knowing where you are or even what you are when you are first waking was the closest that most men would ever come to achieving enlightenment. The nebula that were his eyes, the smoke and mirrors that made this funhouse so surreal became comfortable. Sometimes he woke up alone in the dark coiled up in the bathtub, the water a cold serpent wrapped around him.
Marcel's heart beat at night, over the radio, over the traffic on the street outside his slatted window covers. The acrid exhaust sometimes crept in. He cast it back out by lighting a Lucky Strike. He would lie awake, sometimes just waking at night and collect his escaping nimbose afterlife with whatever was between his small fridge and his small table.
He seamed his way through Paris streets, not knowing where he was, and impossibly lost because he was in a perpetual state of Jamais Vu. He knew how to go by Metro, but walking a cardinal direction was never easy. He stopped to get a strong short coffee for a euro. It went down smoky and hot, and burned. The day was starting and he needed to get out of its way. The keepers of this hell were not sympathetic. The streets filled with persons hurrying along with breads and papers and bags. There was a quiet hum, that roared loud in ears that had fallen in love with the quiet birds just before they start at dawn. He drank a stomachfull of wine. Then he woke up in his bed, with swollen lips and a dry tongue.
He let the earth spin him into the sun, under this tower, this defiance, like he was hiding comfortably under it. Still on his back, he let the morning street cleaners come into earshot and then couldn't bear it. He had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn't matter anyway. He piled his skeleton up and walked. Marcel was sure he was already dead, that he was cast into a purgatory, heaven or hell that looked and behaved like the world he knew around him. The woman who squatted over a stream of urine that ran down the slope of the street he lived off of was a sentinel, a psychopomp. With her dirty and dried skin draped naked with a veil of a white dress and her endless stream of urine, she kept a sinister and quiet guard that he didn't challenge. She didn't seem to acknowledge him when he passed anyway.
It was endless, and timeless. When he went to the ATM, it gave him money. When he took money to Chateau Rouge, they would give him Skenan. When he woke up, he was usually in his or a familiar bed, though sometimes he would see a ceiling and have no idea where he was. He liked the idea that a Lama once said that the experience of not knowing where you are or even what you are when you are first waking was the closest that most men would ever come to achieving enlightenment. The nebula that were his eyes, the smoke and mirrors that made this funhouse so surreal became comfortable. Sometimes he woke up alone in the dark coiled up in the bathtub, the water a cold serpent wrapped around him.
Marcel's heart beat at night, over the radio, over the traffic on the street outside his slatted window covers. The acrid exhaust sometimes crept in. He cast it back out by lighting a Lucky Strike. He would lie awake, sometimes just waking at night and collect his escaping nimbose afterlife with whatever was between his small fridge and his small table.
He seamed his way through Paris streets, not knowing where he was, and impossibly lost because he was in a perpetual state of Jamais Vu. He knew how to go by Metro, but walking a cardinal direction was never easy. He stopped to get a strong short coffee for a euro. It went down smoky and hot, and burned. The day was starting and he needed to get out of its way. The keepers of this hell were not sympathetic. The streets filled with persons hurrying along with breads and papers and bags. There was a quiet hum, that roared loud in ears that had fallen in love with the quiet birds just before they start at dawn. He drank a stomachfull of wine. Then he woke up in his bed, with swollen lips and a dry tongue.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
небесное пространствоиздат
"You get the same thing everyone gets: A life to live." - B. John
"And no one gets out alive." - A. E.
"And no one gets out alive." - A. E.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Lune
There he sat on a low ledge to a large window. He was an alien. Maybe he always was or always would be, but at that moment he certainly was. What the hell were these kids doing, eating lunch and engaged in some young people game he didn't know the rules for? So he stared at nothing or he read nothing or he became nothing. For several days this was so, and every day at lunchtime he tried to hide from observation by climbing into a window. The struthious and painful. There was no stoicism, but numbness. Hermes was not happy. He had capitulated his noble savage campaign, and was being socialized with the leaders' children, except it didn't work. He was living in a suburban satellite city, but it may as well have been the moon. In fact, he'd surely prefer the moon. The skateboarding kept him anchored in some sense of self, some sense he would not relinquish. Strangely, he did not identify with music. He didn't like lyrics and he only listened to a few things for comic value that quickly dissipated. He smoked cigarettes when he wasn't allowed, he smoked ganja when he could, and he could often. He tried to die alive in suburbia, except his heart would not give.
A young woman came up to the window ledge and sat down. She asked him some questions he couldn't remember, and extended some warmth or indication of the amicable. She was quiet like the ghost he was trying to become, but more comfortable and translucent. Then they knew each other. He would stop going to school again, but for the time she was a muse. Someone once said that Hermes had done a lot of things but not truly lived very much. This was maybe true even then. When he saw skateboarders he felt like he was still part of some tribe, but the wild antics of his heart were caged here. Social laws were well established. He was a visigoth, a savage, a magician. There was no place for him here, where the temples were chain restaurants and the odysseys were to Disneyworld. He was bestowed with an anachronistic heart. The muse's name was Estelle.
Estelle made a challenging invitation to visit her at the beach while she was there with her family. Hermes already knew the secret that to live as a man, one needs only clean socks, underwear, water, and occasional food. An angel of prophecy gave him a gift of coins, to follow his heart. So he embarked on a journey to the sea, with nothing more than he could easily carry on his shoulder. In making space, he cast off the world that typically rest upon that shoulder. If the world fit into a backpack, he had no qualms to bear the weight of it. He made the journey with two college girls who overestimated his age when they picked him up on the side of the road. They were drinking wine coolers, and they were laughing more than any situation he could understand warranted. He was glad to get out of the car.
It was early evening and he hadn't found anywhere to rest. A friend should have been around, and probably was, but this was before telepathy & cell phones. He and Estelle sat on a bench in a park late into the night. They talked and smiled and he exhibited every nervous antic in the spectrum of the young man lacking confidence. Somehow it was warm and magical, even if it was uncomfortable. Lucioles, lightning bugs were his mates and he was home wherever they were.
A young woman came up to the window ledge and sat down. She asked him some questions he couldn't remember, and extended some warmth or indication of the amicable. She was quiet like the ghost he was trying to become, but more comfortable and translucent. Then they knew each other. He would stop going to school again, but for the time she was a muse. Someone once said that Hermes had done a lot of things but not truly lived very much. This was maybe true even then. When he saw skateboarders he felt like he was still part of some tribe, but the wild antics of his heart were caged here. Social laws were well established. He was a visigoth, a savage, a magician. There was no place for him here, where the temples were chain restaurants and the odysseys were to Disneyworld. He was bestowed with an anachronistic heart. The muse's name was Estelle.
Estelle made a challenging invitation to visit her at the beach while she was there with her family. Hermes already knew the secret that to live as a man, one needs only clean socks, underwear, water, and occasional food. An angel of prophecy gave him a gift of coins, to follow his heart. So he embarked on a journey to the sea, with nothing more than he could easily carry on his shoulder. In making space, he cast off the world that typically rest upon that shoulder. If the world fit into a backpack, he had no qualms to bear the weight of it. He made the journey with two college girls who overestimated his age when they picked him up on the side of the road. They were drinking wine coolers, and they were laughing more than any situation he could understand warranted. He was glad to get out of the car.
It was early evening and he hadn't found anywhere to rest. A friend should have been around, and probably was, but this was before telepathy & cell phones. He and Estelle sat on a bench in a park late into the night. They talked and smiled and he exhibited every nervous antic in the spectrum of the young man lacking confidence. Somehow it was warm and magical, even if it was uncomfortable. Lucioles, lightning bugs were his mates and he was home wherever they were.
Friday, July 18, 2008
The First Panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights
Hermes adjusted to a young nomadic life where he only possessed what he carried in his bag. He smoked what cigarettes he was given, and he was loved by those who were amused by his peculiarities. Much of the time, he slept on one of a few sofas in apartments rented by college students. The adolescent tides of sexual appetite were a plague. Skateboarding of course alleviated some of that energy, but it was still there, still persistent and at times nearly consuming. One morning he woke up on the sofa of 4 college girls' living room with Ted staring down at him. Ted asked, "Did you hear? We're going to Louisiana?" "What? What the hell are you talking about?" "It's in the papers and all. Get your stuff together. Oh, that's right, you don't have any stuff to get together. Jason will be here in 15 minutes."
So Hermes took Ted's word for it and woke up enough to get his bag back together and smoke cigarette ends in the ashtray. It was about as strange a way to wake up as he had known. Soon enough, Jason came in the door to the apartment and waved a hand that said, "saddle up, boys, we're hitting the trail" and we followed him out to the Isuzu Rodeo that a significant injury had won him. I'm sure he'd prefer to have his original health, but today he was making use of the car
"Where are we going?" Hermes demanded. "Do you really care, man?" Jason responded. And in that question lay his answer. Hermes knew a girl, a very beautiful and young girl he had met at some religious camp a couple of years back and had kept in correspondence with. Ted's dad lived in the mountains in Tennessee. There was the itinerary.
Along the way, they passed through Gatlinburg, home of Dollywood. They didn't stop. Late in the evening, at dusk they must have arrived at Ted's dad's little house on the mountainside. Hermes had been asleep and no one woke him up until they were going to eat. Then they came and got him out of the car and for the second time in one day he woke to a world of absurdity.
Across the gravel, just inside the door were the washing machine and dryer, upon which a shotgun lay. There was a chain around the handle of the refrigerator, with a lock that wasn't fastened. Ted introduced Hermes. "What is he, some kind of Indian?" asked Ted's dad. Ted smiled his mischievous smirk and said, "yeah, he's Cherokee I believe." "Well he better not steal nothing."
Ted's dad's friends were sitting around a small table playing cards. He relayed the introduction, "This is my injun' friend, 'Hermes'. Say 'How', Hermes." "Uhm, Hello."
It became Hermes' task to open the cans of Chili for dinner and heat them up on the vintage stove. This bound him to the same kitchen as the country gentlemen playing cards around the table, with their witty comments and banter and asides. "Don't burn the chili!" they admonished him.
They ate the damned chili from a can. Since Hermes was lowest on the Totem, so to speak, and last one in the house, he was given a reclining chair to sleep in. The only channel that Ted's dad watched was the Country Music Channel, and he left it on 24 hours a day in case he might miss something. So Hermes let his exhausted soul sink into that dusty reclining chair to the Achy Breaky Heart that was this world.
In the morning, Ted briefed Hermes and Jason on the mission they had to get to the country store and get supplies for his father. It was assumed that because Ted was from Back East he had money and the inclination to look after his kin. So Ted pretended that he did.
At the store they had plenty of cans of chili, corned beef hash, boxes of gelatin, bread and butter pickles, white bread, and various canned vegetables. They also had whiskey. Ted bought some of each. None of us had any money. It was insane.
When we got back and Ted presented his gratitude for the hospitality, Ted's dad asked if we'd ever had moonshine. It was like 9 in the morning. He produced a canning jar from under the sink with an apple floating in it. Then he unscrewed the lid, handed it to me and said, "be careful, you're an injun'." And so I was.
We let it be known that we were going on our way, that we were very grateful, and that we'd stop by on the way back if means allowed. Then we saddled up, walked past the laundry with the shotgun on top of it, and into the auto. Back on the interstate, we headed south. The new mission was the utopia of New Orleans, a magical city of costumes and nudity, like some sort of occult ball.
Along the way, I disclosed that I knew a beautiful girl whom I had kissed at camp some time back who lived in Louisiana. She lived in Natchitoches. That was where we should be heading. She was hot, and sweet, and southern. So Natchitoches replaced New Orleans for me, and when we got there I knew in my heart I wouldn't be leaving.
When we found the town, we looked for a phone booth. Back in those days some phone booths had phone books chained to them. I looked up "Iskenderian" and found an address that matched the one I recalled from our correspondence. I phoned the number and she was jumping on the phone with excitement. Why she'd be so excited to hear from me was unknown, but it was a good omen.
We pulled into the gravel driveway some minutes later, passing along the Red River and its french iron wrought benches. Everything was glowing with warm and wet sun. Spanish moss draped the trees and I knew I was in a magical land, somewhere else. Her family, her mother was somewhat cautious by us three boys, but because of my very factual and sincere presentation of my homeless predicament, she insisted that I stay with her. The other two had other plans. Ted and Jason were still New Orleans bound.
Jason didn't believe I was staying. But I was. I wanted a new life, and this was far enough away from anything I knew that I could start living here. Really start living. The aether was thin and I could breathe. Each lungful of wet air gave me a hunger for the potential. I was staying.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Big Bertha =or= Yes, I am a rocket scientist
The neighborhood was built on some rotting dinosaurs, and it smelled that way. The machines, the big yellow machines they used to unearth the earth, strip the trees and unleash the gases of million year old putrefying dinosaur made the suburban outpost hum. There were empty fields, evocative of a desert. It was the northeast. The houses were one story, like the same desert, sometimes called "ranch houses" by whomever would try to sell them or sell them to themselves. The water company was artesia. All imagination, all indicators were that this was a little desert enclave in the swampy forested midatlantic. It was literally a cultural desert.
Mose and Otard were friends. Old friends. They lived in houses on opposite ends of an expansive empty and dry field which had given up the ghosts of those dead dinosaurs so long ago. In the afternoons the would get up to whatever skateboarding, soccer, or prank that was inspired that day. Somehow Otard had a whole cache of Estes brand model rocket engines, which he had previously overlooked as interesting. In the backyard there was a shed and a bicycle sally port that had a metal roof. Using magnesium fuse that had been acquired through Mose and his connections, Otard would light the small engines propped up on a rock or whatever and watch them careen off in to the hilly field, wildly changing course and propelling through the air like some kind of scrivened cursive. Man, he loved that.
There were also rockets. There were smaller rockets with model numbers that he had put together from kits, with fins to guide the projectile on a course set by a long steel rod and a loop on the side of the rocket which gave the projectile a good start. They went up, sometimes to the point where they could barely be made out with his eyesight, and then were supposed to discharge the cone with a small final expulsion. There were rumors that they had cameras that one could also set up to be fired with the parachute that was the payload in the cone of these rockets, taking a single photo from the peak of the trajectory. He did not have one of these cameras. Later he thought to fly a kite or a helium balloon made of mylar or something strong above his Harlem 6th floor apartment, with a wireless camera perpetually casting its view down to a receiver and potentially fed through a web page, but the romance of a view looking down from the sky had not struck him yet.
So the rockets went up and they came down, and then engines when fired alone would spell out some mystical divine message above the dry and very flammable tall grass. The fear that the rocket would settle on the ground with fuel enough to set the grasses alight made the excitement all the more profound. There were considerations to take the fuel out of the engines and somehow concatenate them into a larger engine, but the fuel was solid and they were aware that this project probably held unanticipated features that they did not have the resources to address. The bastards were fast though. Probably at least 100 miles per hour on a small rocket.
Big Bertha was a large pink rocket that sat in the corner of Otard's bedroom, a monument to the future. She stood 3' tall and pink, and had the diameter of a can of soda. Her guiding fins were thicker and stronger than the smaller rockets, and she had not the fitting for the Estes size engines. She was the future of rocketry. She was pink and unafraid. Her statuesque defiance of levity was an affectionate challenge. She had no parachute. She was a one-way rocket, and the only launch she deserved was the good one.
Mose had an uncle that worked for a company called Rocket Research. They probably made weather rockets or something, and in retrospect, this was probably the source of the magnesium fuse that burns so beautifully under water. This was tested in the blue plastic backyard kiddie pool. Fire under water was a James Bond scuba welding affair. Some serious business. Then it became a tool. Those electric ignitions with the equivolent of a match head on a thin wire were flaky, and one of the things that unnerves a rocket scientist is a flaky ignition system. The magnesium fuse, which burned evenly and very very very hot, was a sure-fire thing so long as the engine and the fuse were in reliably solid contact. They were also outside of the established Estes safe ignition protocol, and inherently advanced in that they were not accepted by the establishment.
One afternoon, Mose said that he had an engine for Bertha. For whatever reason, Otard dismissed this as bullshit, since there were no known retail engines and he did not have faith that Mose had stayed up all night working on a prototype engine of Bertha's caliber. The excitement that Mose probably expected, and did not receive, killed his own excitement. The engine did exist, but was ignored because of Otard's very unscientific presumptions.
Rocketry was put aside, since the small engines were expensive and neither of them had any regular source of income. Still, Big Bertha stood in the corner. She had black & white checkered collar below the nose cone, and the lovely washed out desert pink. Big Bertha was a one-way rocket.
The seasons changed and it was winter. Winter inhibited rocketry, as recovery was impeded by wet and cold. Foliage was thinner, and it should have been taken advantage of, but neither of the young rocketeers were into the idea. It was a video game season. Sure, snow was fun, but for the most part it was not a time for adventuring into the fields in search of a 1-2' long tube of cardboard.
Finally the early spring came, with all of its impish opportunity and Mose came over to Otard's house with the fabled Rocket Research engine. Otard was amazed. It was made of some sort of plastic, maybe pvc, and as big as he imagined a stick of dynamite to be. It had a different material for a nozzle, or the nozzle was fitted with a second, harder nozzle. It had model numbers that did not fit the Estes schema, and it was heavy. She didn't even fit into Bertha's motor mount. They had to devise a way to mount this engine, and it would require fitting a collar into the existing motor mount and adding the length of the engine to the base of the rocket. They looked at anything that was cylindrical and made of a material they could work with. Wrapping paper tubes (too small), PVC pipes (too difficult), tall beer cans (too messy, not strong enough), etc. Finally they found a poster tube that fit nearly perfectly, and with some taped wedging, the engine fit snugly into it and the fit they made by screwing the existing motor mount crossways suspended into the new engine mount kept the engine enough near to center. They worked on modeling this mount for the better part of a week.
Finally they were satisfied, or disenchanted with working on this part of the project and wanted to get to the launch. They considered that they better give this particular launch a wider berth. A Big Berth. They used a 4' length of magnesium fuse, improvised a launch rod with some dowling rod and she stood so beautifully on her launch that they took their time, savoring the potential and contending with the fear that this power may be more than they were equipped to handle. There was fear.
At 16:06:08 they lit the end of the fuse with a butane torch lighter, having established that it takes about 28secs per foot for the fuse to burn. The rocket began to ignite at 8 minutes after and took off with a roar they had not heard before. It made them cover their ears and the neighborhood echoed the blast. Clumps of dirt flew up and out to 7 or 8 feet and there was a great trail of acrid smoke. They watched for several seconds the rocket ascend, then turn slightly south and carry with the same velocity and exhaust that it had left the launch. Soon the rocket appeared to get so small, to become such a speck so far away that they wondered if it began its descent. The backdrop in the sky was a white and fluffy cumulus cloud and they could not see any indication that it had pierced this cloud, or any indication that it hadn't.
They never saw that rocket again. Suddenly, the attention from the neighbors, now curious what that blast was about made them overly aware of the significance this launch could have. They ran up to the launch spot, saw that there was a 2.5' wide crater 1.5' deep and tried to kick the missing dirt back into it. They knocked over the wooden rod, and then walked quickly back to Otard's house. Did that rocket just go into orbit? They would never know, but probably. Would the g-men come knocking? Maybe. The rocket days were over. They had no more engines, and Big Bertha was sent home.
Mose and Otard were friends. Old friends. They lived in houses on opposite ends of an expansive empty and dry field which had given up the ghosts of those dead dinosaurs so long ago. In the afternoons the would get up to whatever skateboarding, soccer, or prank that was inspired that day. Somehow Otard had a whole cache of Estes brand model rocket engines, which he had previously overlooked as interesting. In the backyard there was a shed and a bicycle sally port that had a metal roof. Using magnesium fuse that had been acquired through Mose and his connections, Otard would light the small engines propped up on a rock or whatever and watch them careen off in to the hilly field, wildly changing course and propelling through the air like some kind of scrivened cursive. Man, he loved that.
There were also rockets. There were smaller rockets with model numbers that he had put together from kits, with fins to guide the projectile on a course set by a long steel rod and a loop on the side of the rocket which gave the projectile a good start. They went up, sometimes to the point where they could barely be made out with his eyesight, and then were supposed to discharge the cone with a small final expulsion. There were rumors that they had cameras that one could also set up to be fired with the parachute that was the payload in the cone of these rockets, taking a single photo from the peak of the trajectory. He did not have one of these cameras. Later he thought to fly a kite or a helium balloon made of mylar or something strong above his Harlem 6th floor apartment, with a wireless camera perpetually casting its view down to a receiver and potentially fed through a web page, but the romance of a view looking down from the sky had not struck him yet.
So the rockets went up and they came down, and then engines when fired alone would spell out some mystical divine message above the dry and very flammable tall grass. The fear that the rocket would settle on the ground with fuel enough to set the grasses alight made the excitement all the more profound. There were considerations to take the fuel out of the engines and somehow concatenate them into a larger engine, but the fuel was solid and they were aware that this project probably held unanticipated features that they did not have the resources to address. The bastards were fast though. Probably at least 100 miles per hour on a small rocket.
Big Bertha was a large pink rocket that sat in the corner of Otard's bedroom, a monument to the future. She stood 3' tall and pink, and had the diameter of a can of soda. Her guiding fins were thicker and stronger than the smaller rockets, and she had not the fitting for the Estes size engines. She was the future of rocketry. She was pink and unafraid. Her statuesque defiance of levity was an affectionate challenge. She had no parachute. She was a one-way rocket, and the only launch she deserved was the good one.
Mose had an uncle that worked for a company called Rocket Research. They probably made weather rockets or something, and in retrospect, this was probably the source of the magnesium fuse that burns so beautifully under water. This was tested in the blue plastic backyard kiddie pool. Fire under water was a James Bond scuba welding affair. Some serious business. Then it became a tool. Those electric ignitions with the equivolent of a match head on a thin wire were flaky, and one of the things that unnerves a rocket scientist is a flaky ignition system. The magnesium fuse, which burned evenly and very very very hot, was a sure-fire thing so long as the engine and the fuse were in reliably solid contact. They were also outside of the established Estes safe ignition protocol, and inherently advanced in that they were not accepted by the establishment.
One afternoon, Mose said that he had an engine for Bertha. For whatever reason, Otard dismissed this as bullshit, since there were no known retail engines and he did not have faith that Mose had stayed up all night working on a prototype engine of Bertha's caliber. The excitement that Mose probably expected, and did not receive, killed his own excitement. The engine did exist, but was ignored because of Otard's very unscientific presumptions.
Rocketry was put aside, since the small engines were expensive and neither of them had any regular source of income. Still, Big Bertha stood in the corner. She had black & white checkered collar below the nose cone, and the lovely washed out desert pink. Big Bertha was a one-way rocket.
The seasons changed and it was winter. Winter inhibited rocketry, as recovery was impeded by wet and cold. Foliage was thinner, and it should have been taken advantage of, but neither of the young rocketeers were into the idea. It was a video game season. Sure, snow was fun, but for the most part it was not a time for adventuring into the fields in search of a 1-2' long tube of cardboard.
Finally the early spring came, with all of its impish opportunity and Mose came over to Otard's house with the fabled Rocket Research engine. Otard was amazed. It was made of some sort of plastic, maybe pvc, and as big as he imagined a stick of dynamite to be. It had a different material for a nozzle, or the nozzle was fitted with a second, harder nozzle. It had model numbers that did not fit the Estes schema, and it was heavy. She didn't even fit into Bertha's motor mount. They had to devise a way to mount this engine, and it would require fitting a collar into the existing motor mount and adding the length of the engine to the base of the rocket. They looked at anything that was cylindrical and made of a material they could work with. Wrapping paper tubes (too small), PVC pipes (too difficult), tall beer cans (too messy, not strong enough), etc. Finally they found a poster tube that fit nearly perfectly, and with some taped wedging, the engine fit snugly into it and the fit they made by screwing the existing motor mount crossways suspended into the new engine mount kept the engine enough near to center. They worked on modeling this mount for the better part of a week.
Finally they were satisfied, or disenchanted with working on this part of the project and wanted to get to the launch. They considered that they better give this particular launch a wider berth. A Big Berth. They used a 4' length of magnesium fuse, improvised a launch rod with some dowling rod and she stood so beautifully on her launch that they took their time, savoring the potential and contending with the fear that this power may be more than they were equipped to handle. There was fear.
At 16:06:08 they lit the end of the fuse with a butane torch lighter, having established that it takes about 28secs per foot for the fuse to burn. The rocket began to ignite at 8 minutes after and took off with a roar they had not heard before. It made them cover their ears and the neighborhood echoed the blast. Clumps of dirt flew up and out to 7 or 8 feet and there was a great trail of acrid smoke. They watched for several seconds the rocket ascend, then turn slightly south and carry with the same velocity and exhaust that it had left the launch. Soon the rocket appeared to get so small, to become such a speck so far away that they wondered if it began its descent. The backdrop in the sky was a white and fluffy cumulus cloud and they could not see any indication that it had pierced this cloud, or any indication that it hadn't.
They never saw that rocket again. Suddenly, the attention from the neighbors, now curious what that blast was about made them overly aware of the significance this launch could have. They ran up to the launch spot, saw that there was a 2.5' wide crater 1.5' deep and tried to kick the missing dirt back into it. They knocked over the wooden rod, and then walked quickly back to Otard's house. Did that rocket just go into orbit? They would never know, but probably. Would the g-men come knocking? Maybe. The rocket days were over. They had no more engines, and Big Bertha was sent home.
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