A Monster's Viewpoint

I just finished reading John Gardner’s “Grendel”, a story from the point of view of the monster in Beowulf. I like this passage:

“Blood lust and rage are my character. Why does the lion not wisely settle down and be a horse? In any case, I too am learning, ordeal by ordeal, my indignity. It’s all I have, my only weapon for smashing through these stiff coffin-walls of the world. So I dance in the moonlight, make foul jokes, or labor to shake the foundations of night with my heaped-up howls of rage. Something is bound to come of all this. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!”

Fireworks for the Weary

Did I say something about life lacking color? God must have heard me, because She piled on the luster last evening to bang me over the head with the brilliance of life, if I just care to see it. While I was uploading a rant about my aversion to real life, I hear these explosions going off, so I look out the window. A storm blows across the west, the setting sun coloring the thunderheads every shade from midnight blue to red. Down on the plaza an old jazz woman sings on stage, the audience huddled beneath umbrellas, a field of mushrooms glistening red, blue, black. Over in Loring Park an art fair kicks off its first night with a fireworks display. From my high-rise the fireworks explode at eye level. So with the thunderstorm sunset, jazz music bouncing off the buildings, and bursts of fireworks lighting up the sky, I had to say “you’re right. I get it. Just open your eyes.” As long as there will always be a fireworks display ready for every time I feel disillusioned about life, I’ll be fine.

Thrice Removed

mirror mirror mirror, etc.
photo by raysto.

What is with my aversion to writing about real life? Or bring down to the personal level, my own life? I’m bored with it. Or is it that I don’t want to look at it too closely? What sort of things can I be avoiding looking at? That I’m thirty-six and alone, that I have not found that woman I’m destined to be with. That I wonder if love is a fiction, at least for me. I don’t want to hear you self-help readers say, “You’re just afraid you’re not lovable.” I’m more afraid that I just won’t find her out there, or that I’m incapable of loving someone. I’m great at being enraptured, lustful, entranced from afar, but let me in too close and I’ll start to see the cracks in the teacup.

Okay, enough on love. How about children? I ache when I think that I might never have children. I think kids are the most miraculous beings on the planet. I immediately smile when I see a child walking towards me, holding a grandparent’s hand, or riding on a dad’s shoulder, or even sleeping in a stroller. They pick me out of the crowd too, and smile back. It’s like they know I’m connected to them in some way. Or is it just that they can’t repress a giggle from seeing a 6’2” kid smiling back at them??

What else? Writing. God, writing. Don’t make me look at this debacle. Writing was to be the thing I live for, the life’s work that provides meaning, a purpose-maker, navigator, reprisal for all of those empty spaces mentioned above. But my love and joy of writing has dissolved, left home, abandoned me. It’s like you work for something (albeit half-assed) all of your life and then detour off course and realize while you’re lying in bed at night that you’re not going to get it back. Sometime a number of years ago I strayed. And where am I now? Working at a utility company as a SQL coder. A data gopher. I don’t want to look at this too closely, and maybe that’s why I have such distaste in my mouth when I sit down to write, especially about any thing real. It’s something like running into an ex-lover on the street and having to hug them and say how wonderful they look. It’s like kissing somebody you really don’t want to kiss but feel obliged to. Like getting laid off and seeing the smug face of your old coworkers when run into them at the grocery store.

See how I shelter myself with metaphor. A thing like a thing like a thing leaves me three steps removed from the truth, and I can finally digest it. I’m waiting for July 1st, when I can leave this truth and reality crap behind and go back to my delusions.

Hail and Expired Eggs

Egg
photo by switch1.

I was getting ready to head out to the grocery store when the sky opened up and a righteous storm blew into the city. Water streamed so thickly down the windows that I felt like I was in a car that had just dropped off a bridge into the river. Wind hit the glass so hard you could see the reflections bulge, hear the glass crack as it expands and shrinks. Then hail started to fall and I pressed my face up against the glass despite my better sense of judgment so I could see the spectacle of a million pea-sized ice balls dumped from the sky and drop 25 floors into space. First they whisked north in the wind, then they reversed and whisked south. Everything around me roared with the vibration of hail. Ice drifted on the roof of the church and looked like snow. Clumps of ice coagulated in the gutters and swirled around sewer gratings. I heard on the radio that manhole covers had been lifted off their moorings by the pressure of the runoff in the sewers.

It's over now. It's 10:30 at night. I’m usually sleeping by now but I’m baking brownies for when my family visits tomorrow. I couldn’t think of anything to cook and I can’t grill out since I don’t have a balcony and I feel so damn feeble that I have to buy roasted chickens at the grocery store. I must seem like some sad abandoned puppy to the women of my family visiting my apartment with its beef jerky, mixed nuts, and a fridge full of beer and olives and expired eggs. The guys are probably thinking “Awesome! Widescreen plasma TV, beef jerky, mixed nuts, olives…what a life! But you got to throw out those eggs, man.”

10 Minutes Over Tea

I have ten minutes in which to write. I'm obviously not doing so well with my daily truth telling in the month of June. This is evidence of my aversion and disregard of the truth and its million little irrelevancies throughout the day. So what the hell am I doing right now? Saw the Pharmacist last weekend and got to see her eclectic apartment, complete with opium den-bathroom, mannequins, poker chip collection, and balcony garden. My mom is visiting from Florida, so we babysat my brother's kids, Taylor aged 8 (and a half!) and Shea aged 10 (and a half!) on Saturday night. I love taking a day and being both a kid again and a surrogate dad. We played Connect Four, played a memory card game which Taylor was freakishly good at, billiards, tickle monster, bounced on the trampoline, and at out at Subway. By 10:30 I was exhausted. Last night I watched the hockey game. I'm halfway through watching "Night of the Iguana" and love Richard Burton's character, or is it that I love Tennessee Williams writing? Saturday mornings are Tennis lessons, so I can get a rating and then play in a fall league. Sunday mornings I play against the 6'5" Czech coworker. Work, which I need to leave for now, is all-consuming as usual, a deposits campaign going on where I need to pull data for qualifying customers, who they need to call each day, how many deposits they had assessed the previous day, and which customers were billed five days ago so they can call them up and bully them. Really, I'm ashamed at how much I enjoy figuring out the puzzles of how to write code to get the data they want.

The Wrong Tomato

Tomatoes In Tomato Droplets
photo by evilgreg3000.

In a hurry to get to work this morning, I reached into the fridge and grabbed the ingredients for my turkey sandwhich; muenster cheese, light mayo, country style Dijon mustard, horseradish, and a tomato. As I sliced the tomato, I noticed how it looked pale, its red less vibrant, the seeds inside looking too dark. I just bought it yesterday, though, so I dropped a slice on top of the cheese, ziplocked it, and started putting ingredients away. Then I saw the actual tomato on a different shelf in the fridge, vibrant red and ripe. I must have grabbed a tomato I had bought two weeks ago and never used. The wrong tomato. A sandwich ruined. But I had to get going, and there was no time to fix it. Grin and eat it.

06-06-06

Alien Fire
photo by noqontrol.

Today is 06-06-06. My birthdate is 09/29/69, so if you turn my driver's license upside down, you see how today I will sprout bat wings on my back and I will blacken out the sun over Minneapolis and . . . and . . . do something hideous and apocolyptic or just plain mean. Or I might watch the Stanley Cup Finals.

Lazy Days of Summer?

Noeremburg Garden 020
photo by brettanicus.

I’m not sure a reclusive guy like myself can adjust to these full summer weekends. I’m more accustomed to a weekend of reading, hanging out at my favorite coffe/tea shops, or writing in my journals. This weekend I went out to eat with the Pharmacist at a noisy sidewalk restaurant, had a doctor’s appointment, shopped for a new bike to replace the one that was stolen, went to Sportmart to shop for roller blades, walked around the Lake Harriett rose gardens, met up with the Pharmacist again to watch a half dozen rabbits hopping around the lawns of the convention center after sunset, played tennis with the Czech from work, visited my Mom at the Hyland Park Reserve, and watched the Woody Allen movie Match Point. Are you exhausted yet? So am I.

It’s what we do in Minnesota. The ice receeds and we stumble out of our homes and blink at the sun, then start rushing around to get in as much living as possible in this momentary garden that has sprung up around us.

Directions Required

Pill Bottle Cap
photo by ocellnuri.

I had taken the Pharmacist out on her first date, back when I was nineteen and she was seventeen and we both had summer jobs at French Park. I was a maintenance guy and she worked concessions. I liked how she was pretty but didn't know it, and hid shyly behind her big frizzy Julia Roberts hair. I remember having to go inside to meet her mother before we drove off to a movie. We went to see "When Harry Met Sally." Very fitting, seeing how our paths would cross again later in life.

She was painfully shy and nervous. I thought she might throw up. But I didn't hold that against her; I remember the same feeling, back when I was fifteen and went on a date with an eighteen year Madonna look-a-like and lost my virginity in a church parking lot, but that's another story. We kissed at the end of the date. We talked a little at work afterwards, but I didn't ask her out again. I thought I was probably making her miserably nervous, and two shy people aren't the greatest combination.

Fast forward seventeen years and I get a couple of anonymous comments on this blog, and then a hand-made journal sent anonymously in the mail. Finally I get an email from Anonymous identifying herself. I could have been freaked out by this, a possible stalker coming back from the past to drug me (Pharmacist weapon of choice) and leave me for dead for having never taken her out on a second date. But I arranged to meet up with her at the Open Book coffee shop.

It is odd meeting up with somebody you haven't seen in seventeen years, but since I didn't know her all that well back then, it was more like a blind date. She did try passing me a tablet of some kind during our short meeting, some kind of Tylenol pain killer that might help my neck, she said, but I stuck with my ibuprofen just in case. Even though she may have had plans to leave me floating in the Mississippi river, I did ask her out the following weekend.

We went to a gourmet pizza place, walked by the river, and then went back to my place. Now I felt like the awkward one; I hadn't been on a real date since my divorce. The Pharmacist, though not as shy as she was when she was seventeen, is not one to make the first move. We're on the sofa when I finally just laugh nervously and kiss her. She's really learned how to kiss somewhere in the past years.

Either it was my neck pain or the fact that I was thirty-six and trying to make out on a sofa, but I couldn't get comfortable. I didn't know how to navigate us from the sofa to the bedroom. All it would have taken was something as simple as taking her hand and crossing the room, but it was a gulf. The sofa was a rodeo bull and I couldn't stay on its back. Damn slippery leather. Damn limbs of adult bodies too big and clumsy to be flopping around on a sofa like a couple of teenagers. We laughed. We lay there. We felt the engines shifting down to a slow idle and we both knew the ride was over, for that night, anyway.

Dead Idols

I'm already not doing so good at posting to this every day. It's the mundane factor weighing me down, like I was worried about. Right now I'm making a Billy Idol's greatest hits CD for a woman I'm seeing, the Pharmacist. Yes, the snarling brit decked out like a punk but who was really just a crooner at heart. I wanted to be him in highschool. I showed the The Parmacist my senior picture of of my spiked hair. No snarl though. She said the rest of the weekend she had Billy Idol songs stuck in her head. After Billy I wanted to be Jim Morrison and grew my hair out and wore beaded necklaces. Then it was Harry Connick junior and the hair swept back like a muted pompador. I was always trying to be somebody else, then sometime in college my idols died away. There's nothing more foresaken than a man without his idols. Now it's just the ghosts of french poets and outsider-artist janitors that I like to imagine are watching me, but I don't want to be them.

There is more to tell about The Pharmacist. Later. She's my anonymous poster from a while back, and had sent me the journal in the mail.