Life of Brettanicus

The Apple and the Sickle

2011-05-07T10:44:00.001-05:00

photo by torobala.

Hills, gray and raining. Deep green forests. Heavy clouds hovered only a few feet above the ground, mingling with the tree tops. Budapest is the land in the clouds, mist glistening on hillside rocks barely glimpsed through the clouds.

On our train ride from Budapest towards the Czech border, a girl and her mother rode in our compartment. The girl’s name was Regina, around sixteen or seventeen years old. Most beautiful girl in the world, sleeping next to me, pummeled in and out sleep on a rocking train.

For the second consecutive night I stayed awake, playing games of pretending to be asleep but with my eyes cracked open so as to peer unobserved on her sleeping face, cherub lips parted slightly to breathe. The mother fights sleep just as diligently, to keep watch over her gosling. I inched closer to the daughter’s side with glacial patience to obtain my objective; letting my arm fall to rest against her bare thigh, as though I simply shifted in my sleep.

In the morning, the sun rises on her face and she wakes up. Vibrant, talking to us about her favorite breeds of dogs and her home and her dreams of one day going to America. She wants to be pen pals and gives us her address. Even her mother warms to us in the morning light and invites us to stay with them should we ever find ourselves in Prague. We get off the train.

Odlef’s grandparents were wealthy and respected in this small Hungarian town. The grandfather was a respected doctor, with a hospital and a boulevard named after him.

The house is a stout stone structure, high ceilings and expansive rooms, with doors that are ten feet high. Thick stone walls keep the rooms cool during the day, and in the early evening we close the shutters over windows barred to keep out theives. Portraits hang on the walls of the family ancestry, from oils to black and white photographs of ancestors, grim and strong. A bishop stands on a balcony in a Transylvanian church. His wife, the tragedy figure, died young from tuberculosis.

There is a garden out back with cherry, nut, and plum trees, squares of flowers, isles in purple bloom, perfumed. The weeds are growing high so Odlef wanders through the garden with a sickle in hand, broad sweeping arcs sculpting the garden, chopping down what does not belong.

Look out back, past the gardens to the property beyond. See the steep roof, stained chimneys and lightning rods? This is their original mansion, taken away by communism. They are in the courts to take it back. They have plans, Odlef’s father and uncles, to reclaim that which was taken and to restore what has decayed. But some things are gone. Russian soldiers had taken the house, shit in the tub, and stolen the silver. Some spoons and knives were found later, scattered across town. But the fine china and teapots now sit in Russian cabinets.

The Grand Tour pt 7: Scarecrow Hill

2011-01-19T06:53:00.001-06:00

photo by HORIZON.

I sit alone on the sidewalk outside of the locked house in Balassagyarmat. Mad dog howling of hunger, smaller dogs yapping a refrain, a bloodied wart seeps on my arm, sticky crimson and dirt. I practice the words in Hungarian, “Odlef K_, gone to get the key,” accompanied with gestures as though I am performing a pantomime. I can see myself through a local’s eyes; a foreign mantra of a long haired bleeding American shaman who drawls his words with a palsied tongue.

Church bells are tolling the hour: hear that cacophony of dogs?

We ride the bus from Budapest to Odlef’s house in Balassagyarmat, only a few miles from the Czech border. The bus coasts down winding hills, then chugs up the next incline, working itself to near collapse until a moment of reprieve. I knew the feeling. We pass a hillside crop of berries guarded by scarecrows draped in linen sheets. Like wraiths they are, flapping in the breeze, not just in shapes of human form, but also of underworld creatures, horse-like and spectral. What I wouldn’t give to sneak out to the hill on a moonlit night, with a light breeze bringing the celebration to life, with Bosch holding court at the center of the gathering.

As we near the smaller villages, we come across old peasant women walking along the roadside in their rapid, hunched over gaits. Widowhood veils their faces in black scarves, toothless smiles at nothing but the hot sun beating down on them, their joints creaking on the way to market, alone, only a few vegetables to buy now that the husband has died and the children left. She looks up to passengers in the windows of the bus. I search her face for self-pity but find none here, at least none detectable from the foreigner’s outside observations, wordless and passing.

The Grand Tour pt 6: Santa Croce Rain

2010-12-22T10:35:00.001-06:00

photo by ~Essence of a Dream~.

Dark clouds gather at the end of streets and behind towers. We rush to a square outside Santa Croce and lie on our backs over the cobblestones, watching those etched clouds swirl and bulge, swell and recede. Then came the rain. I saw individual raindrops plummet from the sky and land on my cheeks. When the rain started to come too strong, we crowded into the church with the others.

A downpour and thunder fills the square, driving away the tourists that crowded beneath shop awnings. The church becomes too crowded, so we take shelter beneath a network of scaffolding used to restore the old building. I crouched among the skeletons of scaffolding and stone and sang the blues in the key of an exhaust fan humming nearby; “I’m soaked to the bone and I feel like goin’ home…”

The rain lets up and the square is like a gilded mirror. Two blond girls are the first to venture out, walking brightly across this somber space. Patches of bright blue color the sky like the first strokes of a paintbrush on old canvas.

The Grand Tour pt 5: Lamentations no. 1

2010-12-04T09:28:00.001-06:00

photo by earthmagnified.

Lost in a hotel room that is too large for me, a high ceiling, vast tile floor and a tiny chair. Where am I? Rome, I think, a beehive of cobbled streets, twisting alleys and whirring scooters. What street is this? Foreign drawl of a street name like the last words of a villager struck down by cholera. I’m lost in a city where I am lost in the hotel where I am lost in the room and where I am lost in this chair.

Walking now, marching twenty strides behind Odlef, a clumsy limp and with each step a wince of pain from the blister on my pinky toe. This little piggy is squealing “SHIT FUCK PISS” all the way home. The sun beats on Rome, bakes the stones and I walk on the coals. Dry air sucks moisture from my eyes. Trembling, hungering, baking, I fall out of the flowing current of pedestrians to lean against a wrought iron fencepost. I try to find my happy place inside my head, but all of my memories seem far away, across the ocean. But here’s one now: childhood days sprawled on the grass with the family dog. Playing kick-the-can with Mike and Jane. First snow of the year and I’m standing at the neighbor’s door, “Can Jane come out and play?” There now, something looks familiar. I remember every detail about a split second of those days.

Sometime during these musings I have fallen back in line behind Odlef, and I fully awaken as he comes to a stop. Look up, there is a heavy solid dome stretched above our heads, an open circle at the apex, a sunbeam shining through the cool moist air onto marble floors. This is the Pantheon.

The Grand Tour pt 4: Toulon Postcard

2010-11-20T12:17:00.001-06:00

photo by lentina_x.

Old sailors grounded in Toulon sit on doorsteps throughout the day, sipping beer in the mornings, biting their fingernails in the afternoon, tasting the dirt on their tongues. Their skin is deep brown and liver-spotted, tattoos of ships broken up on their withered arms. Cobblestone alleys lead crookedly toward the Mediterranean shore. Speakers hang over the streets, tangled in lines of wire and cable, bringing the streets alive with American sixties songs. In the farmers' market, hordes of tourists shout in broken French with the vendors, a tangle of hands shuffling honeydew melons and yellow plums and paprika. Further up the avenues, away from the shoreline, the streets grow quiet. In the squares, lovers mill about with entwined arms or sat in patio cafes waiting patiently for their drinks. A fountain stood in the center of a square, water trickling down a swell of moss and vines, dripping into a pool. A blackbird fluttered in the shallows, water beading its feathers.

We stay at the hotel Le Petit Chateau and wash our clothes in the boudoir with hand soap. Eating sandwiches of liverwurst, sardines, and tomatoes on a fresh baked baguette, Odlef sits on the windowsill looking out over the chaotic jumble of flats with red-tiled rooftops. In the afternoon we buy three bottles of chilled white wine, drink in the night and come alive; this is our daily ritual, to be followed by numb, wordless mornings. My life is something like water: without taste, bland, lacking intoxication, even here in France. That is why I reach for the wine bottle.

I write a postcard to a friend back home. There is too little space to cover everything going on, so I decide it best to describe only the items on the table in our room:
- crusts of stale French bread
- two husks of beach melon
- two plums from the farmers market (yellow)
- two half full bottles of white wine
- ashtray, filled (one pack)
- Paris guidebook (tattered)
- Rome guidebook (pristine)
- backpack strap (useful) and an American penny (useless)

I take Odlef’s spot on the windowsill and claim my perch four stories above the street. Sallows fly in circles above the fountain in the square. Church bells toll the evening vespers. Pickpockets withdraw from their day of work, street urchins laugh into the face of the coming night, and a dog kills a cardboard box.

The Grand Tour pt 3: Straw Dogs

2010-11-14T15:23:00.001-06:00

photo by Samantha Decker.

Odlef and I follow a tour in a Paris guidebook in which you pretend you are walking through Montparnasse during the Lost Generation of the 1920’s. It is as though we are two starving nihilists who, armed with the guidebook, torch everything in the city while preserving only those great artifacts from Gertrude Stein’s Montparnasse. We see a new restaurant called the Hippo Grill; it does not exist. There is a café called Le Select, but at this hour in the tour guidebook there are no people. But I see the people, smoking, reading papers, making all of the correct motions of intellectuals, and yet we drop the curtain on their play; they do not exist.

We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.

The Grand Tour Pt2: Atlantic Crossing

2010-11-07T08:16:00.001-06:00

photo by Just Plane Photography.

I am on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackness fills the window; I have no fear of the ocean because I cannot see it. Yet it is there, those churning depths, those sharks and whales just below my body suspended in space, but right now I feel no nearer to the ocean than when I was lying in my bed in Iowa, imagining my Atlantic crossing. In fact, I was closer then. My room was dark. This plane is filled with light, stewardesses handing out blankets, and men with their shoes off to air out their stinking feet; this is my version of the Grand Tour, 21st century style.

How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.

I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.

Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”

The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.

The Grand Tour, Pt 1

2010-07-11T18:50:00.001-05:00

photo by klebersales.

He dropped out of the Iowa State writing program weeks into the first semester, after he started binge drinking beer, half a liter of whiskey, and then rioting across campus in a bacchanalian frenzy, diving into creeks, hanging over cliff ledges, smashing beer bottles over his forehead. Campus security picked him up, and he was assigned to a campus psychologist. The counselor sat with knees crossed, notepad at the ready. “You’re clearly exhibiting self-destructive behaviors, but we haven’t talked about what’s going on inside. Why do you want to hurt yourself?”

“I don’t know,” the young man replied. Long stringy hair hung over his face but didn’t hide the stitches sewing up the gash in his forehead from one of the broken beerbottles. “I can’t take life anymore. It’s boring. It’s mundane. It doesn’t have any of the magic from Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, and I feel cheated. There’s nothing for me to write about in this town. Worse of all, I’m freaking out. I’m nervous all of the time. I get panic attacks just walking into the classroom.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“I’m supposed to read my work in front of the class.”

“And you’re nervous they won’t like it?”

“I don’t know. They like it fine. Some of them even tell me it’s better than anything they’ve read. Other’s tell me I ripped it all off from the poet maudits, from movies I’ve never seen, or that I use too many adjectives. But that’s not it. It’s being exposed like that in front of the firing squad, all of them watching me, all of their eyes on me, all of their judgments being processed at that moment, and I see myself through their eyes. I panic.”

“Your MMPI showed you have a number of personality disorders. Four, in fact. Nothing to get overly concerned with, any person taking the test will probably have a few disorders identified. You have Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Ideation, and Social Phobia.”

“No pills.”

“But you’re already medicating yourself, and in all the wrong ways. Don’t you want to feel happy and at peace with yourself?”

“It’s not about being happy. I want to feel life, experience the full spectrum emotions. Live dangerously, sail my ships into uncharted seas. I want to open the doors of perception. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”

“Okay, now you’re just quoting directly from Nietzsche and Jim Morrison.”

“Jim who?”

“So you think the magic is ‘out there?” the counselor asked, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.

“I hope so, because it sure as hell is not in Iowa.”

“So leave.”

“Leave?”

“Go on a road trip. See the country. Take the grand tour.”

“But I can’t. I don’t have any money. I’ve got my classes—“

“You’re flunking all of your classes.” The counselor dropped the notepad in his lap and raked his fingers through his hair. “Look, you’re dying. You’re killing yourself with this behavior, and you keep putting yourself into dangerous situations where you leave the choice of life and death to chance. You are not a happy person.”

A thought came to the young writer. “There’s Odlef. He’s a friend of mine, a Dutch foreign exchange student that lived in the dorm. We used to get drunk together a lot.”

“About the drinking—you need to stop.”

“Not likely. So this grand tour thing, you mean like how the young English aristocrats would travel around Europe, visiting museums, playhouses, operas?”

“Yes, it was considered a right of passage and that their exposure to European culture, art, and history would complete their education.”

“Odlef is back home now in Amsterdam. Could you get my Mom to pay for one of those train passes?”

“The Eurorail. Yes. I mean, no. It’ll be up to your mother whether she thinks this is a good idea, but I will recommend to the dean that you take a break from school without penalty. And I would like to talk with you mother, if you approve.”

“To convince her about this trip?”

“To talk about your issues, and about what kind of therapy that I can recommend.” The crestfallen look from the student stirred up his sympathy, and he added. “This treatment just might include Gestalt therapy, which essentially focuses on the experience of life; ‘send your ships into uncharted seas,’ as you said.”

As they wrapped up their session, the counselor couldn’t help envying the student, despite his mental anguish and inner turmoil. The boy was bright, literate, creative, and he would be headed on the grand tour that the counselor had never experienced. What kind of inspiration might he find while strolling the halls of the Uffizi, gazing up to the Sistine ceiling, breathing in the Parisian night air?

Getting My Land Legs

2010-06-20T16:08:00.001-05:00

photo by flickrzak.

I’ve been out to sea for too long, working a small fishing boat, surrounded by nothing but water and a crew of derelicts, scoundrels, swine. The Captain was not so nice of a guy, either, as he set out to rob us of our half of the profits after the catch was hauled out of the sea. His plan? To toss half the crew overboard. I complied by taking the ankles, he the shoulders, and my bargain was that I could live.

As I stepped off the boat and back on dry land, I was struck with stage fright. The spotlights of street lamps blinded me, along with the attentive stares of passers-by along the sidewalks, looking at me as though they knew I had drowned my shipmates, and that each of them had been one of their loved ones. Which they probably were.

I stumbled through shrubbery and down shady lanes of elm trees. Women were everywhere, of all shapes, sizes, and colors; I was a kid in a candy store but no money with which to buy a gumball. I could beg, bribe . . . or steal. The sea washed me of my ability to commit crimes, but did not cleanse me of my proclivity for sin.

Come now, no need to stumble down damp alleys lined with stinking dumpsters, when pretty summer lanes stretch from here to the cornfields. I’d rather use this stick in my hand to drag across white picket fences than to poke dead rats. Look at those freshly trimmed hedges, ivy covered brick homes, and white mailboxes with the red flag lifted up. A little brown dog lies unleashed in the lawn, heavy lidded eyes, panting in the sun.

Something has to happen, right? I can’t just wander around town all day without a care in the world. There’s something I must care about, someplace I belong, or somebody I’m running from. Who am I going to see? Where’s my wife, my kids, my dog? Which neighbor double crossed me, and where is my mother buried? Each time it takes a little longer to regain my land legs.

Getting My Land Legs

2010-04-24T15:07:00.002-05:00

photo by Federico Erra.

My creative funny bone has not been smacked in quite some time. How do I get back to that place inside my head, how do I find that playground of my youth? My lack of inspiration is evident even in the storyline of my dreams. Now, when I feel bored, I reach for the cheap escape of “Desperate Housewives”, or catch “Sherlock Holmes” at the discount theater, or I play hours of solitaire on my iPhone. I search for high-priced gadgets to distract me, while what my soul really requires is something as simple as pen and paper. We compromise: an hour on my laptop for a little stream-of-consciousness. The lowest priced effort for the would-be writer.

Out of the morning mist emerges a tea house, about a hundred yards from the docks. Inside gather Harajuku girls, professors, grandmothers. Drifters slink to the shadows of the back room, sipping their oolongs and nibbling dried scones like the rats down at the pier.

In the front room by the portrait window, huddled in overstuffed chairs with their feet propped on footstools, the silver-hairs click their knitting needles and unravel infinite balls of yarn. I sneak down the back hallway towards the store room, riddled with crates of tea. There’s a cracked cellar door leading to the basement, where century old wine casks lay broken amid the cobwebs and dirt floor, the stains of their contents still discernable on floor, or is that blood? In the center sits a small round table with the melted stub of a candle where the tea shop owner escapes from the bustle of the shop to read through his wife’s diary.

I leave through the coal chute and head further inland. Dogs bark all over town, lunging into the dark but snapping back in mid-leap as they reach the end of their leashes. Dark clouds roll in, electricity in the air, green skies ready to hatch. Children on their bikes pedal hard for the hill from which to watch the storm pass. One giant lightning rod, that hill. They don’t know the danger in which they put themselves. Twelve years ago Sally was struck and lived, followed by her prolonged hospital stay with her fried nerves, muscle twitches, blackouts. People plied her for visions embellished on her through the lightning bolt. She waited for supersensory abilities, but no such magic came. She told them that the rare honor of being struck by lightning and living was like a steel rod being pounded from the crown of her skull through her spine and out through her heel bone, and that was all, yet people still asked her if she could pass on a message to their dead mothers, what day of the year they should plan for their wedding to ensure a lasting marriage, or where they could find their car keys. In frustration she started to make up answers. She was right almost every time.

Abuse the Brain, Hobble the Mind

2010-04-03T12:59:00.001-05:00

photo by maytevidri OUT GR & MDZ.

My mind is hobbled. Why must I jam pointed objects into my brain all of the time? Why do I throw old blankets over it and kick it around? Why douse it in alcohol, prescription drugs, late-night TV, and then set it on fire?

My mind is my adversary. It wields too much power over me, too easily breaks me into submission. I hate the shadow it casts over every sunny spot in which I pause to stand awhile. It bickers constantly with me and won’t listen to reason, and I believe that if I dull it, life will be easier. Easier to live, yes, because it was so incapacitating to have these obsessions, these glaringly bright epiphanies shooting off like firecrackers, that…okay, just shut up now. Let’s not get into all that. Best not entertain these thoughts because then they will become encouraged and verified, they will gain confidence and think they can just butt in any old time they want when all I really want is a little peace and quiet.

So I manage to dampen it, tamp it down. Drink does not help really, let’s be honest. While it gives me a vacation from my mind, it also opens floodgates of feelings, something I’m told are “emotions,” and now I have to deal with a whole new sensation. This liberation is too hard to shake off when the drunkenness wears off.

So with the abuses of the brain -- a smidgeon of serotonin uptake inhibitors here, a dose of neurotransmitter suppressors to the limbic system there -- I end up with a brain that barely limps along, and when I want to put my full weight on it, it can’t hold up. Today is one of those days. I awake from a ten hour sleep and find that it is impossible to get out of bed.

I know what you’re thinking, but keep your clinician to yourself; I’m not particularly sad. It is much more physical than that. It has less to do with the mind and more to do with the brain, like I said, before, that time with the metaphor, that thingy...well you get the picture. It don’t work.

I call in sick to work, barely make it out of the bed to the sofa. The sun has spilled light all over the living room floor. Have to clean that up later, but for now, I want to watch out the window for a while. Two boys are running across the park with red plastic sleds in hand, heading for the snow covered hill. Their names? Let’s see; Dan Blom and Edward Jowicke. They skipped school and run with so much energy for the top of the hill. They know when they slide down and get to the bottom, they’ll get detention, but who cares? It’s worth it. Look at them go, bouncing over bumps, the scrape of packed snow speeding under them, their laughter traveling across the snow even while they slide down to their demise, but it was fun for a while. So what if they get locked away in a detention room? As soon as the principal turns her back, they will make another escape.

Hidden Doorways

2010-03-28T14:54:00.007-05:00

photo by frogmuseum2

After he bought a 1920’s Cape Code style home, he felt impelled to install hidden doors, miniature windows looking onto bonsai gardens, figurines of elves and gnomes perched in the many nooks and crannies particular to older homes. Things fantastical, mythical, or just a little kooky. He remembered a visit to his aunt’s house once as a child, with overgrown apple trees crowding the windows with their limbs. Looking out the kitchen window, he could see a wiry bird’s nest on the crook of a branch, with a half eggshell and a rubbery looking chick popping its head out. He stared and stared, but the chick never moved. “It’s fake, isn’t it?” he asked doubtfully. “Oh no,” his aunt said. “It’s real. See, he just blinked.” His older cousins backed up her story. “Oh, it’s real alright,” they snickered. He checked on the baby chick every morning to see if it had moved yet, until finally his brother said “Don’t be a dumbass, its rubber. Can’t you see that?” But his aunt immediately came to his defense, “Oh no. It’s real. See, it moved its wing,” and she winked at him, as though the fact that it was real was their little secret.

On the last day of their visit, he was watching the chick from the window and said to his aunt, “The momma bird never shows up to feed it. It’s going to die.” She sat him on her lap and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s not real. It’s a tree ornament that I put up there in the Spring.” It wasn’t until after she fessed up that he finally saw it move. Everybody laughed at him.

He wanted to put something at the base of the giant elm tree by his driveway. Maybe a tiny wooden door in the trunk, and a white picket fence. He wanted to plant ivy at the side of the house so that it would crawl up the chimney brick, and he could lodge elves in the brambles, peeking their heads out of the leaves. Maybe in the guestroom, in that little cupboard door cut into the outer wall to get at the insulation, he could place a hand-bound journal written by a made-up child that lived in the room twenty years ago, documenting all of the weird creatures that come out of hiding during the night. Now, all he needed was a nephew or niece to make it real.

"The Book Thief," by Markus Zusak

2010-03-21T18:45:00.005-05:00

I finished “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak, and immediately started reading it again. When I come across a book that achieves something unusual, I like to read it twice: once as a reader, and second as a writer. That second reading allows me to try to see how he does it, not that this will reveal all of the young Aussie’s tricks.

What is unusual about this book? The first thing: you wouldn’t expect a book narrated by Death himself, about Nazi Germany and a foster girl’s family hiding a Jew in their basement, to capture so much beauty. The dichotomy of humankind, the capability for both brute ferocity and tenderness all within one species, in one country, in one city during an infamous moment of time…well, it even makes Death take notice: “I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

Zusak sums up what the book will be about on the fifth page:
“It’s just a small story really, about, among other things:
* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
*A Jewish fist fighter
*And quite a lot of thievery”

The girl is a nine-year-old foster child named Liesel, given up by her Communist mother to stay with a couple in a small town outside Munich. Her younger brother dies on the train, and it is during her brother’s burial that she steals her first book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook.” She doesn't even know how to read yet, but she senses the power of books and how they will hold the key to what is happening to her.

Her foster mother is a squat, harsh woman with a penchant for swearing, who holds within her a combination of both cruelty and love, in keeping with the book’s theme. Her foster father, however, is all kindness, spreading a quiet calm around him. “When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.”

He sits up with her after she awakens from nightmares, and at her request, teaches her to read with her first stolen book, “The Gravediggers Handbook.” With her faithful friend Rudy—a boy that always tries to negotiate a kiss from her—she goes on to steal several other books from the unlikely sanctuary of the Mayor’s personal library. It is not until after her foster parents hide a runaway Jew in their basement that words break free from their books and become a tool in her hands for capturing and understanding the world around her.

She tries to bring to him the beauty of the outside world. “The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole…” As Death describes it, “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”

The aware reader will also notice the concentric circles of what is going on here, the matryoshka dolls each tucked one within the other. While Leisel is discovering the power of words, so too is the author, in this rare experience of writing a book that would soon capture the world’s attention. Zusak’s short, staccato rhythm of words might first distract the reader, but after about ten pages, I began feeling the effect. Short blasts, like gunshots, but impactful:

“That last time.
That red sky…
How does a book thief end up kneeling and howling and flanked by a man-made heap of ridiculous, greasy, cooked up rubble?
Years earlier, the start was snow.
The time had come. For one.
***A SPECTACULARLY TRAGIC MOMENT***
A train was moving quickly.
It was packed with humans.
A six-year-old boy died in the third carriage.”

It was during my second reading of the book that I could truly appreciate the care with which Zusak rewrote the later drafts of his novel, with that omniscient knowledge of all that would come later and weaving it into the story. He excuses this prescience with the vehicle of Death as narrator. For many readers, this broken timeline may be confusing and frustrating, but for others it will add another layer of meaning to the text. Poignant, bitter sweet scenes colored with the knowledge of what will come.

Before each part or chapter, it is like Zusak shares with us his outline:
“PART EIGHT
The word shaker
Featuring:
dominos and darkness—the thought of
rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s
wife—a collector—the bread eaters—
a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—
and the anarchist’s suite collection”

Humans are capable of great beauty and brutality. So too are words. On one hand, words are used by Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to spread the Nazi propaganda, while on the other, Liesel’s stolen books provide her with grateful escape. In the Mayor’s library, she sits among a pile of “the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brim of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
You bastards, she thought.
You lovely bastards.
Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.”

She comes to learn, as she starts to write down her own experience in a notebook that she will title “The Book Thief,” that words are not meant to make the world beautiful or ugly. “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

Those are Liesel’s words, but they are also Zusak’s. In an interview with the author, he explains how the book is about trying to find beautiful moments in an ugly time. Inspired by a family story about a German boy giving a piece of bread to an old Jew being marched through the town, he explains, “On one hand, you've got pure beauty, which is the boy giving the bread, and on the other you've got pure destruction, which is the soldier whipping the old man for taking the bread. You put those two things together, and you've got humans."

Eleven Years Ago Today

2010-03-11T07:47:00.001-06:00

photo by moonjazz.

Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:

I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.

Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.

I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.

Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.

I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.

Conversations with a Dead Dad

2010-02-28T17:48:00.002-06:00

photo by ARTeTǝTЯA ( Too much busy elsewhere :( ).

Forget about it, Son. Forget about work and all the meetings there. Forget about the re-orgs and what your employees think of you. Forget about the newspaper this morning, and headlines of earthquakes and tsunamis, of political lambasting and financial collapse. Come on over, come here to me. We’ll rest up a bit. Breathe deep, calm yourself. Look at how the sun melts the snow. It almost smells like Spring, doesn’t it? Your favorite season, I remember. It’s not here yet, though. There will be plenty of winter nights to light a fire. You remember how I always put on too many logs, and your mom would complain how hot it was? Nothing is more nostalgic for you than the smell of wood smoke. But those days weren’t without their stress either. Even hearing my voice again makes you nervous. It’s ironic that I should be the one to comfort you now, when back then I was anything but. Even now, when you hear that voice filling you with self doubt, it’s my voice. When you think your ideas are stupid, it’s me that shoots them down even before you utter them. But forget about that now, son. Forget about the jolt of fear when your school bus would drop you off and you would see my car in the driveway, home early from work. Forget about the sound of my raised voice calling out for you when I found something you broke. Forget about my temper. Come on over, come here to me now. Breathe deep. Calm yourself. See the sun. Hear the wind in the trees. Smell Spring just around the corner.

Ghost of the Bayou

2010-02-21T11:29:00.009-06:00

photo by quizz....

Dive down into the abyss. The swamp. The bog. Light plays beneath the mire, even in the deep hours of night. The illumination is Sally, the ghost of the bayou, killed and dumped here by a man hiding his crimes in the remotest of locations. Only, her spirit turns his grim playground into something wonderful, a place of beauty. Bayou Sally is not a spirit of anguish but one of celebration, a soul turned joyous for this conversion by a murderer to her true spirit, set free in this part of the land so teaming with life. She sings. She dances in the eddies of water, lounges upon the backs of alligators, wears snakes around her neck. Wild orchids are tiaras in her hair.

The killer returns to deposit another body. This next spirit is more of what one might expect - forlorn and tortured, wailing throughout the night at the brutal interruption to her life. Bayou Sally looks upon her with distaste, anger at the disruption to her home, and drives her out. If the killer insists upon bringing her more visitors, then she must persuade him to find suitable victims to fill out her court; to entertain her, love her, dress her in palm fronds and place irises in her hair.

She sings into his ear, and fevered visions crowd his mind. Over the next several months, he brings her two youths to play with her the games of her childhood, then an elderly aunt to knit her shawls of ivy and vine, then two ladies in waiting to serve her, and a young man to fawn over her. There's one place left at her table, she decides, and she needs a soul to match hers: strong and virile, cruel with passion and devoted to her happiness, and it is with this last persuasion that Bayou Sally turns from princess to queen, arm looped in the arm of her husband, as the killer takes his last victim.

Flavors of Crazy

2010-02-14T12:20:00.002-06:00

photo by Midnight-digital.

She was crazy. Utterly nuts. I knew even before I had officially met her. I could tell when I first saw her behind a booth at a software conference in Las Vegas. She was one of those six foot tall, leggy women in a tight tee-shirt of a software vendor, as though she was one of the programmers, peddling a handful of flyers to the throngs of computer geeks. Black hair all tangled up in a bird’s nest, and these little black eyes like pebbles in her face. I sensed it right away; she was a bipolar carnival perched atop her high heels. For some reason I had always been drawn to the crazy ones. Later that night at the conference party I saw her again, only this time the roles were reversed and she was the target audience, with the computer geeks marketing their come-on lines and clumsy attempts at flirtation. After a few gin and tonics, I felt a need to assert myself as the alpha male of this inferior gene pool and took my shot. She ended up bar hopping with me and one of my coworkers, even though she didn’t drink. Mixed poorly with her meds, I figured, but she had no problem watching me drink for eight hours, and then followed me back to my hotel room.

Only flashes of memory, like some “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” montage, the silhouette of beauty that turned monstrous in too direct of lighting, the fuzziness of alcohol giving way to flashes of lucidity, disorientation, regret. Were those wrinkles and scars in the dark, or did the alcohol send me off into some kind of delirium? Who was this wrapped in the bed sheets the next morning? She quickly got ready in the bathroom and left, leaving a lipstick message on my mirror “Bye Sweetheart” with a heart drawn underneath. That was my first clue that she had a flair for the dramatic.

I was too hung over to attend that day’s conference sessions, but she had the vendor floor to work. She called me later that afternoon and came by the hotel lobby to talk, saying she didn’t want me to think this was a regular occurrence for her, that she was recently divorced and going through some stuff, and that there were no expectations, but she thought I was somebody special and sweet. Some shit like that. We hugged when she left and exchanged business cards.

The next week at work, I got a package mailed to me. It was a vintage Batman lunchbox (must have been something I said during my drunken binge), filled with Halloween themed decorations: orange and black tissue paper, confetti in the shape of pumpkins and black cats, a CD of Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London.” There were homemade cookies, and stickers of ghouls and goblins on the inside of the lunchbox. I got razzed by the guys in the office, but it made me smile. I thanked her in an email, and she responded that she just happened to be in town for a vendor exhibit next week, so we could go on a real date if I was interested. I thought “Sure. Why not?” I resisted offering her to stay at my place, and found out which hotel she would be staying at.

I should have suspected something was not right when her hotel was nowhere near the convention center. She said she needed to find one with an oven. I found out why when I picked her up. She had baked me three dozen cookies. She apologized for how many there were, but she wasn’t sure if I’d prefer the chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, or the traditional chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I usually don’t go for nuts, but it looked like tonight I would be stuck with one that night.

I’ll skip describing for you the obligatory dinner, or how despite all of the warning signs I was still attracted to her, and that if she lived halfway across the country, I couldn’t really be in that much danger, could I? Instead, let’s jump ahead to the post-sex pillow talk at my place.

She had been bulimic at one point in her teenage years, then an obese binge eater, and now she had some sort of band wrapped around her stomach that had turned her skinny. The skin hung off her bones like an old blanket, in places. There were scars on the insides of her thighs where excess skin had been removed. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I go after a nice normal girl, like Christine’s friend, the geeky one with horn rimmed 60’s glasses, but kind of cute and funny? But in a moment, even this unhinged woman would be rejecting me.

After she told me about her bulimia, did I offer her a hug? I thought; okay, this just happens to be her flavor of crazy, compared to all of the other flavors out there, including my own. I clinically listened, nodded my head much like I imagined a therapist would do, and stayed at a safe distance. But she needed more. A sad sympathetic face and a tilt of the head. A hug. An “awww, come here you,” with arms held out.

When I missed my cue, she turned on me. Accusations flew. Why did I seem so stand-offish, now? Why didn’t I show more emotion? I tried to cover with stories of my own scarred childhood, an emotionally distant father, and how maybe I was unconsciously trying to become like him; a rock, an island. Why did I always conjure up Simon and Garfunkel lyrics when a woman put me on the defensive? It didn’t have much effect on her though, and she went on bitterly about the flat-lined men in her life, making me feel increasingly guilty until I felt like I was in some long term relationship when this was ONLY DAY THREE with this person.

Then I found my honesty and spoke up, “No I am not comfortable with you spending the night, and yes I think you’re a little bit crazy for baking me a batch of three-dozen cookies and sending a Halloween box to my work, and yes I think it would be a good idea if I drove you back to your hotel room right now!”

During the tense car ride to her hotel, she informed me that she would be flying out immediately, that there was no conference and that she had spent all of this money just to come see me, but good riddance to me. When I got back home, I sighed a breath of relief. Okay, brush my teeth: two times. Shower: two times. Wash the bed sheets: three times. She was almost erased, except the cookies hung around for another week. She made damn good cookies.

Postscript: She mailed two CD’s shortly afterwards. One was a forty-five minute burned monolog of how angry and hurt she was. Odd that she felt the need to capture this in a recording rather than an email or letter. Also odd how she somehow looped around from a tirade about that night and how cruel I was, to an introspection of her self-worth, to how I was so wonderful and caring on that first night when I was drunk at the convention, to eventually how I showed characteristics of an innocent, sensitive side that she would miss. I thought about posting it on YouTube. The other CD contained every possible cover of the song, “I am a Rock.” She was clever; I had to give her that.

Expeditions in the Cold

2010-01-10T22:13:00.003-06:00

photo by davebrosha.

Arctic air slid down off the iron range and pooled around the Twin Cities. Each morning I woke up with my steaming pot of coffee and turned on the radio to hear the latest temps: -19 degrees, with a high of -5 planned for later in the day. It was warm inside, the furnace almost never turning off. I went down to check on it, touching one of its aluminum vents, and quickly drew back my singed fingertip. At least if I burned down the house, I would be warmed in its glow until the fire died out, and who cares what happens after that? The wind chill would carry me off to someplace else.

In the evenings, I drank brandy and escaped this place altogether. From my den, with snifter in hand and a few good books spread around my lazy-boy, I could dip in and out of various novels that had somehow escaped me in my youth; “Treasure Island,” “A Wrinkle in Time.” Sometimes Jung would interpret the symbols of my dreams. When I really stretched out these nights, I picked up my pen and that handmade little notebook my sister had given me years ago. I wrote down the string of words that came from who knows where, telling me things that I always had trouble understanding. If I was lucky, the ink would dry quickly enough to freeze the feeling to be deciphered later, but more often than not the dry air evaporated all essence from the ink so that I was left with a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.

Huh. Interesting. Something is forcing me to remain here writing. I keep trying to go on the internet but get failure messages, pages that can’t be found, proxies that can’t be bypassed. This is good; I’m excited about this news. Somebody is sabotaging me. At least something out there is listening, a paramour of the other side blitzing my motherboard, sending binary critters to rewire my router to guide me down a different route--to here: another empty page, but with words poised at the ready.

The cold even gets to me here, in a room puckered dry from a space heater. I make believe this cold comes from arctic winds howling around a science outpost, a circle of tents huddled on ice-flats at the tip of the world. We are beyond the rim of the sun’s route. There is hardly any sign of life on these stretches of ice, and I would never have realized, without having been here, that this also results in a lack of death. I have always mourned the lack of death; it leaves nothing for contrast. We have come in search of oil, at least that is the mission of the team that has allowed me to tag along to report on their progress. I come in search of something completely different, something captured in oracular visions, in hieroglyphs that modern words can’t translate, and by a side of myself I let few people see. It is only within the arctic circle that I feel safe enough to explore it further.

That is, until the brandy runs out, and the candle sputters down, and I fall asleep in the chair. I wake to the radio forecast: a warming trend is on the way. Finally. I wonder what a thaw will bring.

Beware the Jabberwock

2010-01-03T11:54:00.001-06:00

artwork by: Teodoratan

Hear these somnulary baby gurgles in linen wraps. Dry docked night suspended in evervescent crushed velvet. The dredger stalled in Oakley swamp in the bulge of bioforge greenmunge. The lily blooms have bereft our noonside gardens, trilled to naughtingshire brambles and den. We cleaned the glen of all woodland sea nymphs and glypheril. These dragwired fairies of the crescendo moon, guilty of the lurid pose and pansy musk, expunge the triple goading of flesh and blood and bone.

Always the Last Customer

2009-09-27T15:25:00.002-05:00

photo by Dragon Weaver.

I am about to become the sole patron at the TeaSource on a cold, windy Friday night. From just a few yards down the sidewalk, a movie house expels crowds of couples at various stages of dating, families catching the latest Pixar animation, teenagers squawking in little flocks that quickly form, break apart, and just as quickly gather again.

Here I am, sitting alone at a side table in this quiet, warm little tea shop. Somber music plays faintly over the room. A college-aged shop girl ignores me from behind the counter. Or is she wondering what the hell I am doing here on a Friday night, the only customer that remains? This is how I choose to live my life, peacefully, cognizant, introspective, and solitary. There it is, that word that holds such allure for me; the solitarian.

A second employee appears. They rotate taking their breaks in the back room or skirting outside with a cell phone held to the ear. This new tea-girl packs up boxes for catalog orders. She pours looseleaf tea into tinfoil bags, seals them, slaps labels onto boxes, all of the while chewing on her gum and sniffling. Tea powder gets in the nasal passages, causes a tickle you can’t scratch.

People shuffle past the shop window, shoulders hunched against the wind. Maybe it is the cold wind outside, or the fact that I am alone in a teashop on a Friday night, but the Feist song playing over the speakers has never sounded so solemn. I think of going home and playing her CD in its entirety, but I know that it won’t hold the same spell for me that it does here, in a warmly lit shop on Cleveland Avenue on a Friday night, out among people, watching them without interacting.

New customers arrive, families coming out of the cold for a cup of non-caffeinated herbal teas and lemon cakes for their children, newlyweds with their magazines or laptops, occasionally looking dejectedly at one another.

I eavesdrop on a young couple pitched forward on their chairs. It must be their first date; I can tell by how interested and happy they are with one another. I am glad that I can still feel happiness for them, being a divorcee that could instead be thinking jadedly of their naïveté. I feel their optimism warming the back of my neck. It wasn't so long ago that I felt the same thing, right? I feel it again through them.

I stay until the customers slowly filter out, and I’m once again the last customer. It’s time to close up shop, to finish my writing, but I want to end with something else, anything besides what is directly in front of me. I want to block out music in the teashop with the rhythm of words. Words that ring with their own music on the tongue, the harmony of vowels, the sharp staccato of consonants.

What do I see? Foothills flicker in the light of a campfire. Orange and yellow shadows play like silent films on the sand and brush. Burning logs collapse upon themselves, letting loose a spray of sparks like a burst of confetti falling skyward.

"The Song Is You" by Arthur Phillips

2009-08-30T08:54:00.003-05:00

I was looking for an entertaining read from a modern writer, something with some hype around it, and maybe a love story from a man's point of view. This one fit the profile, and was about inrequited love; even better.

Though it involved a middle-aged man and the mutual attraction with an Irish vocalist/songwriter on the brink of making it big, I think it was really about a man and his love for music. The way it takes just the right song at the right moment to bring out the strongest flavors of life. The way songs of our past can be a more potent memoir than photographs or diaries could ever be. The way "shuffle" on an iPod can be a direct line of communication with the fates.

It was good, not great. I found myself frequently being hit over the head with Phillips's wit, kind of like I felt with Wilde. I liked how well he showed us the passion and perfection-seeking of the audiophile. It also explored the pursuit of art under commercial influences. Our hunger for acceptance and praise, the need for accolades, but not at any price.

What the Cicadas Showed Me

2009-08-22T11:14:00.001-05:00

photo by Dave Allen Photography.

Listen to those Cicadas wailing away. There’s something distinctly electronic in their song, something strung out taut like a piano string wound too tight, something otherworldly. It is as though the circuitry of the planet is rewiring itself in preparation for the change of winter, only there is a cross-circuit somewhere nearby, a blip in the grid and the cicadas sound the alarm.

You become aware, through certain words, certain thoughts tuned to just the right frequency, that there is a thin curtain concealing mysteries from you and everyone else. Once in a great while, you catch a mere glimpse of what lies behind, but just enough to know that it is there. Despite the split second exposure of this secret, you know with absolute certainty of its substance, its fact, its truth, but how can you be so confident? Maybe within the brain there is a buried sensitivity, a sensory gland that you have done everything in your power to turn off, but at certain times, something triggers it. Like the sound of cicadas. Synapses fire up, microscopic lightning bolts light up the darkness of your subconscious: “Oh yeah. That’s right. I remember now.”

Then it’s gone. A soothing voice like that of a loving parent leaning over the bars of your crib says, “Ssssshhhh. It’s only cicadas. It’s late summer, and fall is coming. That’s all. You’ve heard them thirty seven times now, remember? Go to sleep. Fall back to sleep now…”

But the curtain stirs restlessly now, and what lies behind peeks out with increased frequency. You wait with impatient excitement for the curtain to be drawn and the show to begin.

Dream With Eyes Awake

2009-08-15T22:13:00.001-05:00

photo by Teodoratan.

There was this guy once who could begin to dream while he was still awake. He would stare at a certain spot in the room with unfocused eyes, begin breathing deep and regular, and then wait for the curtain to fall. Or rise, depending on which side you’re standing on. Once his thoughts took the form of images that began moving on their own, it was all he could do to hold back his excitement and maintain the balance of dream and wakefulness, like cupping his hand around a sputtering flame to shed just enough light on his subconscious.

What did he dream about in those moments between hemispheres? He dreamt of the cars he had stolen in his youth, submerged at the bottom of a lake after the wild rides across town had come to an end. He dreamt of beachfront mansions flooded by the tide, hallways filling with sand, water crashing at the base of a staircase, escape routes cut off, the foundation sliding into the sea. He dreamt of fishing in pools of water so clear that he could see the shadows of fish curling among the rocks, the glint of green scales. The line tugged as he caught a big one, but as he dragged it to shore he saw that the fish had long been dead.

All the while he dreamt, his eyes were open, scanning back and forth, up and down, fingertips twitching until, without reason, his eyes stopped their rhythmic movement and drew their focus back to the room at hand. He would start to laugh, or look sad, or still afraid as the dream wavered like drapes in an open window, dissolve away like cotton candy on the tongue.

Look What The Tide Brought In

2009-08-02T13:02:00.001-05:00

photo by Gayle_T.

The bum washed up on shore on a beautiful May morning, seaweed chained to his legs, a bottle of bourbon half drunk in his pocket, no message inside. Was his death a message to the town? The bay was a killer, and she was just getting warmed up for summer, waiting to claim unwary swimmers, fisherman that stayed out in the storms, the occasional suicide from a Bay Bridge leap. The bum was her calling card that the drowning season was just getting in gear.

The bum smelled badly. The woman who had discovered the body, taking her dog for an early morning jog, held her shirt-sleeve up to her nose and mouth when she brought over the police for introductions. Unwashed, sweaty, oily, and that was back when he was alive. The police recognized him, remembered his slight lisp, bags under his eyes, the way he wiped his nose nervously on a sleeve when children would point him out to their mothers. The bay had bathed him, but that didn’t help the smell. Instead of the stink of life it was the stink of death, the simple fact of how quickly we become so much meat the moment the spirit leaves the body.

They photographed, bagged and tagged him while the sun glinted off the water, and a cool breeze blew leeward. Seagulls dipped and weaved over the waves. Teenagers clambered into sailboats for a morning lesson, ropes clanging against the rigging like bells.

Chelsea's Violin

2009-07-25T14:01:00.001-05:00

photo by FeistyEily.

He was discharged from the army after the battle of Amiens, where he’d been hit by a shell on a Frenchman’s pockmarked dairy field. He left his leg beside a creek that looked like it would have been good for brook trout. What happened to brook trout during a war? he wondered from a hospital bed to pass the time. They sent him back home to Dover, England. His aunt had passed while he was at the Front, so now he returned to an empty cottage by the coast.

The quiet of the cottage wears on his nerves, as does the drone of fighter planes patrolling high above the cliffs of Dover at night. He tries to labor in the vegetable garden outside, but the lack of leg leaves him off-kilter. He waits by the fence for someone to come by, a chance to say hello. Scarved old ladies on their way to market. Trucks loaded with bleating sheep. After a while, a young woman comes by on her bicycle and smiles to him. He watches for her each morning but sees her only on Tuesdays, pedaling by with a violin case strung over her shoulder. He finds excuses to be by the fence, and one morning he asks her name and about the violin case.

“It’s actually a viola. Slightly bigger than a violin, a deeper sound.”

“They’re all just fiddles to me,” he jokes. “Would you play for me sometime?”

“I can’t,” she shakes her head. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

“Bollocks with proper. During these times?”

“Precisely during these times,” she says. She pulls her wrap around her shoulders, gives him a nod good-day and pedals away.

Maybe she feels as though she behaved too harshly to the maimed solider, for the next week she stops along the fence to play some notes for him, still sitting on her bicycle seat. She plays again the next week from within the garden gate, and she eventually joins him inside for tea in his aunt’s parlor. Their Tuesdays form a regular pattern where Chelsea joins him for a cup of tea and to play for him the latest pieces that she has been practicing. Also in the parlor is an old upright piano that has fallen out of tune. He says he could get a boy to come tune it if she would play. She says she can’t play, so there’s no use.

He almost loves watching her preparations as much as he loves the sound of the viola. He gazes on the curves and rich colors of the varnished wood so delicate that it could easily crush beneath his hands, but its beauty is such that he is compelled to corral his strength. He cannot refrain from running his fingertips along the grain. Its bridge is crooked, years of tension bending it forward. Rosin on the bow. The body cupped below her chin, then the stroking of the bow across the strings. Vibration deep in her belly. The moan of diminished F sharp, the cry of high C, the wavering vibrato along her neck.

Waiting for Something to Happen

2009-06-20T07:46:00.001-05:00

photo by carib being.

It is Friday night and I’m sitting in the tea shop with my laptop and trying to think of something to write. At this point, I would even settle for something to retool from the thousand-plus pages of my journal, but nothing appeals to me. Hundreds of possibilities, but they are all dead to me.

There’s nothing in my head, either. How could I be so empty? I’m calm and relaxed in the humid air of mid June. My limbs are heavy after having been worked to exhaustion during my morning chores around the house. What am I saying; I did a load of laundry and unloaded the dishwasher.

Maybe I don’t want to write because I have found myself in one of those down times, caught in a doldrum at sea with all of my sails whithering on the mast. I don’t want to write. Reading is fine, movies better. Even staring off into space or at the people filing down the sidewalk is better than writing. I soak everything up but give nothing back. How long will this last? Writing teachers say I should respect this time of incubation, or is it a convenient rationale for laziness? I don’t know, I won’t worry about it. I’m reading the Pen/O. Henry Prize stories of 2009. I’m watching Revoltionary Road and True Blood. I’m watching the leaves of the crab apple tree in my back yard turn yellow and fall to the ground with apple scab. I’m waiting for something to happen.

Stranger at the Door

2009-06-07T17:28:00.001-05:00

photo by Industry Is Virtue.

If I was to draw a character right now, and I mean bring him right through the front door and into the living room, who would he be? Let’s choose a villain. A man of moderate height, stocky, with a flattened nose like a boxer. Coarse whiskers grizzled black and gray. He wears a thick sweater of itchy wool the color of coal. Faded jeans. Black work boots. He looks like he works on a ship. The ledge of his brow darkens his eyes. He comes into the room, stomps the snow off his boots and onto my hardwood floors. He’s got a few flakes of snow in his hair that start to melt the moment he steps inside.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, I think it does. It helps me see you as real.”

“Real, huh? I’m talking to you right now. Doesn’t that make me real?”

“That helps. Helps a lot, but give me your name. Seriously.”

“Okay, it’s Kurt.”

“Interesting.”

“Why do you say that?” he asks. “Is it because it is the name of your childhood friend, the bad kid down the street who latched onto you that one summer? Kurt the bully.”

“Hey now, that’s not fair,” I reply, a little unsettled. “I’m the writer here. I get to know everything about you, but you’re not supposed to know about me. How did you know about him?”

“Because I come from the same place as your memories of Kurt. Kurt and I are from the same neighborhood, so to speak. I know all about him, how you used to play boot hockey at Meadow Lake rink, and about how he took a shit over the side of the boards once. You looked over the boards. It was steaming in the snow.”

“Gross! I don’t want to think about that.”

“And remember how he told you he walked in on his mom and dad having sex once? How did that go exactly? She was standing in front of him with her robe opened. Or was it that she was giving him a blowjob? That’s right, you learned the word blow job from Kurt. When you first heard it, you thought it must be like a “snow job,” where you rub snow in somebody’s face, so a blow job must be when you pin somebody down and blow in their face.” He snickers.

“Okay, I’ve had about enough of that. Are you him, only older now?”

“No. Kurt was just a troubled kid, a bad influence that your parents didn’t want hanging around. I’m a little more damaged than he was, a little more dangerous. I’ve still got some good in me, but something happened that made me turn.”

“Something about your sister?” I ask.

“Or was it my wife? Or did I lose a child? I don’t know, you tell me. You’re the writer.”

“You watched one of your buddies drown on a fishing boat in Alaska,” I decide. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Silver. It was the color of my dad’s fishing boat, the color of a Mercedes Benz, the color of bullets that kill werewolves, the color of the coins that bought chocolate ice cream cones for me and my big sister.”

“So we’re back to your older sister.”

He looks at me pensively. “Leave her alone, okay?”

“Don’t worry, she’s still around. But I think we have to do something with her. You know; plot-wise. But let’s get back to your buddy drowning in Alaska. Was it an accident?”

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Good, I don’t want this to be some TV drama about a murder on rough seas. So if it was an accident, what’s the problem?”

“It was my fault. I let the line go. It snapped tight, caught him by the legs, swept him overboard. I even had him by the arm for a few seconds, but my hands were slick with chum. He slipped away.”

“Sorry. So how does guilt turn you into a villain?”

“It wasn’t what happened on the boat. It was what came afterwards, when I got on land.”

We continued talking like this, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. I offered him tea, but he took coffee; strong, black, with a sprinkle of cocoa powder in it. The cocoa powder showed me that there was still a soft spot inside of him, and that he did not want to degrade into some tough guy, thug stereotype. We went back and forth until it got late, trying to figure out what had happened with him before finding his way to my house. Had he run into some trouble while hitching down from Alaska? Did he have a drinking problem, beat up a woman, or did he somehow get wrapped up in his older sister’s problems? He wanted to turn his life around; I could see that, but I could also see him fighting the compulsion to knock me unconscious, steal my ATM card and my car keys and go on the run.

For my own safety, I had to find a part for him, and fast. Trouble was, I had lied when I told him that I was not going to kill off his sister. She was already dead, and he had something to do with it. I had no proof of any of this, and I hadn’t written about any of it yet, but I saw it the moment he walked through the door and stomped snow all over my hardwood floors. To figure it out, I had to get him to tell me. It was a part of the process.

Death and Cats

2009-05-30T09:57:00.003-05:00

photo by Zero86.

A guy at work recently experienced the unfortunate loss of his mom, who died of cancer after a year-long series of misdiagnoses, chemotherapy, and pain management. “Pain management” sounds so abstract and antiseptic. We are not in the doctor’s office now, so let’s drop this façade of decorum and speak truly. It is more accurate to say “…a year of doctors making mistakes, of injecting poison into her body, of puking out her guts and watching herself slowly waste away in the mirror until becoming unrecognizable.” In the end, we greedily take the pills that deliver us from pain, even at the cost of losing our awareness. For most of us, it is even better to lose that awareness, because all thoughts are focused on the fact that death is real and it has finally arrived. It is no longer a concept, and we can’t stop wondering what is going to happen the moment the lights go out.

Westerners don’t deal with death gracefully, as we know. Our culture is wired more towards the here and now, and any thoughts about when we are gone gravitate immediately to the lives of our children, and often times for some odd reason, to how high their taxes are going to be. Spirituality is left to the mysterious meetings my neighbors and coworkers attend in dark, musty churches around the metro. I don’t know what they talk about in there--aside from the odd Christmas service, I have never attended church--but whatever is said, it doesn’t appear to prepare us to confront, or better yet “embrace,” our mortality.

Anyway, this is getting way heavier than I intended. I meant to tell you about the more curious episode of my coworker’s Mom and her pet cats. It was her wish that when she dies, her cats get put down. Upon hearing this, my first thought flashed to the ancient Hindu practice of the recently widowed wife leaping into her husband’s funeral pyre to accompany him into the afterlife. Yeah, that was a real thing, and you can read up about Sati on Wikipedia.

Why did his Mom want the cats put down? Probably to bring something loved and familiar with her into the unknown. If she didn’t believe in the afterlife, then maybe she was afraid nobody would take care of the cats and they would suffer. She knew that her surviving husband never liked cats.

During her last days, the kids tried to talk her out of it. There were other options, like the humane society and pet adoption. It raised ethical questions, particularly for those of us who consider an animal’s life as precious as human life. They were unable to change her mind.

The mom died. Debates started among the family. Emails shot back and forth about honoring their mother’s wish or finding a home for the cats.

The story gets fuzzy here, but there was some kind of miscommunication among the family members that voted to save the cats versus those that wanted to carry out their mother’s wish. My coworker’s brother was particularly passionate about honoring his mother’s memory. I think a decision had been reached to save the cats, but my coworker and his brother had not yet heard on the day they showed up at her house to gather up the cats. When they get to the house, the smarter of the two cats is tucked away behind the furnace. The dumber of the two was lying on the floor, watching these two men trying to catch the other cat. The brothers knew that if they put the dumber cat into a carrier first, the other cat would know something was up and would never come out. But like I said, it was a smart cat and already seemed to know what was going on.

So they caught the cats, brought them to the vet, and had them put down. I know, it is a sad ending. I was rooting for the cats too. I think it is wrong to proclaim a death sentence to a loved pet when we die, but I also know there’s enough fuel here to debate either side. Debates about right and wrong are not my thing. Instead what intrigues me about this is the parallel with Cancer coming out of nowhere, chasing after the mother during the months of her treatment, and finally putting her down. Maybe the brother that was passionate about honoring her memory found some kind of comfort in assuming the role of grim reaper and reenacting the ruthlessness of mortality.

Soft or Hard G

2009-05-23T17:04:00.005-05:00

I actually wrote this a couple of years ago, but it fits with my recent Tea theme:

She was brewing a pot of green tea with mango behind the counter when Eric walked into the tea shop. Eric of the Earl Grey White Tip, Eric of the soft brown eyes and books tucked under his arm like "Madam Bovary" or "Pride and Prejudice" or "Interview with the Vampire." Eric of the occasional female friend that none of the girls behind the counter could figure out if he was married to, dating, or divorcing, but the woman had not been with him for the past few months.

She hurried to get the green tea brewed for the other customer so she could move on to Eric. She felt a stirring in her body as she prepared the tea with a honed awareness of Eric standing next in line, a stirring not unlike the warm water in the pot, the swirl of green tea leaves and yellow flakes of mango, the sensuous smells carried on the curls of steam. As she watched the slow unfurling of the leaves in the hot water, she remembered that this motion was called the “agony of the leaves.”

Finally, she finished with her customer and he stepped up to the counter. She did her best to sound composed, "Good morning, would you like the usual Earl Grey with White Tip?"

Eric scanned the board for today’s specials. "How about Rose Congou. Or is it pronounced Conjou? Is the G soft or hard?"

Why was the pronunciation of the soft or hard G the most erotic experience she had had in weeks? She felt her cheeks burning as she considered various responses: "You can have it either soft or hard, depending on your mood," or "The G is hard, like orgasm." But instead she replied, "It depends, I hear it pronounced both ways. I think the owner says "Congou" with a hard G.”

"I'll have a pot of that, and a ginger cookie, or should I say GinGer?" Eric said, smiling. She laughed a little too loudly and tipped over the canister of tea, dried rose petals and dark leaves spilling across the counter. As she wiped them off with the palm of her hand, she thought about knocking everything off of the counter in one passionate motion, hopping up and pulling him atop her, “Take me here, take me now!” But instead, she only managed a chipper, “Anything else for you today?”

“No thanks,” he replied, and she punched his frequent drinker’s card. One more and he’d get a freebie.

Molly on the Far Shore

2009-05-16T11:07:00.003-05:00

photo by *amber e*.

A young woman wore a summer dress and danced in the sun on the far side of the river. Her name was Molly, a redheaded Irish girl with green, green eyes like pale green tea. Her large family of redheaded siblings and redheaded parents and aunts and uncles picnicked on a nearby knoll. On the other side of the river, a young boy stood on a sandbar and watched her dance. Even from across the water, he could see the green of her eyes and her red, red hair. He concentrated on ways to get across; surely he could beat the currents, he thought. Maybe with enough longing, he could overlook the fact that he never learned to swim. Maybe he could hold open his coat like sails and catch a strong wind gusting down the valley. He watched her twirl and felt his spirit grow light enough to lift him up, but his feet remained anchored to the shore. He scrambled twenty yards up the shoreline to a small boat pulled onto the sand, tied to a willow tree. He fumbled with the rope, but he couldn’t figure out the secrets of the knot.

A young boy sat in a wooden boat tied to a tree. Molly danced on the far shore.

Giving Dad a Shave

2009-05-11T07:44:00.002-05:00

photo by cristal78023.

William was sitting on his mother’s lap, leaning back into the crook of her shoulder while the family watched television, only his father wasn’t looking at the screen. He was scowling at William. “Boy, you’re eleven now. You shouldn’t still be sitting in your Momma’s lap.”

“Leave the boy alone,” she said. “You’re still my baby, aren’t you?” she teased, hugging him close, but William started to squirm away as he watched his father. He had always been intimidated by the cigar smoking, gruff man, but now he studied him closer. He felt that inevitable tug as a boy starts to cross the threshold of boy to man, the trepidation of leaving the protective wing of his mom, and yet drawn to those masculine instincts just starting to form. He noted the way his father chewed on the cigar at the corner of his mouth, the casual tilt of the whiskey glass in his hand. That night he heard his mother and father arguing in their room. William tucked his head under the pillow, buried himself beneath the sheets and tried to become invisible.

Each night his father came home from work, his mother needed to give William a push to go hug him. His whiskers scratched the boy’s cheek. When he slipped off his shoes, his black stocking feet stank. William had the job of putting his shoes in the closet, and hanging his father’s hat on a peg. He ran his fingers over the felt brim, smoothed the brown feather tucked into the sweat stained band.

He turned twelve that summer, the last summer vacation before he would have to start working, and he spent his days secretly trailing after his father from twenty yards back, to and from the plant, in the evenings when he’d stumble out of the bars, on the weekends when he would run his errands. He adopted the way his father would lean against a wall or a tree with one leg cross over the other and propped on a toe. He carried change in his pockets and jingled the coins when he’d walk down the sidewalk. He learned to spit into the sand without getting any on his chin. He substituted a toothpick for the cigar and sucked on it all day, shifting it from one side to the other using only his mouth.

Now when his dad came home from work, there were no more hugs, but his dad grinned proudly, ruffled the boy’s hair, slapped him on the shoulder and told him to go get him a glass of whiskey, “two fingers high, no ice. And no sipping,” he chided, shaking a finger at his son. When the boy returned with the glass, he said, “Okay, you can have a little sip,” as though relenting, but William hadn’t asked. He took a small taste anyway, just enough to wet his lips. It burned.

That weekend, he tailed his father as he went on another of his errands, this time to the barber shop for a cut and shave. William’s mom still cut his hair, but something about the barber shop drew him. He had only been there once a few years ago, but remembered the checkered tile floor, the smell of pipes and cigars, and a baseball game playing on the radio. His dad never wanted him to come along, for some reason, so he followed him in secret and waited from behind a tree across the street. After twenty minutes, his dad came out with a clean shave, trimmed hair, and his arm slung around the barber’s sister. They disappeared up the stairs leading to a small apartment above the shop. The blinds dropped shut. Half an hour later, his father came slinking out of the building and around the coiled barber pole and swaggered toward home.

Back at the dinner table, he watched this man accept food from his mom without a hint of guilt or regret, watched him tell her the pork was overcooked and the peas too cold. The next time he announced that he was going for a cut and a shave, William followed. Once again, his father came out of the shop with the barber’s sister and disappeared upstairs to the apartment. William balled up all of the fury a boy of twelve can muster, ran into the barber shop, grabbed the straight razor off the sink, and stomped up the stairs with a man’s bearing instead of a boy’s. He slashed his father forty times and left the barber’s sister untouched but soaked in the blood of his father. “That’s for momma. It’s you that was never good enough.” He dropped the razor, walked out of the apartment, and disappeared into the streets.

Divine the Right Tea

2009-05-03T14:58:00.005-05:00

Two tea girls work behind the counter in a nearly empty store. It is a beautiful Spring day. Who would want to be inside, drinking a hot cup of tea? Besides me. I’m here, drinking tea, thinking, writing. The tea girls are conscious of me, the sole customer sitting at a table and tapping away on a laptop. They seem to know that I'm writing about them, that maybe at this moment they are becoming characters in a story, novel, or poem. As they wipe down the counter, they laugh and whisper to each other, stealing glances to see if I’m watching. One of them laughs as she wipes the counter, “Here’s me cleaning. I wonder if I’ll become a Grecian maid wiping down the sculptures in a garden.” How self-conscious they must feel, like at a family gathering when somebody pulls out a video recorder. Or is it fun? I wouldn’t know. I’m usually on this side of the keyboard, this side of the camera, of the action, of the friends and family and lovers. I don’t like to be the subject of anything.

Steam rises from the pots of water, creating clouds of mist that they have to swim through. Oh come on; this begs to be captured in art, in poetry, but I’ll resist. I have never been good at poetry anyway. I am here to think about my next short story, the Tea House. Research, so to speak. What are the questions customers ask? What kind of people wander in off the sidewalk without a clue of what they want, while others march in with an order scribbled on lined notepaper? I’ve brought along my writing tools; post-it pads and bright yellow file folders to storyboard the characters and conflicts, jot down the many blends of tea that can be entwined into subplots as metaphors. How much can you tell about a character by the kind of tea they drink?

Most customers have no clue what they are looking for, other than a specific something or other that they can’t seem to describe without sweeping generalizations. “I had this great cup of tea at a restaurant once, you know, a Chinese restaurant, or was it Mongolian? something sweet? kind of flowery? or grassy? with a kind of astringent aftertaste?”

Somehow the tea girls divine what they are looking for, or make something up that sounds convincing. Some people just want to be assured and guided, and when she holds open a container for the customer to study and smell the leaves, they latch onto it right away: “Yes, that looks right. I’m betting that’s the one.” Others will never be satisfied, almost like they are intent on finding reasons why “no, that’s not quite right.”

I drink Magnolia Oolong, (catalog description: gently scented with magnolia blossoms so that the cup is light, sweet, floral and invigorating), but only when I’m at the shop. At home, I’m a completely different person. I am Imperial Gold Yunnan (…composed almost entirely of golden tips. It is stunning to behold. It steeps up thick, rich, velvety, sweet, and bold with a long lingering aftertaste and an almost tactile silkiness) or China Black Special (brews up very hearty, rich, and smooth with a pronounced sweet note, almost caramel like). Previously, there were phases of Earl Grey White Tip (…a large portion of white tips--the most prized leaf of the plant--and blended with the finest oil of bergamot available. Incredibly aromatic and flavorful.). There was a time when I was irrationally enamored with Blue Beauty (…brews up very aromatic, sweet, floral, and slightly spicy with a pronounced silky texture. The leaf is sprinkled with ginseng and licorice root, and then folded many times so you will get many steepings from the same leaf), until later I wondered, “what was I thinking?” like when you wake up beside someone you only barely remember from the night before. Early on, one of my first loves was Rose Congou. It’s gone now. There’s a story behind that one, but not for today. I need to do research. I need to eavesdrop on the family that has sat at a table beside me. I need to spy the titles of the books stacked beside an older woman who sits alone.

Hasn’t nine years in this tea shop gathered for me enough story material? I’m only stalling, now. I’ve drained the dregs of the pot. Time to go.

Figurines

2009-04-21T07:14:00.004-05:00

photo by brettanicus.

Once in a grand ol’ while, I see flowers burst from the carpet, blue skies wash across the ceiling, birds alight on the stems of reading lamps. Grasses, fields, clover, goldfish swimming in the candle pillars. Light the candle. The goldfish flicker and flutter. Dream of angels, devils, the wash of sacred water between my toes. I grew jungles out of potted palms, bayous in the turtle tank. The turtle spoke to me, “Mr. Wood, you’ve neglected me for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I can live off of two meals a week, but look at my paltry legs. Look at the thin reed of my neck. Where once there was strength, now there is decrepitude. The Barrister is coming today to have a word with you. I’ve asked him to be kind, as you have been to me over these last dozen years or so. But today is a day of reckoning, and the balance of owner vs. tenant, pet vs. man, slave vs. master will be pitched on its head. So I leave you with that forewarning, and for now, good bye.” The turtle withdrew his head into his shell, tucked in his legs so that only the tips of his claws peaked out, and curled his tail against is hind leg. How I wished I could have a shell.

So now I must wait for my visit from the Barrister; how shall I waste my time? Books wait on the shelves; Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Prince, Winnie the Pooh, but instead I reached for the etch-a-sketch. Such confines of control, only left or right, up or down, and the illusion of a curved line which is really only miniscule right angles traded off, one for the other. I drew a mountain, a palm tree, and a little house in the foothills. Then I turned it upside down, gave it a good shake, and it was all gone, mostly, swept by a sand storm.

How many figurines do I have in my room? Not pictures, but actual shapes? They come out of the woodwork, stretch their heads, blaze their colors and shake free their loose feathers to drift upon the floor. The parrot of the golden breast and fiery wings. I’ve waited a year for him to utter a word, but he only sits deep in thought. Across the way from him, the sullen Eeyore with droopy ears and eyes, a little tuft of black hair perched on the peak of his head like a bird’s nest, though surely not the parrot’s; he would require a more noble homestead to prop up those heavy thoughts that plague him. Then across the way, a naked man sitting on a rock, pitch black skin, great strength of limbs but weak of mind. We move on to the upper bookshelf, with no books displayed but only the artifacts I’ve gathered over the years, like my Grandmother’s English tea pot, two Japanese tea cups, a pipe that was a gift when I turned thirty—but back now to figurines; floating above these artifacts is a porcelain fairy with delicate lace wings, a halo of golden curls, with delicate and breakable features still intact.

There are more figures coming out of the fog. Three Grecian women with clasped hands encircle a pot, with no plants inside, only empty space. The bronzed faces of a man and woman, pitted at opposite sides of the room. And lastly, a rubber iguana perched on the window sill; I stare at him for hours to catch him moving, but he doesn’t even blink. Until I look away, at which time he scurries across the room into the palm fronds.

There's a knock at the door, and the turtle comes out of his shell. It must be the Barrister.

"Postcards" by E. Annie Proulx

2009-04-19T15:08:00.004-05:00

Just finished the novel “Postcards,” by E. Annie Proulx, author of “Shipping News.” From the back cover: “…the tale of the Blood family, New England farmers who must confront the twentieth century – and their own extinction. As the family slowly disintegrates, its members struggle valiantly against the powerful forces of loneliness and necessity, seeking a sense of home and place forever lost.”

It fell short of “Shipping News,” and was her first novel, I believe. It’s one of those storylines that traces the slow depressing decline of its characters. She has the same powerful sense of character dialect like she had in “Shipping News,” authentic but at times distracting. I like the way her stories operate on two levels, one very grounded in reality that leaves dirt under your nails, and another in a grand sweeping mythology, with names like Loyal Blood, Mink, Mrs. Nipple, Starr, and a hitchhiking Indian that leaves with the main character a journal that he will carry along with him for the rest of his life, jotting down the fragments of his years on the road.

Here is one of the pages that I dogeared, where she writes in bold type, a kind of prose poetry that channels all of the senses: “He passed old trucks humping along on bald treads. He is worried about his own tires. He turns off onto a gravel road but the stones fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete. Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The soil in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks. In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.”

Anguish and Reward

2009-04-16T06:52:00.002-05:00

photo by Monalisa Adjami.

He comes home in the evening after a long day at the office, settles into his den, turns on his laptop, and in the cool glow of the screen he starts to make-believe. Interesting phrase: he makes believe. His fingers lightly tap on the keys, and a world begins to appear. He smiles, at times chuckles, at other times frowns and drags his fingers across his scalp. Creating worlds—bringing people out of the mortal soup into living breathing flesh—takes a lot of effort, mixed with pleasure, thrill, anguish, uncertainty. With the effort comes reward; these characters start to speak, at first only with hollow words that are obviously coming from himself, but within moments, their words start to stray from what he intended. Soon, they are jabbering away in their own tone of voice about their own cares. They say things he wasn’t expecting, and he doesn’t quite know how to reply to them, so then invents another character, and soon that character is refuting the first, and now the writer feels like he is just watching from a corner while these two people play out the scene. This is when he starts to smile, when his eyes catch fire with interest and wonder. What is going on here? He feels a little guilty for eavesdropping, but not enough to make him stop, for it is the guilty pleasure of the voyeur.

Mantra of Leaves

2009-04-15T07:43:00.001-05:00

photo by cfbenson.

She moves behind the counter, shaking tea leaves out of ceramic containers onto metal scales, weighing out the orders, pouring the dried leaves into shiny gold tinfoil bags, nose tickled by tea dust. Her hair is pulled back into a pony tail, lifted off of that long slim neck. She has a profile with the curve of forehead and cheekbone that begs to be captured in oils on canvas and aged for three hundred years in a clandestine gallery. There’s something solemn about her bearing, until a customer steps to the counter and her smile lights up, but when they leave the flame just as quickly smolders out. Back to the rhythm of pouring out the leaves, balancing the scales, pressing closed the bags, a mantra that clears the mind.

Get It In Writing

2009-04-04T20:33:00.003-05:00

photo by Lazzuri.

Writing creates a world totally within my control. There is something comforting in that, even though I never considered myself a control freak. As I write, the pace of life slows down and falls into a rhythm, each word moving in concert with that which it describes. Sometimes I think I am more wholly in the world of my imagination than in the world around us. If I was not describing it with these words, how much would I have noticed the sound of the wind outside, the smell of mellon coming from the kitchen, or the stillness of all the objects in my den except for the movement of my fingers and my thoughts? Get it in writing, they say. How true.

Dear Mignon

2009-03-29T21:28:00.000-05:00

Dear Mignon,

How could you grant a mere boy of fifteen a fantasy for two weeks at the end of summer, and then leave him for school in California? You were eighteen and had all of the big men on campus after you; the jock down the street, the man with a handlebar mustache at the club, and even my twenty-two year old brother who asked you to go away to a cabin with him for a weekend. But you picked me. I was so naïve I didn’t even consider that you were coming on to me; I thought you were just being nice. When did we first kiss? I remember it took a long time to get to that point, and you must have been wondering what I was waiting for, how I could be so dumb to miss all of the signals. You were house sitting for your uncle across the street from me, and invited me in when he was away on a trip. We sat on the large puffy sofa in the dark cool of his basement. You offered me a beer. I said yes. I had never drunk a beer before that, only sips of my Dad’s when I would get him another can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Then you gave me a massage. I laugh now, thinking about that. How did you maneuver us from sitting on the sofa to a massage? I wonder what you thought when I didn’t kiss you, or offer to return the massage, or anything beyond my thanking you for the beer, and the massage, and crossing back over the street to my house.

We played tennis. Some boys from a baseball tournament sat along the fence to watch you running for the ball and the way your breasts bounced when you ran. They asked if you were my girlfriend, and I said no. They started catcalling, but I didn’t know what to do about it. You glowered and turned red. They eventually went away.

I remember now the first time you finally broke through to me and left no doubt as to whether you were interested in me as more than a friend. We were at the movie “Fright Night”, and you leaned your leg against mine. You held my hand for a while, and pulled my hand closer to you so the back of my hand rested against your bare thigh. I wasn’t watching the movie at all anymore, only your thigh and my hand. Then there in the dark you let go of my hand and slid your palm across my leg, and felt me getting hard. I remember walking out of the movie theater with a raging erection and thinking everybody could see it, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

You taught me to always open a door for a girl, and to always be gentle. You used to press your nose against mine and look right into my eyes; you were just a blur except for your eyes and smile, and you would flutter your eyelids like butterflies. Your uncle’s red Camero and a church parking lot. I didn’t have a clue where kids went to park and that seemed as good a place as any.

That last night we were to spend together before you moved out to LA to chase your dreams of becoming an actress, you told me that a person never forgets their first. As you drove me home the radio was playing Phil Collins “Against All Odds,” a very fitting soundtrack to my night. I remember thinking how every time I would hear that song, I’d think of this night. Phil Collins. Jesus.

Then you were gone. I remember feeling how lucky I was to have spent those last two weeks of summer with you, and that’s what made me angriest later, after it hurt to read your letters about your part-time job in a shoe store while you waited for callbacks from your latest auditions, and then letters asking why I wasn’t writing you back. I had to convince myself that I didn’t feel anything at all. Another lesson you taught me.

A Night in Birmingham

2009-03-22T17:24:00.001-05:00

photo by Trondelarius.

He was driving all night from North Dakota to someplace south, maybe the gulf. He wasn’t sure exactly where, but the main thing was to feel the thrum of the road passing beneath the wheels, an unraveling ribbon of tar with no end, no beginning. It was midnight by the time he crossed into Alabama, but he didn’t want to stop. He was in a zone, tired brilliant and half mesmerized by the highway. Trees loomed out of the dark into the headlights. He struck a deer just past Birmingham, and his clothes were splattered with blood because he had stopped the car, walked back, and dragged the carcass to the ditch.

Got to wash up at a motel or something, but none of them would take in a man at 2:00 am covered in blood. From a travel guide in his glove box, he started calling B&Bs. An old lady named Ms. Sandy answered on the third phone number, at a place called the Fox Trot. Said all of her rooms were open, and that she’d be happy to take in a boarder. She gave him directions, a ways off the highway, but he was desperate.

When he pulled up to her home, she was standing on the porch wrapped in a shawl. He grabbed his duffel bag from the trunk and asked why an old lady was answering her phone at 2:30 in the morning. Couldn’t sleep, she said. Seemed like the older she got, the less sleep she needed. Hardly knew what to do with all of that time on her hands, especially at night with nobody staying with her to talk to.

He started to explain the blood, but she waved it off. Doesn’t matter, come on in.

He remembered, later that night after having showered and had a cup of tea in her kitchen, what it was like staying at his grandmother’s. That feeling of being taken care of, being safe, and the odd way that time hung suspended in her kitchen in those purgatorial hours between night and morning. They talked of the kinds of things that, later on, he couldn’t remember. All he would be able to recall was that feeling of kindness, acceptance, of being made to feel completely at home. That’s how it felt being in Ms. Sandy’s presence, even more so than any particular thing she said or did.

Who was she? Maybe it was just her name, but he imagined her to be the Sandman’s widow, grown old now and abandoned, left to lord over this home in the Alabama woods, wiling away the insomniac nights with guests that needed a place to rest.

I wish I knew what they talked about, or what he was running from in North Dakota, or what he was running towards, but it seems that Ms. Sandy doesn’t gossip about her boarders. Your sins are safe with her.

Have You Seen My Tree?

2009-03-07T10:54:00.002-06:00

photo by dick_pountain.

The tree was gone when I got up in the morning. For one hundred years it had stood to the left of my front step, and on the morning of July 28th I stuck my head out the door to pick up the paper from the front step and saw that the tree was gone. No jagged broken stump, no charred remains. The grass was smooth, as though a tree had never grown there. I drove around town, looking for it. I hung signs:

Have You Seen My Tree??
60 ft. black walnut
5 ft. trunk cir.
Last seen on the evening of the 27th
on the 3100 block of Manor Dr.
Call 612.366.1477 with information
$500 REWARD!

I got a few leads, but most were dead ends. Many were pranks. Some people called with real concern and compassion in their voices. Long after the signs came down and the calls stopped coming in, neighbors would mention to me that they might have seen it, on their last vacation out west, or the other day when they took their kids to a wildlife preserve in Washington County. It looked happy out there in the woods, they said. Maybe it was for the best.

I have picnics now and then on my lawn, right over the spot where it should be. Maybe I’ll plant something new over the spot next spring. It’s a shame. It really balanced the front yard.

Solace of a Bad Man

2009-02-27T21:29:00.005-06:00

They drove up the North shore for a weekend away at a small cabin. Back in the Twin Cities, her new boyfriend was the perfect gentleman she new him to be, but with each passing mile his civility towards her gradually peeled away, like the trappings of the city slipping away as they drove further north. The trees grew taller, the woods deeper as his temper flared over petty things, like where they would go for Thanksgiving, and who would pay for the gas, and how fast he was driving.

On they drove, up past Duluth, the roads growing narrower as they passed hulking ships rusting in dry dock. The winds picked up near Two Harbors, fueled by drought, gusts coming from every which direction, and he struggled to keep the car on the road.

Civilization dropped away by the time they reached Grand Marais. The interstate trickled down to a county road, then to a gravel road, then to a dirt path with weeds growing down the center, winding among the birch trees, until they finally coasted to a stop in the deep woods of the Gunflint Trail and their cabin for the weekend.

It took them much of the day to get there. The sun was already setting. Inside the cabin, his gentler side came out again; he prepared a quick spaghetti dinner, and they talked about friends and family. She couldn’t explain, even to herself, what made her shut down his advances that night. She felt that things were not as they appeared.

Her nightmares didn’t help matters: she dreamed of wolves circling the cabin, staying just out of sight behind the trees. The next day it was her turn to become unhinged, picking fights over whatever was convenient. She got into an argument with him about hunting: he was for it, she against. He claimed it was natural and necessary for thinning out the herd, but she said only Native Americans should have the right to hunt. He claimed Native American’s weren’t good sportsmen when it came to hunting, using lights for spear fishing to attract the fish, or setting fires in the woods to scare wild game toward their hunters waiting in ambush.

She started to hate him. Maybe hate is too strong of a word: he dropped in her esteem. She lost respect for his ideas. He must have picked up on her change of heart, because he looked like a trapped animal, eyes darting around the room, mouth tense like a snarl.

She wanted to get out of there. She grabbed her things and marched out to the car, waiting for him to come drive her home. He didn’t. She crossed over to the driver’s seat. No keys. Stupid idea anyway, she couldn’t just abandon him out here. She decided that a walk through the woods might help cool her off. She happened upon a deer trail and followed it around the pond, down a ravine and beyond the surrounding poplars and birch into the deep woods of evergreens.

Windfalls crossed the trail, forcing her off the path. She lost her way among dead trees felled during the severe storms of last summer. She lost all sense of direction and began to panic. She smelled something in the air; soot, cinders, smoke?

The tree canopy rose too high to get a good view of the sky, but among the undergrowth and the tree trunks drifted a haze, like morning mist, only dirtier. The heat sucked all moisture out of the air. Within seconds the wind came rushing in with a smell that burned in her lungs. Fire.

Fir trees on fire. Great plume of sparks. In the strong winds, flames leapt from tree to tree. She ran beneath the arches of burning limbs, bolting through the woods alongside panicked deer and rabbits. Birds dropped from the sky like meteors. She fell out of the burning bramble to an open clearing where, beside the pond, sat the cabin: the one thing not burning in this world on fire. Inside, standing at the window, she saw him. Waiting for her. She stumbled inside, into his arms, and smelled the gasoline, the sulfur, the stench of a bad man who just got what he wanted.

Little Bird

2009-01-24T11:46:00.002-06:00

photo by mollycakes.

Sunday morning in the family room. I love my wife and kids dearly, but all I can think to myself right now is “Leave me alone.” I announce that I am going to my den now to write, and I slip away to that corner of the house where the windows are small, where potted palms sit on the floor in what little pools of light gather in this corner of the house. At first, I avoid the typewriter perched on the desk. I still use a typewriter. I am a walking cliché. I smoke a pipe, leaf through nineteenth century novels, scratch notes on scraps of paper, and eventually sneak up on my type writer and settle slowly into the wooden desk chair, careful not to spook it. I stare at the keys for a moment, afraid it is going to burst into a flapping of wings and escape out a window. That’s it. My typewriter on the desk is like a bird trapped in a room, panicked, breast thumping, trying to find a way out. My fingers must be gentle with it. Once it least expects it, I clamp my hands around it so that it can’t get away. I stop typing to scribble this metaphor on another piece of scratch paper for later.

There’s a quiet knock at the door. Must be my son. “Come in.”

“Dad, will you play Chutes and Ladders with me?”

“Not now, Sam. Your Dad’s working. Didn’t Mommy tell you not to bother me when I’m up here?”

“Yes,” he says in that little mouse voice that usually allows him to get his way.

“Why don’t you go play with Elizabeth?”

“She’s over at Jacqueline’s house jumping on the trampoline.”

I pull him up into my lap. He’s still in his pajamas. What time is it, I wonder? Why hasn’t Susan gotten him dressed yet? She’s probably down at the computer, chatting with her sister or with her friends from work. Jesus, she sees them all day during the week; why can’t she give it a break on the weekends to get her children dressed? “Why don’t you go get your big boy clothes on and we’ll play in a little bit. I’ve got to do some stuff yet, and then I’ll come out. Don’t knock though. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”

“Okay,” and he slides off my knee, leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him. I smile at this gesture of his, so careful around me, but then I see how like an invalid I have become, tucked away in a closed room, not to be disturbed. How long have they been tiptoeing around me?

I try to get back to my story, but the characters have wandered off, the backdrops faded, and in the world of my imagination I am losing the light. Damn it. But if it hadn’t been Sam, it would have been something else. A loud truck out in the street. A blue jay flashing by the window. I was able to finish three sentences, though, before the little bird died in my hands. I guess I clutched I clutched it too tightly.

It began with a letter. Ever since I received the envelope addressed to me in a hand faintly familiar, I could never return to the old life I knew. I have since burned that first letter, but it went something like this…

The Sacrosanct Flamingo of Christmas Past - 2003

2009-01-02T12:29:00.001-06:00

photo by psmphotography.

Christmas day in the year of our lord, what’s his name, 2003. December 25th marks the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, per Aurelius the Greek, heralding the first day upon which the sun hangs in the sky a little bit longer than the day before. What better place to celebrate the sun than in Florida, in my mother’s villa in her gated retirement community in Lake Wales? Her back yard butts up to the ninth tee of their country club golf course. The day rang in with the ping of fat-headed titanium drivers and Titleist golf balls soaring towards the immaculate green.

Leave it up to a mother to take in her wayward son on Christmas, so soon after my divorce and I have no place to go.

I sit in the sunroom waiting for sunset, palm trees silhouetted against a pink sky. For twenty minutes I watch the shifting reflections on the windows, revealing a sallow middle-aged man from the north. Despite the tropical surroundings, I know just where I’m from. But reflections can be deceptive in the shifting light of sunset. The glass reflects what is happening here and now, but I choose not to see it clearly. Instead I see what might have been; Christmas by the fireside with the wife and child that never were. I don’t blame myself for filling the vacancy in the glass with imaginary things.

Reflections are not limited by time or place. This dayroom is now an atrium in a Roman hall, and I see in the glass a woman reclined against my arm. She smells like Gardenias. Dark hair falls in ringlets down her back. Face pale, lips like ripe plums. We lean comfortably into each other, eyes heavy, smiles of contentment just starting to creep into our faces when the sun dips a little further below the horizon, and she’s gone. The window shows the dark outside.

Time for a walk. I pass down Tumescent Lane, dodging the mass exodus of golfers in their cavalry of golf carts, beating a retreat from the fairways to their homes, barbarians of social security waving their clubs, drug induced disciples of the goddess Medica. I walk long and far, out to the edges of Phase 2 waiting to be transformed from swampland into villas, out where the sky opens up like a great black cavern and stars ricochet off the road. This swamp is my church, these stars my epistolary, far more so than the dismal Lutheran church we attended earlier in the evening for Christmas service. The congregation sang boastful praise of the strength and awe of Jesus. I didn’t know the words to sing along, but they sounded too much like rap music, a cocky gang banger adorned with gold and bling, slinging rhymes of his fame, strength, power, and riches.

I turn back towards my mother’s house. How can I question where He is leading me when I don’t believe in Him? But I do believe in something. Something expansive. Something all knowing. Something that scattered the stars into the sky, that programmed the cells of the human body, that molded the brain and left it as vast and unknown as the ocean floor. Maybe I believe in the Roman’s Saturnalia and a topsy-turvy world where I’m 36 and sleeping in a pull out cot in my mother’s spare bedroom. Maybe I believe in the imaginary characters I cast as understudies for the people I’ve chased off the stage, and maybe I care more for reflections of the sun rather than staring directly into it.

I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies. I do . . .

Dialog: Raising Daughters

2008-11-28T09:10:00.003-06:00

photo by ifdefelseif.

“When did you come home last night?” he asked.

“I don’t know exactly. Around midnight, maybe?” she replied.

“Who were you out with?”

“James. We went to the Orpheum and saw a show, and afterward drove down to Willow Grove and parked by the pond.”

“I didn’t want that much detail, but thanks for stopping there.”

“You asked.”

“I asked who you went out with, not where you went, or where you parked, or what you talked about, or anything else, for that matter.”

“We didn’t do much talking.”

“See, there. Don’t tell me that. I don’t want to know.”

“You intimated.”

“I did nothing more than provide an example of what I don’t want to hear.”

“Whatever.”

“Intimated. That’s a good word. When did you learn to use words like that?”

“From James.”

“He sounds like a pretty smart boy.”

“He’s thirty-seven.”

Narrative: Boys Will Be Boys

2008-11-26T08:52:00.001-06:00

photo by Haeretik.

Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just have to go find the deputy. He’s out back looking for bodies. See his flashlight bobbing on the grass? Why did you do it? You had so much going for you? Don’t answer that. I already know what drives a man to kill. But my own son? My own boy? Didn’t I raise you right? Didn’t I take you fishing? I paid for that pansy summer camp when you were twelve. Lots of good it did. I knew you were going to do something, one day. I knew you were going to go too far. Sit down. Didn’t I tell you to sit down? I’ll go out back. I’ll take care of the deputy. Tired of cleaning up your shit, I can tell you that. I’ve been cleaning up after you all your life and it’s why you continue to make such a mess of things. What are you going to do when I’m not around to clean up your mess? When I get back here I want to see you cleaned up. Get a duffle bag. Pack enough for a week on the road. No more. No less. Now you can get up. Go on. Didn’t I tell you to get up? Don’t start crying now. Did I teach you to cry? You made choices, and now you have to live with them. You’re one thing or another, but not both at once. You have to decide. Are you a man, or are you a baby? Are you my boy? Or are you a little girl? I didn’t raise you to be a girl, so go on now. Boys will be boys. We’ll get this cleaned up in a just a second. Stay in the house. I got to go find that deputy.

Chloe Jean: Siren of the Skies

2008-11-09T16:50:00.001-06:00

photo by GORDONZHOU.

His family lived on a farm briefly when he was a kid, back when his accountant father and architect mother decided to abandon the New York City bedrock for the more tender bed of soil abundant in the Midwest. It was there that he spotted his first love, Chloe Jean, cutting a swath across the sky over their crops. The young woman crop dusted all of the properties in Jefferson County since her father had developed glaucoma when she was sixteen. Chloe Jean. Her name was on the lips of every man watching her dip and weave over the fields, misting a cloud of insecticide over the waiting plants. She was pretty, that particular kind of wholesome, healthy, white teeth pretty that farm country tends to breed. The town believed the only reason she was still unmarried was that she spent more time in the sky than on the ground, and nobody could catch her.

Chloe Jean. Even years later, just saying her name conjured the image of the young beauty buzzing low overhead, summer dress and scarf trailing in the wind. When he was thirteen, how many nights did he fantasize about sneaking off with her, taking to the skies, a stowaway in the cockpit between her thighs? He rode his bike to the landing strip at her father’s farm and hid away at the side of the hangar to watch her climb in or out of the cockpit, just in hope of catching a glimpse of leg or swelling breast beneath her summer dress. She was always smiling when she climbed in or out of the plane, the same kind of smile when a woman gazed into the eyes of a man she loved, but for Chloe Jean, it was reserved only for her plane.

He was in chemistry class when everyone heard the fire trucks and crowded by the window. A thin trail of black smoke curled into the sky over Peterson’s farm. Chloe Jean, the first love of his life, crashed and burned in a bean field. Investigators later determined that a tree limb at the border of the field had clipped her wing. For years afterward, boys from town kept a shrine in her memory at the trunk of the massive oak. He considered, several times, hanging himself from one of its limbs. He still feels, unreasonably, somehow less a man for not having done it.

Beware the Fireflies

2008-10-04T10:00:00.001-05:00

photo by louistib.

He didn’t know anything about writing anymore. He hardly even read. So why did he sit down every morning at the laptop and pretend like he was going to write? Foolishly optimistic. Maybe he could just stream-of-consciousness write:

No matter what, whoever you may be and wherever you go, you will find little monsters hidden in the brush. Green emerald glossy eyes with sparks shooting from them when they see you stumble into the grove. The smoking embers of last night’s bonfire still curl skyward, unstirred by wind or bird’s wing or buzz of insects. He falls to the weeds near the ashes, lies on his back, looks skyward and watches the slow stream of smoke dissipate into the dirty blue, and remembers.

We piled up pillows at the bottom of the staircase and jumped. That wondrous sensation of falling from the sky and landing gracefully in a mound of silk pillows imported from the Orient. The darkness that fell when you closed your eyes, and the warmth when you reached out blindly with your hand and took hold of your friend’s arm to pull you up, there in the pillows with you, her eyes also closed and the sound of her playful giggling in your years, and you fall back into greater darkness as the memory fades.

There. A pinprick of light in the black velvet curtain. Help him. Pull him out of it with a yank on the arm, maybe even something whispered in his ear. He won’t look, won’t open his eyes, won’t betray with blush in his cheeks, but you will feel it against his chest, the rapid drumming of his heart in its cage. Shit, cliché’s come out after dark like fireflies, so pretty, so tempting to chase out across the fields.

Seven Wives a' Calling

2008-06-29T20:36:00.001-05:00

photo by Katrijn Michiels Photography.

Late one morning, a man in his mid-fifties sat down in his living room with his cup of coffee and a newspaper, and was about to take a sip when an odd noise caused him to pause. Was it coming from inside the house, he wondered. He lived alone. He had only just moved in a few weeks back. Through the windows, he saw crows crowding around outside, cawing like an angry mob and beating the air with their wings, but they were not making the noise that caused him concern. He rose from his chair and pressed his ear to the wall. Quite distinctly, he heard the sound of wood groaning and cracking. As he drew away from the wall, he heard the unmistakable sound of windows sliding open and banging shut, one after another, from somewhere inside the house, loud as gunshots.

He grabbed a butcher's knife from the kitchen and took a tour of the many empty rooms with their gleaming hardwood floors broken up only by stacks of boxes still waiting to be unpacked.

One room after another greeted him with nothing but the mundane. He was about to chalk it up to nerves from living in a new place, when he heard a faint rustling sound in the attic. He climbed to the second floor, pulled on a rope to a trap door in the ceiling, and ascended the steep ladder to the attic knowing that most likely he would find only pigeons or mice. He had never been up here before. Instead he found a dozen mourning doves sitting atop travel chests and perched on the shoulders of a headless seamstress’ dummy. He looked closer and saw that all of their eyes were merely black beads sewn into their sockets, stitches running up their breasts, mottled feathers, and sawdust spilling to the floorboards.

He chuckled, but he started to sweat. Just the heat caught under the roof, he told himself. The silence calmed his nerves, until he noticed that the noises had not died; they only migrated to the cellar, and the sound was less mistakable. A woman, perhaps? She was crying, and it was getting louder.

He plunged down the attic ladder, through the house toward a woman’s cries that steadily grew to the pitch of a wail. He came to a halt when he reached the stairs to the main level. Draped down the staircase, like the shedded skin of a snake, lay a wedding dress. Mildewed lace and torn veil flowed down several steps. The moment he saw the dress, the wailing stopped. He stepped closer, reaching down to touch the fabric, when the sound of shattering glass brought up upright.

He proceeded slowly but steadily now toward the cellar. He had only descended halfway down the crumbling concrete steps, just at the depth where the dank air circled round his ankles, when he saw her standing at the bottom. A gauzy mirage, with a face faintly recognizable, but he wasn’t sure. Was she the first, or the third? Red hair like a slow burning fire. Behind her, another woman in a shredded veil, standing barefoot atop a shattered jar and spilled white powder that left a caustic odor in the air. From behind him, at the top of the stairs, came another movement as another bride slowly descended towards him, this one with hair black as crows feathers, eyes hollowed out and spilling river pebbles from their sockets. He moved away, ever so slowly, but not in an attempt to flee. He had already moved enough times to realize he could never really get away. Instead he brushed past her on the stairs and went to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

He ignored the dozens of dishes shattered on the kitchen floor and routed round the cupboard for the large teapot. It was the favorite tea set of . . . which one was it now, the fifth wife? He gathered up the seven teacups on their chipped saucers, carried them to the sink to delicately clean them until the water boiled.

He had guests to entertain.

We are Little Worlds

2008-05-07T06:58:00.002-05:00

photo by wili_hybrid.

I can’t decide if I want to be alone, or with somebody. I don’t even mean whether I want to be single or in a relationship; I mean do I want to isolate myself from other people, or do I want to engage myself in conversation at the tea shop, do I want to small talk with people at work. It is so strongly tempting to draw back, to still be among others but separate, quiet, observing. Why would I want to do that to myself? Why would I deny myself the enjoyment of friends, of getting to know what somebody did that weekend or what they thought of the movie “Dan in Real Life?” I could still listen in on their conversations with other people, but I wouldn’t have to share myself. I wouldn’t have to share myself. Interesting choice of words.

Becoming a solitarian carries with it a kind of romance, something that …this no longer interests me. Now I’m thinking about going for morning walks down Theodore Wirth Parkway, the crisp mornings, the stillness of the trees. I suppose there would be birds singing, and squirrels bouncing over the wet grass. Would it inspire me? Would it become one of my favorite moments of the day? Nothing is stopping me from getting up, putting on my shoes and my coat and heading out. Yeah, let’s do it!

I’m still sitting here, drinking tea and talking to myself. I keep wishing to discover something here, in the solitude of my living room with the sunrise cresting the rooflines and trees in my east-facing windows, and seeing the Others walking their dogs, jogging, pushing strollers. Watching the others. Another interesting choice of words. They are like me, but separate. Maybe that’s what I find so terrifying about other people. To know that they dreamt last night of being late for class or about the last argument they had at work, to know that they went shopping with a friend to buy that pink windbreaker and now they pull it on each morning as they go jogging to hopefully lose some of that weight that makes them loath themselves, or makes them realize their body is aging and they don’t want to succumb to the inevitability of growing old, that’s what frightens and thrills me. We are little worlds orbiting each other. We can’t all possibly carry these inner lives, fears, loves, can we? What if I had ended up being one of them? But I landed in this body, in this house, in front of this laptop and drinking a cup of Nilgiri Woodlands Estate and wearing the old flannel shirt of my dead dad and wondering, do I want to be among others, or do I just want to be by myself? Do I want to go for a walk, or do I want to stay in this chair, waiting for something to happen?

Tea for One

2008-04-12T10:05:00.003-05:00

I sit in my favorite teashop but look around as though I don’t recognize it. Somebody came in and changed everything. The old orange walls that looked as though a drunk had experimented with sponge painting have been painted over in soothing green. Covering the dirty brown Berber carpet are oriental area rugs. The taupe chairs have been replaced with bright red ones hollowed out like cracked nutshells. I’m in one of these red chairs now, by the window, drinking smoky Russian Caravan tea. It’s my second steeping because I want to prolong my stay in the tea shop, so I make-do with this tepid second steeping and sip slowly.

I read a book on Midwest perennials in anticipation of spring. What should I plant? I picture an English garden alongside a path of paving stones winding its way to the front entrance, or maybe a secret garden at the side by the chimney, with figurines of sprites hidden among the flora. I just moved into this picturesque brick home in the Fall, on Manor Drive, in a town called Golden Valley; it even sounds like an imagined place. The prior owner covered the grounds in gardens, so maybe I won’t need to plant anything. It is now early Spring and the first few signs of growth have broken soil; all of these pockets of gardens are ready to wake up. I feel a bit like a parent with a dozen infants stirring in their cribs, about to wake up screaming and demanding attention. Maybe I should make a run for it.

I get distracted by the sounds of a mother and young daughter that take a table beside me. The little girl has a whispery voice, like the daughter Zuzu in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” who says to her father, “But I’m not sleepy.”

“Mommy, want me to do a magic trick?” Brilliant smile of baby teeth and dimpled cheeks, and she makes her hands disappear inside her mittens. The mother looks under the table, under the chair, inside her teacup while the little girl giggles like mad.

I take another sip of cold tea and think of gardens.

Grasping

2008-03-23T10:27:00.003-05:00

photo by Vesuviano.

I should never have waited this long to write here. Yeah, I had a number of excuses, what with buying a new home and work getting crazy. But the longer I wait to post something, the more pressure builds up. On this long of a hiatus, he better come up with something good. But I haven’t. I’ve barely written a thing during these last six months. When I try to write, I stumble around, get all clammed up and frustrated and tight inside, and then I just go blow my time on the internet or channel surfing. But now I feel like I better throw something against this wall, or it could get archived, and I’m not ready to let the Life of Brettanicus slip into oblivion. So here you have it, the first post in six months, and it’s about nothing really. Which is probably for the best. I get blocked when I put high demands on myself. I’m not even sure I want to write still, but since the age of fifteen I have believed that writing is the only thing that gives me a sense of purpose, and that feeling—when inspiration gets into my bloodstream—it’s one of the best feelings in the world. It makes you want to experience it, again and again, and you chase it but never quite get there again. But the chase is the next best thing.

Dumbfounded

2007-08-05T08:58:00.000-05:00

This blow to the head has left me dumb. I can’t think too long or two hard. I suffer from lengthening periods of blank space. I stare into the room and just “am”. Monks meditate to achieve this level of just “being” in the moment. Lowered brainwave activity. Lessened sense of self and a pure perception of the world, observing objects not as tools, but just things as they are. How can a normal person, without a brain injury, look at a sofa and see it as anything other than something to sit on? How can you look at a pillow and not know that it is soft?

I don’t remember the accident. They tell me I was in a jeep that rolled, and it landed on my head. They say I was in a coma for two months, and on the third I came out f it speaking in French. I had three years of it in high school but I got D’s in it every term. Guess the brain soaks it all up like a sponge, and sometimes it takes a hard squeeze to ring it out.

Heedless Speckle of Stars

2007-07-30T07:08:00.001-05:00

He sleeps easily now, and that bothers him. What right does he have to sleep so soundly? He never admitted with what relish he suffered in his younger days, those restless years of spiritual searching and his tired affectations of a struggling writer. He thinks back on his various experiments: fasting in the woods like a suburban shaman to see visions; subjecting himself to sleep depravation for three days to see visions; following a spirit of a young Navaho boy across the desolation of Utah. Great arches of stone formed a natural amphitheater from which to cup his screams and fling them skyward. Heedless speckle of stars.

He tries to stay awake all night like he used to, but can’t resist turning on the tv and falling asleep to Jay Leno. What more can you expect from a corporate middle manager? He thinks about buying a tank of ether and a mask and resorting to artificial means of hearing voices. He wants to see hallucinations whipping about the room, imaginary children playing in the hedges, recently escaped from Our Sacred Heart of the Feeble Minded. He looks dejectedly at the sterile rooms of his apartment. What kind of atmosphere do you need to lure the muses? They need a welcome mat, a comfortable abode in which to spend their long weekends, a place that feels like a bed and breakfast for the beyond. He pictures himself small-talking with them in the late morning hours, sipping tea and nibbling on pastries. What would they talk about? Probably how bad the traffic was coming out of Olympus, or the humidity, or his hammer toe.

He wonders what a muse looks like: silvery white, like a sculpture of Michelangelo’s that has learned to flex its limbs? Jade eyes in a marble face? No, his muses had always been the dead idols...Rimbaud, Artaud, and Morrison. He felt closest to Artaud; they shared the same despair. Morrison was his college comrade, his drinking buddy, his idol of excess raising hell and dancing on ledges. Rimbaud was the brilliant prodigy, the cocky boy of sixteen that invented a new language, and then disappeared into the jungles of Africa never to be heard from again. And who has become his muses now? Steven Covey? Scott Adams? Who comes to mind first when he sees the name Homer?

Mighty Mississippi and Pink Lawn Chair

2007-07-16T22:30:00.000-05:00

I spent an hour this weekend in the sun by the river in Saint Paul. I’m not even sure which river it is, Mississippi or Minnesota. Seems a little too narrow to be the great Mississippi, but it probably is. I brought my little pink lawn chair; I really need to get a more manly one, something from Coleman with armrests that hold beercans. I packed a lunch of smoked turkey and gouda with a tomato, mayo, and country mustard, and a lime yogurt whip, and a bottle of water. It was kind of nice eating my lunch there in the sun and watching boats fight or coast with the current. Then I carried my chair down right to the waters edge to better hear the waves and let my vision skip across the water’s surface like a perfect skipping stone. Across the river on the far bank, dogs chased sticks into the water or chased each other along the beach. After the sun ducked behind clouds, I pulled out David Copperfield and read a few pages; it’s around the time his mother has died, and he is driven back home from the boys school to attend the funeral.

The Extortionist

2007-06-18T06:47:00.001-05:00

She wants money. Lots of it. She has confidence that with her green eyes and porcelain skin, she can lure a man to give it to her. She starts off small; dates with executives, doctors, lawn firm partners to fancy restaurants. Then a ludicrous number of flower deliveries to home and work. She takes it up a notch, starting with the mind games. How does one take a normally stable man, who has shown enough responsibility to have built a fortune, and turn him into a irrational man, one who exercises poor judgment for once in his life and grows sick with longing for her, terrified with thoughts of losing her? She plays them so well.

The relationships graduate to expensive gifts: diamond earrings, all-expense paid trips to Vegas and Vancouver, Caribbean cruises, lodges in the Rockies. Once they pay for her high-rise apartments not too far from their executive offices, she knows they are ready. And she severs them. She tears these powerful men apart, leaves them weeping in their Humvees or their chauffer-driven Lexus’s. Now it is merely a matter of presenting a sound business proposal: the sincerity and feasibility of her talking to competitors, wives, boards of directors. It’s a matter of supply and demand, Darwinian economics, event-horizons.

One Less

2007-06-09T11:02:00.002-05:00

“Hi Missy.”

“Don’t call me Missy.”

“Okay, Melissa. How’ve you been? Have you missed me?”

She looks at me, sideways, like she doesn’t quite trust me, but then she ventures her answer.

“A little.”

“A little? Like you miss my sense of humor? You miss my Yankee charm?”

“I miss kissing you.”

That caught me off guard. “I miss that too,” and I walked over to the kitchen and poured us each a glass of water. I wished it was wine, something to calm my nerves, but she didn’t drink wine. Only water.

“So how’s it going with that ex boyfriend of yours? I can’t remember his name.”

“It’s Tom, and he’s not an ex anymore.”

“I don’t want to know his name. I’ll just forget it again. Do you have sex? Don’t answer that. I suppose you do. You both got HPV. He’s the fucker who gave it to you, so no risk, eh? Not anymore.”

She looked hurt now. “We fuck, yes. Is that what you wanted to hear me say? We fuck, and I’m happy.”

“You could die, you know. I read something about it turning into cervical cancer.”

“That’s the other kind of HPV. I won’t get cancer.”

So you think, I wanted to say, but I knew she was probably right. She was the doctor, and I was just a sales guy. Not a very good one at the moment. “So you want to kiss me again?” I asked.

“No. Not right now, anyway.”

I must have pissed her off more than I intended. I wanted to kiss her again, but then what good was it? What could it lead to? Instead I played her some new music I had found on the internet, talked about her family, about the books she was reading, and it took a good twenty minutes before I could look at her apologetically, and then we kissed awkwardly like kids on the playground.

“I can’t kiss you any more,” she said.

“Any more tonight, or any more ever?”

“Any more ever. We’ll start messing around and then what? You know we can’t ever sleep together.”

“So that’s it? It comes down to sex?”

“It comes down to that fact that Tom is nicer to me.”

“Tom who?”

“I’m leaving.”

Trailer Park Professor

2007-06-03T21:59:00.000-05:00

Up in a trailer park on the shores of a lake more modest than nearby Mille Lacs, in a 1987 silver Airstream camper nestled under a canopy of fir trees, lived Warren Futgers, nicknamed the Professor. He was not a college professor. He had never even been a high school teacher. He held no degrees that anybody could speak of. Yet he carried himself like an educated man, one taken to long hours of contemplation on his lawn chair with frayed nylon seat and plastic armrests smudged with newspaper ink. He spoke rarely but when he did, he held your interest. He had an easy way of speaking and a tone of voice that was comforting and reasonable, so that you found yourself frequently saying things like, “Yes, I see. That makes sense. I never thought of that before, but now that you mention it, I suppose so.” His hair was long and stringy, balding at the temples, and he grew his beard until it touched his chest, then he would shave it all off and start over again.

The Professor didn’t read the Sunfish Times like the other locals, instead subscribing to papers from London, New York, and Boston. He read his newspapers seated in his lawn chair from early morning until lunchtime, drinking tea from an insulated mug roughly the size of a bait bucket and brandishing the name of a local gas station. Then he folded up his papers, slapped them against his knee while he looked out towards the lake, and retreated to his trailer.

His trailer was filled with books; nineteenth century novels, historical biography, herpetology, travelogues. Herbs grew in miniature pots, and creeping plants wound their way across drapery rods and down from shelves. His kitchen countertop was a clutter of experiments and specimens: ant farms, honeycombs, caterpillars spinning cocoons in jars with air holes nailed through tin lids. The place smelled strongly of curry; he used it nearly everything he cooked.

He was one of those solitarians that rarely wandered over to say hello unless officially invited for a potluck or a drink, so his neighbors frequently came over for a visit when they saw him out in the lawn chair. Kids knocked on his screen door in the afternoons to hear stories of distant places, mythological heroes and villains, arctic explorers and Indian chiefs.

He owned a canoe with a hole in the bow that restricted him from ever having another person in the canoe; only by sitting alone in the stern would the distribution of weight raise the bow high enough above the waterline to stop water from leaking in and sinking it. He didn’t go out much on his own, but he did take you up on a sunset boatride on a pontoon if invited, and he particularly enjoyed rides in the Culverson’s speedboat. He’d sit up in the bow with his hair and beard whipping in the wind, sunglasses shielding his eyes but tears driving horizontally across his cheekbones from the rush of air.

Then one morning, he was gone.

Where’s the professor; did he go into town? Did he leave to visit a dying family member? Is his mail getting forwarded? Nobody had a clue. The children whined and asked their parents to tell them stories, but they were never as good as the Professor’s. People missed seeing the glow of his light at night, warming the shadows beneath the pine trees into the early morning hours. Now the woods seemed particularly dark and menacing, as though a guardian had abandoned his post. When the sheriff’s department dragged the lake, they found his canoe sunk in about twenty feet of water, but no sign of a body.

The kids of the trailer park came up with their own theories: the professor had finally found a canoe partner, but the moment of his delivery from loneliness had resulted in his drowning. Who would it have been? "It was the ghost of Pocahontas." "No way, it had to be a mermaid." One boy offered the theory that it was an escaped serial killer had broken into his trailer and demanded they paddle across the lake to get away from the cops.

The adults’ theories were no more plausible than the children’s. Maybe he was a felon and staged his death. Maybe he was an insider trader with all of those big city papers and struck it rich and left without so much as a goodbye. Maybe he was out on lake in the middle of the night and got abducted by aliens.

Everybody waited for him to show up again, either floating face down out by the docks, or strolling into the park with a fresh mug of tea and no explanation for his absence, but the truth is, he never showed up again, and they eventually had to tow away his trailer.

How Many More Times

2007-04-23T07:05:00.001-05:00

pigeon on ledge photo by LSU DAV.

Inside the bell tower of a downtown Lutheran church, pigeons roost. They huddle in window sills or balance on the craggy edge of stones. Their brethren flutter round and round the tower in circles. It’s cold on the shady side of the north face, which is where Humfelt lays on a window ledge, keeled over to one side like a grounded boat. His eyes are crusted, and his heart flutters erratically in his breast. This will be his last day, he’s almost certain, of being trapped in the body of a pigeon. Last day of pecking at french-fries spilled on the sidewalks, of darting out from under roaring buses. Last day of flight. Last day of ascending to a perch fifteen stories above the city streets. Last day of soaring through canyons of high rises.

How long had he been trapped in the body of a pigeon? Previously he had been a floor trader on Wallstreet, then a cuttlefish, then a mercenary, then a goat, and way way back he faintly recalled life as a magician, a wizard of sorts traveling around villages with a band of other illusionists. He convinced himself from time to time that his tricks were more than just sleight of hand, but that he harnessed actual powers of nature that ordinary mortals did not share. He could make a pretty woman in a crowd take notice of him just through concentration. He could will the gold coins out of a shopkeeper’s pocket and into his own coffers. At night, when he roamed through village streets or out on the edge of town to a milkmaid’s hovel, he could will himself into her bedroom.

Now he gasps a last few lung-fulls of air on the ledge of a chapel tower. It is early spring, a time of rebirth. He wonders through whose eyes he will next look upon the world. His reincarnation had not always been incremental in time, so he’s not even sure into which world he will resurface. Will it be the late 2000’s, or will it be a wheat field in 19th century France. Will he be driving at tank in WW2, or brushing lint off his master’s waistcoat in Edinburgh mansion? A worm boring through coffin wood to get at the rotting flesh within, corporeal fruit wrapped in soil? Or will it be one of those times when he is caught between lives, trapped as a ghost gliding through the lunar mansion?

The one constant in this long thread of lives is that he remains in the orbit of his eternal lover, Rebecca. If he is a pigeon sitting on the shoulder of a statue in a city park, she is a sparrow flitting through the bare branches of crab apple trees lining the park benches. If he is a executioner operating a guillotine in a French square, she is the courtesan expelled from royal halls only to stretch her slim neck across the blade’s edge. The magician lurking outside her window. The worm boring into her grave. Will he ever have her? Yes, he has a thousand times, and a thousand times he has lost her. Which is more painful, in the end? Is there and end?

Keys to Life

2007-04-15T10:10:00.001-05:00

funciona! photo by corbata1982.

The Backspace key is my nemesis. All of these words spill out of me, and just as quickly slip into oblivion as I hold down the Backspace key. Really, these keys hold such warm or bleek possibilities if they could be applied to life. Home. Pause/Break. Delete. End. When I was in Budapeste huddled on a bench in a train station platform, I could have pressed the Home key. During my marriage troubles, I wanted to Pause all of the arguing, but then came the realization that we need to make a clean Break of things. But there are no clean breaks in a divorce. For years afterward, I still thought about her. I imagined I could return to the home we had lived in, and she would be in the kitchen cooking up something, and the dogs would come running and lick me to death as I came through the door. But all of that was gone. A different family lived there now, and it would be so much easier if I could just forget it all. Delete, and it would be like we had never met.

Is life worth all of this struggle? Finding happiness, going to work, paying the bills? Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to press the End key. But I’ve never figured out what happens when you press the End key. An end will come soon enough, so I might as well enjoy myself while I’m here. Insert myself back into the dating world. Now it’s all about making some kind of Shift. Taking Ctrl. Stop watching life pass me by and get the courage to Enter.

Enter.

There, now I have some space to work with. It’s time to make use of these twenty-six keys that aren’t so easy. Got to find the right combination of them to find my way, but they also hold infinite possibility. Find the right sequence and you’ve got the complete works of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, and the diary of Anne Frank . Lose your way, and you’ve got the Life of Brettanicus.

Tax Deductible Expenses

2007-04-01T11:03:00.001-05:00

Touchy dragon photo by Jukkie.

I was trying to write a story last night, typing away on my laptop. I sat by the living room window looking out over the city from twenty-five stories up, a view that had provided inspiration on many nights, except now I had seen it so many times that I suppose it was no more inspirational than what a ground-dweller feels when looking out to a dried-up birdbath. Since the words weren’t coming, I had a decision to make: either continue my labors at the noble art of expressing the truth through lies, or file my taxes. I was just logging into TurboTax when a dragon crashed through my window and perched itself on the windowsill. It shook a few shards of broken glass from its head and wings, then leapt into my apartment and, with two hops across the room, alighted on the back of my sofa. It opened up a bag of trail mix that I had left on the coffee table after watching Forrest Gump the previous night and started to nibble. It picks out the pretzels and tosses aside the peanuts.

It looked at me with this satisfied expression and appeared to be about to speak when instead it grabbed an open bottle of Newcastle, tipped it back and downs it in two gulps. It belched, emitting two small puffs of smoke, and then jumped down from off the back of the sofa. It hopped across the room, much like a sparrow hops, back up on the window sill and then plummeted at least a dozen flights before those papery wings caught enough air to propel its considerable mass away from the concrete. It took off towards the Warehouse district, where hip-hop clubs were already forming lines at the doors. I was left standing in my empty apartment with a cold wind blowing in, feeling almost certain the whole thing was imagined, until I heard screams from the girls propped up on their high heals alongside the velvet ropes outside the clubs, heard the screech of tires, the crunch of metal on metal, and a fiery belch. The circling spotlights outside Spin caught the dragon banking across the night sky for a moment, then it was gone.

So my question for you is can I file a tax deduction for the broken window? I mean, it is an expense incurred while in my line of work.

Grandmother and the dragon photo by Anandamide.

Spring

2007-03-24T09:21:00.000-05:00

There she is, Spring,
her face beneath the lake's thinning ice.
Green fingers of tulips poke up through the soil
in the East facing garden.
Sprigs of green grass
Glitter like broken glass in the yard.
Mornings wallow in fog,
the primordial soup
from which life begins.

Safe Harbor

2007-03-18T11:55:00.001-05:00

Road to nowhere photo by stevacek.

I traveled by train to Stuttersville, pulling into the station shortly before sunrise after a restless night. Some people say the gentle rocking of a train lulls them to sleep. Not me. I lie awake listening to the scrape of metal on metal, the rush of air over the cars, listening for all of the sounds that indicate you are on a runaway train accelerating to certain disaster. Finally arriving at the Stuttersville station in those pre-morning hours was like coming into safe harbor from a storm at sea. I was home.

I’d left town to get away from a girl that ran the Tea House with her father. I left town to get my head straight, to find myself somewhere on the highways of the American southwest. Instead I just found dead coyotes and a bad case of hepatitis. I’d been delirious in a roadside hotel just outside of Tucsan. The owner’s mother took care of me there in room number 4. In my fever I was surrounded by demons, most of them looking too much like the father of the girl I was running from. But for the most part, fever deliriums are not what they’re made out to be. Most of the time I just felt frustrated, going round and round in my mind, circular arguments, clammy sheets, the knowledge that I was far from home and slipping into unconsciousness. But then my fever broke and I came out of it, like a boat emerging from a storm into safe harbor. Yeah, I see the parallels.

Okay, so maybe I did see elephants pirhouetting atop telephone poles, and scarecrows doing a mean tap dance down the rows of corn. Maybe I invented a new language from idiotic sounds, shuzzle de bop and de dim bam floozy. Maybe I did find myself in a foreign town of steep hills and nearly vertical streets. I boarded a trolley that laboriously climbed, climbed, climbed, until it reached the apex. What a view, in that split second before the descent. An old drunk drives the trolley, and he frequently drifts off to sleep, awakened only by the blaring car horns as we shoot through intersections against the red lights. He takes another shot from a bottle of rum. His ancestors were pirates, you know, and this infamous bloodline of criminals has diluted itself down to this pathetic figure driving a trolley. Before the trolley crashes through the docks at the edge of the harbor, I leap off while it’s still rolling.

I wander the fishing piers. Great bins of silvery pollock and mackerel, herring and sardine, jellyfish and squid. Mermen cart their catches around in crates, ye traitors of the sea. Where have all the Mermaids gone? Out there in the bay, flipping their glittery green tails in the morning light. Beautiful swelling hips cresting the waterline as they dive deep. I try to steal a rowboat to paddle out to them, to cavort there in the rippling blue water, but all of the boats are filled with pale bloated bodies, flies, and the stench of seaweed. I launch them all out into the bay to let them drift to their final destinations.

Where am I going with this? This is delirium. This is fever. This is like a runaway train that finally rolls to a stop in my home town. Stuttersville.
I leave the station platform and walk across town towards the girl I had been running from. It is in the early morning chill that I crept through wet grass towards the Tea House windows. Inside, a golden light burning from a single lamp in the library. Creeping up to closer, careful not to lean into the light pooling just outside the window, I looked to the two figures inside. The girl, still in her night dress, served up a pot of tea to her father crashed out on the sofa. He was drunk. She nursed him. She had a matronly kind of concern on her face for her father, brushing back a strand of sweaty hair off of his forehead. He wrapped an arm around her waist to pull her close. She peeled back his arm, like some kind of tentacle, and tucked it to his side, then crossed the room to the buffet where she set down the tea pot and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and I froze there crouched at the window, fingertips held up to the glass.

Plot Spoiler

2007-02-24T10:16:00.001-06:00

Golden pages photo by redhairedpixie.

He left his apartment with a novel tucked under his arm. It was something he had wanted to get his hands on for quite some time, with leather bindings and guilt lettering along the spine; something from the 19th century, something modern but not too, but besides this, he knew hardly anything about it. He borrowed without asking from his mother’s collection.

He carried a crumpled pack of generic cigarettes in the breast pocket of his red flannel. Cherokee work boots loosely laced. Jeans with a little brake grease smeared on the knee. On the way down the steps he ran into Bridget carrying in a bag of groceries and held open the door for her. She was cute; olive skin, one dimple in her left cheek, white white teeth.

The brisk air smelled of fall, like gutted pumpkins and wet leaves. He walked a block and a half to the bus stop and picked up the 4 uptown, his final destination being a little park nestled between a row of restaurants at where he would never eat, and a trendy fitness club with valet parking.

Somebody was sitting at his favorite bench. He leaned against a tree trunk twenty yards away and stared the guy down until he got up and left. The bench overlooked a small pond ringed with cat-tails, and a playground where a young mother talked on a cell phone while two children scrambled around on the equipment.

The novel’s spine made a slight cracking sound as he opened the covers, releasing a smell of stale cigar smoke and yellowed paper. He read the first sentence, only something didn’t seem right. The words were not that of a 19th century author. There were no butlers or spinsters, no expositions of societal norms, no ladies dying of consumption. But the words spoke to him. Litterally.

Edward, you have to start doing something with your life. See that woman over there, the one on the bench watching her kids? She’s waiting, just like you. Only she’s been waiting for years, and she’s not even sure she wants kids yet, but there’s her four year old with a runny nose pushing the other kid around.

He skipped ahead: Edward, you shouldn’t skip ahead like that. You’ll miss some important information up front, some foreshadowing which might lead to misunderstanding. . .

His heart raced. He started flipping through pages:
. . . Your wife is in a coma. The doctors want to know if you’ll let her go. There are a lot of people waiting for organs right now. . .

Further ahead: Jimmy fell off his bike today and chipped a tooth. You’re going into the doctor to get tested for prostate cancer. Make sure your will is up to date.

Edward finds his place again at the beginning of the book and reads more carefully: Where did this book come from? It wasn’t really your mother’s to have. She stole it from her uncle’s library shortly after his death, during those hours when a family meets under solemn pretext, but secretly their adrenaline is pumping and their eyes scanning the room for value. “What’s mine? What her’s? No, I don’t want it, but I don’t want HER to have it, either. She always got more than me when we were kids, anyway. I should get more.”

It was during those hours of ugliness, when the pettiness of humanity reeks the most, that it turned physical. Your mother and your aunt got into a tussle, trying to reach this book tucked away on the top shelf. Your great uncle had never allowed them to play with it; everything else in the library was fair game, but never, ever, touch this book, he had warned them. Now your mother came out on top, with the leather volume clutched deftly in one arthritic claw, and tucked under her arm for good measure. A running back could have taken lessons from her on how to protect the ball, and she protected hers. All the way back home to Minneapolis.

The ownership of such a valuable book would normally lead one to display it on the optimal shelf, under just the right lighting, with only the most classic of books to nestle on either side of it. Not so with your mother. Maybe she didn’t understand the book. Maybe she feared it. She only ended up repeating the cycle, by tucking it away on the top shelf and forbidding you from ever touching it. But you didn’t wait for her estate to be divided up before getting your hands on it. You couldn’t wait, and you shouldn’t. You’ve been waiting too long for the story of your life to get interesting. Want to learn how your mother’s going to pass on, and when? Turn to page 57…

Plant Life

2007-02-17T09:02:00.000-06:00

He stands in the floor to ceiling window of his condo on the thirty-second floor, looking out. He is overcome with vertigo, but it’s not the height. It’s not the city sprawled below like a safety net. It’s something to do with being alone. Or is it not being in love? Or is it the sudden realization of how he can’t seem to grow up?

To calm himself down, he makes a cup of hot chocolate. He feels at one and the same time like a mother stirring the cup with a spoon, and a little boy licking the chocolate froth off his lips. He returns to the window. A light snow transforms the world of downtown, a kind of fantasy land of glowing lights. All sounds seem to suspend in the air with the flakes and hover, like a trapeze artist caught in the moment after lunging from one rung and reaching out for the other.

He took a sleeping pill about forty-five minutes ago. He should have been down long ago. In his head he hears his own voice saying “time for bed,” like a father and the retort “but I don’t want to,” like a child. He turns his back on the window and looks towards the long path to the bedroom, and that sense of vertigo returns. He tries to make out what those shadows are across the room, tries to hear what the plants are saying to one another. One of the plants reaches around from the corner of the couch as though it plans to touch him with its palms when he passes. Another cringes in a corner, leaves pressed flat against the wall as though petrified of him. But after all, he is seeing the plants come alive. Maybe it should be afraid. Very afraid.

Rainy Florida Christmas

2007-02-01T06:56:00.001-06:00

Kept Indoors photo by stumblintrucker.

I sit here in Florida listening to the dull rain drip outside the window. The bug screens are beaded with water. Water drips from the overhanging tree limbs. I lay on the cot in the guestroom, stretched out to my full length so that my feet dangle over the foot of the bed. I’m sleepy, listening to the rain, smelling turkey cooking in the kitchen and my mom bustling about, opening and closing cupboards and drawers. My step dad sleeps somewhere in the reading room or the on the living room sofa, short shallow breaths like a dying fish. I try reading but I keep falling asleep. Not all the way out, but that oppressive weight on my eyes, the slightest sounds causing a terrible clamor in my head, like beads of water striking a cymbal.

Spirit Garden

2007-01-27T08:55:00.001-06:00

Bok Tower Sanctuary had gained the reputation of having such natural beauty that many of the citizens of Lake Wales and surrounding areas made their wishes known that, upon death, they wanted to be cremated and have their ashes strewn amidst the gardens. Although discarding human remains on sanctuary property was prohibited for all except those of Mr. Bok himself, whose body was interred in a crypt just above the water line of the island upon which his famous carillon rose, family members would try to be as inconspicuous as possible strolling down the paths in their hour of grief, urn hidden beneath a picnic blanket or within a backpack, to deliver their loved one to their final destination. For some it was the serene privacy of the back trails, scattered over the moist undergrowth of ferns and moss. For others it was up high upon the hill, overlooking miles of flat Florida wetlands, while others requested to be scattered amidst the camellias of the winding North Walk.

So many human ashes fertilized the soil of Bok Tower Sanctuary that the place became crowded with the spirits of the departed. Most visitors were blind to the mistral passings across the trails in front of them, deaf to the discontented ghosts bickering over who claimed the best locations for their memorial benches scattered throughout the grounds. Benches levitated throughout the night, walked across the lawns, or were thrown into the middle of the pond, until the morning grounds crew arrived to sort out the mess. They blamed mysterious vandals, probably kids.

Not every visitor lacked the third eye with which to see these ghosts. Some discerned a curiously animated cloud of mist over the lawns, felt a cold brush of air aginst their bare arm, heard the plaintive wail of a grandmother whose ashes were scattered too close to the snakes sunning themselves by the water.

A particularly aggressive squirrel that accosted people walking along the trails was in fact spirited with the lingering soul of Quantanimus James, an accountant who had committed suicide after getting caught money laundering from the Lake Wales Pantheonic Temple in 1962. A ornery man in life makes for one cantankerous squirrel in the afterlife. The squirrel of Quantanimus guarded a gluttonous horde of nuts in the hull of a dead evergreen oak.

Other spirits made themselves known in more subtle ways: the perplexed expression of Uncle Roy in the bark of a tree; the blush of a dead bride in the bloom of Granada roses; the watchful eyes of a lone koi hovering at the surface of the reflecting pool, looking for her niece to come for a visit.

Watery splash photo by tony275.

One spirit was that of a young girl, only ten, who had died of leukemia. In her young life she had only time for one passion: dancing. She had wanted to be a ballerina. Now in her afterlife she haunted the surface of the pools in the early morning, turning the pond into her stage, dancing upon the surface, making ripples with her pirouettes.

And the two swans floating on the pond? Many fancied they were the ghosts of two dead lovers, but in truth the swans were nothing but swans, a pair of the only natural specimens moving about the spirit garden.

Blogfright

2007-01-05T06:43:00.001-06:00

Battle of Britain Memorial 3 photo by ART NAHPRO.

I'm all seized up. I know I haven't posted in ages. I haven't written in ages, not even in my crap journal where I allow myself to type like mad for an hour without any pressure. I think about posting something here and I say, "I don't know what to write. It sounds like so much work." I get tight in the chest. Shallow breaths. An eel writhing in my stomach. Then tired, so tired. Maybe tomorrow.

The Devil House

2006-12-08T06:46:00.000-06:00

"For a nation - "
photo by aperitive.

There is a house on the hill which children and teenagers have snuck out to on moonlit nights for dozens of years. Every town has such a house. They have varied names; the house on the hill, the haunted house, the house in the woods. The particular house which I describe is called The Devil House. The stories of what happened here to give it such an infamous reputation vary, depending on who is doing the telling. Some say devil worshippers live here, others say murders have taken place deep in the wooded property, and others say that you can see cars protruding from the ground with people trapped inside. I am perhaps in the best position to testify whether the stories are true. I live in this house. I bury the cars. I chase my guests around the property with an ax in my hand. It’s a big production, really, to sustain the reputation of living in a Devil House, like directing a Broadway show. The imported statues of demons are placed on either side of the front steps, the projector aimed at the guestroom wall so that a wraithlike figure glides across in a slow loop. Why do I go to all the trouble? For the love of bringing out in people that feeling of being alive, which is best experienced in the moments before they think their life will be taken from them. Terror is an underrated emotion. I do it to keep the tradition alive, I do it for the art of it, and I do it, every once in a long while, to kill someone.

Electrical Storm

2006-11-26T07:37:00.000-06:00

Dangerous Beauty
photo by hugsRgood.

I was thinking of Rachel the other night, and that time we lived Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We were out for a walk when a lightning storm blew into town. Lightning bolts cracked only a few blocks away from us. I wanted to turn back to the house, but she wanted to walk straight into the storm. On her face, I could see excitement and fearlessness. In an open flat field, walking towards an iron train bridge, the rational side of me told her this was nuts. She said not everything is rational. I made her come home. She hated me for it, and I think I fell in her estimation that day. I wonder now what we would have found in the storm. What was it that I was too timid to experience? Something makes me think of how women have this spiritual connection to nature, and how she knew something I did not, and it was beyond explanation. I now wish I had had the courage to follow her down into the field towards the railroad bridge, into a ring of lightning strikes, like Orpheus and Eurydice walking down into the realm of the dead. What would we have found in the middle of the storm? I probably would have just been electrocuted. Maybe that was her intention all along.

Treading Water

2006-11-18T10:36:00.000-06:00

I thought I would be able to handle growing old because my memories of childhood would always be there, and every detail could be recalled to take me back to the exact moment. But all of that was a lie; it was a hell of a long time ago, and the details grow fuzzy until they eventually disappear. I wonder if science will find a way to help me replay the exact events, along with the sounds and smells. I have faith that every detail is filed away somewhere deep in my brain, and that those buried events determine how I behave (or misbehave) today. If I could only tap into it. If I could only break free of my ignorance, ignore the distraction of my surroundings so that I could sharpen these sentiments of the past, skipping school, stumbling drunk down suburban streets on my first few cans of beer, hot humid days on the lake, treading water around the raft where my friend’s sister floated, golden, languid, unreachable. What did she say? Did I hold her hand when we climbed out of the water? Or is she still floating out on the raft somewhere in my brain, and I am treading water in endless circles around her?

Deathbed Lists

2006-11-12T10:14:00.000-06:00

I’m reading a book called “Second Innocence”, that helps us regain that sense of wonder and joy that we experienced as a child. One passage describes how, when people get diagnosed with an illness, they think of all the things they wished they had done. If I was sitting in a hospital bed tomorrow and reflecting on the life I wished I had led, what would my answers be to these questions?

What do you regret not doing because of fear?
Having a wife and two kids. I’m afraid of losing my freedom to do what I want. If I had a wife and two kids, my response would have been to stay single, explore writing, and live in a condo in downtown Minneapolis.

What do you wish you had put more time and energy into?
My relationships with friends, family, and significant others.

What do you wish you had put a lot less time and energy into?
Work. I throw all of my energy and focus into work, and I know when I retire or quit, it’s like, “What was it all for?”

What was always on your someday list that you now wish you had done?
Learning to play guitar or piano. Joining a writers group at the Loft. Going camping and fishing. Buying a boat and a motorcycle. Own a small tea shop.

As you think about your daily experience of life, what qualities do you wish there were more of and what qualities do you wish there were less of (more time for self, more community, more kindness. . .)?
More quiet time, more calm, more laughter, more energy, more reading. Less chores, less worrying, less self-criticism, less tv.

What is your deepest regret in terms of the type of person you never became (a kind person, a generous person, a courageous person…)?
A self-confident person, a self-disciplined person, a more honest person (in terms of I say and do what people want from me, rather than what I really feel).

If I had more time or energy, I would love to learn to . . .
play guitar or piano, other languages, cooking and baking, lucid dreaming, meditation.

A Thousand Monkeys

2006-11-08T07:46:00.000-06:00

An infinite number of monkeys...,
Photo by olivander.

He lives alone, in a familiar filth that he wraps around himself like an old blanket for comfort. He dodges sleep throughout the night, until the brain breaks free of its moorings. The room fills with strangers, after-bar deviants, Bukowski bred and mulled in cheap red wine. The sloppy kiss of a butcher girl, the sullen slut, the prostitute drunk on bourbon, stumbling through Jackson Square, skipping on stars, throwing bottle caps at the boys tap dancing in their sneakers for money across the broken cobblestones of the river walk. The late night started to take its toll and he yawned until nearly passing out, and slipped into a ditch of dreamless sleep. He woke up in a cold library at three am, books jeering from their shelves. Seated at the long oak tables of the reference section, a thousand monkeys crouched over typewriters, tapping at the keys. The floor was littered with tomorrow’s books. The room stank. He picked up a few of the pages, scraped away the monkey shit, and began reading. It went something like this . . .

The Only Thing that is Real

2006-11-04T09:15:00.000-06:00

Fishy Corona,
Photo by olivander.

The act of writing is the beginning; it does not matter if the writing is good. You first write from the heart, and then edit with the brain. You write without rereading, you write without thinking of the fantasy of your team of editors, your publicist, the public readings, the interviews attempting to pierce the veil of your brilliance. Forget the invitations to read at colleges and the likelihood that these very words will be the ones to seduce some young college thing into bed with you. None of that matters, none of that is real. The only thing that is real is this moment, this sublime isolation in which you can uncover emotions you didn’t know you had, recreate a sensation from the past with just the right words, then twist the truth into a shape perhaps more real than the one you had to begin with.

World Stage

2006-11-03T07:46:00.000-06:00

Dylan
photo by mr_la_rue.

I have visions of my neighbors busting down the door and bashing my head in with baseball bats because I laugh too loudly while watching documentaries with the headphones on. The last one was “No Direction Home”, about Bob Dylan. Was it supposed to be funny? I hope so. Afterwards I go into the den and strum my guitar and do my best impression of a folk singer. What wonderful concerts I performed to an audience of books and lamps.

Why does Bob Dylan get press conferences about his opinions when he is only in the public forum because he knows how to strum a guitar, and some would day, sing? Why not invite the anonymous history major to share his message to mobilize a generation? But I cannot deny that Bob’s lyrics of the past flashed like lightning and blinded me. I almost prefer to hear someone else cover his songs, like an old gospel singer, because Bob sounds like he is parodying himself. I cannot hear the lyrics because Bob is in the way.

Come Forward

2006-11-01T07:33:00.000-06:00

powerball
photo by rwhite..

She left without so much as a word. He tore apart the kitchen looking for a note—isn’t that where women always left their notes in the movies—and then went to the bedroom to collapse in exhaustion and found the note, resting on his pillow. All that the note said was “I’m leaving you.” No shit, he thought. But why? Sure, in no way could someone say this was marital bliss, but we had our good times, didn’t we? You liked when I made fun of actors during movies, or at least you laughed. Some of the time. I know you hated how my spoon scraped the cereal bowl, and how I couldn’t stay on a television channel for more than five minutes, and how I had to buy a Powerball ticket every weekend. You always thought that was my ticket for escape. It was, baby, but not from you. It was our ticket out of this neighborhood with its crack house and thumper cars. It was our ticket out of our jobs, so I could go into the Garage and tell the foreman to go fuck himself, and so you could tell the school that you were done dishing food onto the plates of all those thankless delinquents.

That’s when he realized: the last Powerball ticket was not on the nightstand, where he usually kept them.

Later that evening he heard on the news that the winning ticket had been sold from his home town, from the convenience store that he always bought his ticket from, but the winner had not yet come forward.

Sand

2006-10-24T20:29:00.000-05:00

Dunes
photo by gakout.

What are they talking about? Why do they crowd around my bed on a Saturday morning, prodding me for answers? I don’t know what I did last night, I don’t know where I was or who I was with. So just go away. Come back another day. Maybe then I’ll have something to say. But they don’t leave. They make a pot of coffee on the stove and hover overhead, while the room spins, while the dusty air slowly fills my lungs, exits my lungs, fills my lungs. My chest brings me to life like a bellows and I start to remember.

A bonfire, with faces I didn’t recognize. Where were we? On the beach, that’s right, and passing around bottles of rum and vodka. I remember running out into the surf alone. Or was I with someone? I was with someone, a girl. She had long brown hair nearly black in the moonlight. I remember the cold of the water and the saltiness. We kissed, and her lips tasted of salt. I lost her somewhere on the beach. Or was it in the dunes? I remember sand, lots of dry sand. It got into everything. I remember trying to shake it off me, trying to get it out of my pockets my hair my eyes and nearly weeping because I could not get out of the sand.

I am not certain how I got home, or who these people are, or where the girl with the dark hair in the moonlight went, but I’m sure they’re going to tell me. Let me take a shower first. Sand is in my hair. Sand is under my fingernails. Sand is in the crusty corners of my eyes, and in every fold of the bed sheets.

Please Vacate the Theatre

2006-10-22T11:05:00.000-05:00

red seats
photo by nepenthes.

Sitting in an empty theatre, he watches advertisements flash across the screen. Rita the Condo Queen Real Estate Agent; A watch/clock repair shop around the corner called The Fixery; Advertisements to rent out the theatre for corporate or private events. As he waits for the featured film he imagines himself projected up there on the screen, larger than life, his voice bellowing out of the THX speakers so that he fills the theatre.

A woman walks in. He slinks down further into his chair. She pauses at his isle, looks at him out of the corner of her eyes, then continues on to the front row, where she moves across to the middle seat and sits down. She’s blonde, her straight thin hair nearly platinum. She’s heroin-addict skinny, but her skin flawless. She wears dark maroon lipstick that makes her lips look too thin. She’s not smiling, and something about her face makes him think that it is probably painful or strenuous for her to smile. She wears a shirt with Abraham Lincoln printed on the front. On the back, his assassin.

He gets up from his chair and moves to the seat directly behind her. He does not try silence his change in seating; in fact, he pulls down each spring loaded chair as he passes down the isle like a boy running a stick along a picket fence, but she ignores him. She cranes her neck to the screen, where the movie has finally begun. Black and white film of flowers in a cemetery, time lapse, wilting. Two children, a boy and a girl, wear their Sunday best. He’s wearing a little clip on tie, and she has a sun hat. They cup their hands beneath a spigot to gather water, then carefully walk to the flowers and dump the water on its petals. Back and forth, back and forth until the children are near exhaustion but the flowers continue to whither until they finally die.

He sits so close to her that he can smell her hair, see the fine wisps on the back of her neck. He sees a childhood scar on the nape of her neck, while his fingers draw to the razor-thin ridge at the back of his own neck. Grandmother’s emerald ring; did she really twist it around on her finger intentionally? Her signature disciplinary move was to clutch the back of the necks of the two children, forcing them in whatever direction she willed them.

He leans across the seat in front of him and turns to see her face in perfect profile. Her nose has lost the little button shape of the girl and grown sharper as a woman, but the eyes are the same. He keeps watching her eyes and sees in their reflection the big screen. Over the speakers he hears the sandpaper voice of his grandmother, cursing a boy and girl. “Get in the tub, you filthy little grubs. Dirty, filthy things, you stand there. Turn on the water. No, did I tell you to turn on the hot water? Only cold water for you. You think I would use up my hot water on you two? Dirty filthy things.” A course rag, rubbing until raw, unrelenting as the sensitive skin of the children grows red, but her voice falling to silence, only the harsh choked breathing of effort, one hand clutched on a thin wrist to hold them still, the other scraping the cloth across their skin. Dirty filthy things, they stand there in the cold water and watch the other shivering, naked, dirty things. Grandmother hands grows cramped from the strain. She sits on the toilet yet still doesn’t let the children out of the tub. The two of them crouch on either end of the clawfooted cast-iron tub, facing each other, freezing water, arms wrapped around their knees, huddled.

He shakes his head free of the grating voice of his grandmother and gathers the courage to look directly at the screen, but he doesn’t want to look. He shakes his head free of her. In the reflection of the woman’s eyes he sees the screen fall dark, and she turns to look directly at him, and he wonders if she really sees a dirty, filthy thing? Did they every really outgrow those raw naked bodies? They tried to water the flowers, they worked themselves to exhaustion to keep them alive, but they still died in the end. They still felt guilty for letting the flowers die. The girl was always the stronger one, the defiant one, and now the woman held out her hand and he took it, and together they walked out of the theatre.

First Date Conversations

2006-10-09T08:13:00.000-05:00

New 10
photo by ojaipatrick.

“So do you collect anything?”

“Yeah, I collect money.”

“Oh, you mean like foreign currency and things like that?”

“No, I mean actual money. I like to horde it, to withdraw an entire savings account in twenty dollar bills, throw them on the bed, and roll around in it, then deposit it all again the next day.”

“Well what kind of fun is collecting money, over, say, collecting tea pots or baseball cards or—“

“I figure if you collect enough money, you can buy any other guys collection that you want.”

Gene Mutation

2006-10-02T07:38:00.000-05:00

Something makes me chuckle about the last email I got from my mom. The subject line read “Gene Mutation”. The email read:

The gene mutation that I have and for which you should be tested is:
Factor 5 Leiden.

Love,
Mom

Holy Bondage

2006-09-26T18:39:00.000-05:00

Moon Bride
photo by ART NAHPRO.

"What are you doing?" she asked from the living room, amid the clutter of junkmail and newspapers and dishes.

"I'm acting out this age old western ritual called Making the Bed. You should try it sometime."

She gave him the finger and collapsed on the couch. "My back hurts. You expect me to do all this work when I'm in pain?"

He was beginning to know what pain was all about. It was about knowing you were trapped, that this was all there was to life. He wanted something different.

"How about we get flannel sheets, honey?" he asked. Any small change would do.

"I don't want flannel sheets. I'll get too hot."

He tensed up inside by how easily she dismissed him. After he got the bed made his wife decided she needed him to massage her back, so she sprawled her considerable mass across the newly made bed, pulled off her shirt, and handed him the massage oil. He remembered buying the oil on Valentines Day in hopes to spice up the marriage. Now he wanted to spread it all over the kitchen floor in hopes that she would slip and crack open her head.

Animal Crackers

2006-09-23T09:25:00.000-05:00

I ate a bag of animal crackers today. Half the time I couldn’t figure out what animal it was. Sometimes I could blame it on limbs being broken off, but most of the time it just looked like some amorphous shape, like the batter had oozed beyond its outlines. Where did the giraffe go, and the bear? Who turned the playful monkey into a disfigured hunchback? And if I’m unsettled by this, what effect does it have on kids? These crackers are why are kids are so confused these days. I’ll bet the steady decline in national IQ scores is directly related to the degradation of the animal cookie. Who is going to do something about this? Or a better question might be: why is a 37 year old guy eating animal crackers?

Blood on a White Tuxedo

2006-09-20T20:02:00.000-05:00

Nuc Lento sonitu dicunt morieris
photo by ART NAHPRO.

His typewriter had been broken for years and rusting on the desk, but he had not admitted to anyone, not even himself, that he didn’t miss it. He gave up hope on leading a decent life, and resigned himself to the fact that he was bound for life in a trailer park, a sink full of dishes, an unmade bed with crumpled stained sheets, a mutt tied to the bumper of his car barking at a pack of kids that tormented it all day. He bit down on his cheek, tasted blood. Wouldn’t he miss the trance of writing stream-of-consciousness at 3:00 am of vampires perched in trees, of fangs that punctured the night in a glint of ivory razor stainless steel? Beneath the moon he danced with spectral girls in virginal dresses, mud splashed on the pant leg of his white tux, blood splashed on the lapel like a lurid carnation. He laughed at the utter lack of stars on this clear night. Only a great void hung above him with its rogue moon. He danced a waltz to the music of undead orchestral players in the pit and laughed because madness brought with it courage. It was all over now. He’d go wherever life led him. Why waste another hour of his life trying to make sense of things? There was plenty of distraction on the television, and dishes to wash, and would somebody shut up that god damn dog!

Blood Drive

2006-09-17T13:17:00.000-05:00

the needle
photo by world_of_noise.

I gave blood last week. Things didn’t go as smoothly as usual. As I filled out the questions on a clipboard like “Were you in Botswana any time between 1977 and 1986?” a woman lay on a cot beside me with a dampened napkin on her forehead. She must have fainted just before I got there. She laughed embarrassedly as all people do after they faint. Why? It’s not like their fly was open, but it must be a sign of weakness to faint when giving blood, and a sign of strength to see how quickly you can fill up the pint bag, then leap off the cot and head to your next meeting sporting your chartreuse arm band like a medal of honor.

Then I had to go behind a curtain with an interviewer and answer those embarrassing questions like “Have you ever paid to have sex, or had sex with someone who has been paid to have sex.” I don’t get into the debate with him on whether buying your date dinner at a trendy restaurant with tiny portions constitutes “paying for sex”, so I just say “no”. He asks if I’m on any medications. I should carry a laminated card of all my meds. I am held together by a complex cocktail of pharmaceuticals; at any given time I am likely under the influence of no fewer than four medications. Pfizer invites me to their Christmas party each year. Then he asks me to spell them, and what they are each for. Isn’t he the one in the white coat? I don’t remember half the time. Pill #1 is to offset the side effects of pill #2, and pill #3 is so that I can cope with the emotional trauma of what he is about to do to my little finger.

That’s right, what I fear most when giving blood is not the needle in the arm, but the pinprick on my finger for the blood test. He asks if there is a particular finger I’d like to sacrifice, which always reminds me of Sophie’s Choice. This little piggy suddenly is the focus of every nerve ending in my entire body. The spring loaded needle shoots into me, and there’s a split second of excruciating pain. Hallelulha, that’s over, but then the guy starts squeezing the finger like he’s milking a cow, and he starts jabbing the open wound with that tiny little plastic straw. This has got to be against the Geneva conventions.

I am escorted to a cot and handed over to a bloodletter. He’s a trainee. A woman with the air of authority watches from a chair ten feet away, offering up little hints as to what he is doing wrong. He has trouble finding a vein. Ex-girlfriends doubt I even have any, but with enough slapping around and squeezing and rubbing, they find what they’re looking for. The bloodletters, not the ex-girlfriends. They discuss which vein should be used and the angle at which the needle should go in. At the last moment the observer decides to get a second opinion. Another lady comes over and says, “Oh no, you don’t want to go in there because that’s a valve. Feel that? It would have been quite painful.”

They decide on a vein, and I feel the needle go in. I can tell something is wrong because they don’t say or do anything, until I feel a second stabbing sensation. “Your veins are running away,” she says. They get it after the third try, and the trainee attaches the tube and the bag, all of which I know is going on only out of my periphery. I make a point of never looking at the tube, the bag, the needle, any of it. I look off to the walls, or the people moving about, or listen in on the banter between the different volunteers.

He praises the rate at which I fill the bag, as though I had something to do with it, and before long I’m done. As he fills out paperwork he sets the bag on my outstretched legs. The blood is still warm. My eyes are glued to the wall, and I manage not to faint.

The next day, I see three puncture wounds in the crook of my elbow like I have been bitten by a three-fanged snake. Over the next few days the bruise spreads to the size of a baseball and changes from blue, to purple, to yellow.

Uneaten Biscotti

2006-09-08T17:04:00.000-05:00

° c o f f e e b e a n s °
photo by ° d i °.

Why the hell did I break up with Francesca? It was a mistake, I know that now. What was I thinking?

I take another sip of black, bitter coffee and ignore the biscotti sitting on a plate. I'm sitting in the middle of the coffee shop, not my usual spot. Our usual spot. Francesca and I would always sit on the sofa over by the window, sipping coffee and sharing biscotti and telling funny stories about each other's families, or books or movies or stupid little things that people in love talk about.

She never comes to the coffee shop anymore. She's on a track that will never cross mine again. It's enraging to think that she's out there right now, somewhere without me, so instead I'm staring at the sofa by the window and trying to backtrack. There had to be a single turning point from growing closer to growing apart. A comment made, noticing an annoying habit in the other, something that showed the first signs of dissatisfaction. I keep thinking I can find that moment and change it.

I sound like someone who was broken up with, but no...I did the breaking. That's what makes it worse. Maybe it would have been acceptable if something really fucked up had happened, like she had slept with my brother or I had stolen a thousand dollars from her savings account, but the truth of the matter was that I got bored. I started to wonder what life would be like single again.

Is this my answer? Miserably drinking cold coffee and ghosting the places we used to spend time together, trying to relive those mornings when I believed myself to be so miserable?

Morrison's New Language?

2006-08-31T07:20:00.000-05:00

I return to the screen to scream, to the keyboard to scrawl my name in chalk, praying the rain doesn’t come too soon to erase it. I listen to Jim Morrison’s “An American Prayer”, words flowing in and out, streaming like video on the net, images in sudden fits and starts, pixelized and unclear. I need to offer a sacrifice to get a faster connection. How would Morrison have liked the Net? He’d have loved it, a new media in which to rule, to mold into a shape of his will. I wonder at times if he has somehow transformed his soul into code, streams through the network of wires, across the phone lines of the country, dipping into this chip and that circuit, carrying stock quotes to business men and news of births to grandparents and postings of dream interpretations to newsgroups. He has become the primal electronic scream of modems crying out to each other from livingrooms and dens across America. Is this the new language he envisioned, this cybernetic screech? Can music be made of this? Can poetry? Like the priest on the pulpit, Morrison intones:
“…Soft driven, slow and mad

Like some new language,

Reaching your hand with the cold,
sudden fury of a divine messenger.”

Pronoun

2006-08-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

I belong to one of the major form classes in any of a great many languages. I am a substitute for a noun or noun equivalent, take noun constructions, and am declined. I refer to persons or things named, asked for, or understood in context. I have little or no fixed meaning except one of relation or limitation. I take many forms: emphatic, identifying, intensive, personal, reciprocal, refexive, and relative.

I am, in fact, not a noun, but its substitute.

Fishing for Mermaids

2006-08-27T12:13:00.000-05:00

Blue
photo by John Carleton.

A strong distaste in his nostrils and back of his throat, like something rotting. A sinus infection, perhaps, or a general distaste of the smell of things. He wandered around the rooms of his lake home. On the dock he could see his little girl fishing, her legs dangling over the side, the bobber floating on the still water. She would fish from sunrise to noon with a patience that escaped him. What you fishing for, he’d ask, and she would respond “For mermaids, Daddy. Now go away, you’re scaring them.” Odd girl from the loins of an odd mother.

He went to the living room, pulled a Kleenex out of the box and tried blowing his nose again. Noting came out. He felt dried up and like his nasal passages was a closed up house with milk rotting on the kitchen counter.

He grabbed his car keys of the table and headed out.

He drove fifteen minutes to Mainstreet and pulled up outside the 8th Street Grill. It wasn’t on 8th street any more; it had moved from 8th to Main about six years back, but the owner didn’t want to pay for new printing on the paper napkins. Inside, the noise of families and friends talking, the clink of dishes, the cash register printing out checks, the hiss of food from the kitchen. He grabbed a seat at the counter. The waitress, Doreen, had high arching eyebrows like the McDonalds golden arches. Can those be real, he wondered? They didn’t look drawn on. She took a pad of paper and held it, ready for his order. What did he want? What did he really want? He didn’t know but he couldn’t make her stand there forever so he asked for a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee.

He’d forgotten about his daughter; she was still on the dock, and unsupervised. So what if she wore a Snoopy life vest, that wouldn’t save her from a kidnapper or a bear. He almost got out of his seat to drive back, but then realized it wouldn’t matter if he drove back. She wouldn’t be there anymore. She’d have been taken in by the mermaids of the lake by now, and she would be submerged in the deep pools while the mermaids decorated her with clam shells and long draping garlands of seaweed.

“So where’s the wife today?” the cook asked from over the counter, smirking to the dishwasher clearing trays.

Probably fucking that shoe salesman out at the mall. “I don’t know Sam, do I look like I gotta track her comings and goings all day?”

“Just a question,” Sam replied, wiping his hands on his apron and snatching another order from the carrosel. He ducked back into the kitchen and Doreen slid a cup of coffee on a saucer front of him. “You hafta pick out your own muffin at the counter.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because that’s the policy, and I am not one to go against policy; now it’s just a few feet away. You can handle that, now can’t you Clark?”

For fuck sake, why does everybody have to tell me what to do? But he walked over and spent considerable time examining the muffins to find just the right one. By the time he made it back to his seat, his coffee was cold. Have to put more sugar in it now. He shoveled sugar into his coffee, then dropped the spoon with a clatter onto the saucer. He took a grim satisfaction of how Doreen jumped at the sound.

He could have his own affair, he figured. Maybe that elementary school teacher of his daughter’s, or maybe the girl that worked the counter down at the feed mill. She was probably too young for him, but leaving his wife for someone far younger than her would be all the better.

What the hell do I care if she’s screwing around with someone, he wondered? It’s only because of what people might think, is all. When you get right down to, does it matter to me if she’s found someone else? If she was to keep seeing that guy and nobody would find out, I don’t think I’d give a rip. But I want something too. If she gets to have someone on the side, some taste of satisfaction, then I deserve that too, don’t I? It just doesn’t have to be an affair. The last thing I need right now is another woman, so what’s it going to be?

Yeah, what’s it going to be, he asked himself, taking a sip of cold coffee that was bitter and sweet and at the same time, then a bite of one perfect blueberry muffin. Have to tell Sam he really knows how to bake them. Maybe later, he decided, still sore about the insinuation about his wife.

A boat? Yeah, a boat. He’d wanted one ever since they bought the lake home but his wife had always said no. He could escape out on the water from sunrise to noon. What you fishing for, Clark? Mermaids. Quiet down now. You’re scaring them away.

Write Good

2006-08-16T07:58:00.000-05:00

She wrote me a letter
photo by thermophle.

No, not like that. Harder, with more substance. Make me taste it and feel it. Good grammar doesn’t matter; you always do what your grammarian tells you? Don’t talk about concepts like love and hate, talk about the friction between our bodies. Don’t tell me about old lovers, tell me about now, this very moment, the most important moment. Stay away from adjectives. I am a noun. Use only nouns.

Bright Shiny Objects

2006-08-13T16:40:00.000-05:00

A Picture Share!
photo by margarita azucar.

I knew I’d only be seeing her for a couple of days, then she would be whisked back to the west coast, and then even further away across the ocean, so I knew this was mainly a fun weekend, a handful of hours when the woman I knew from the internet would be incarnated in the flesh. Getting too attached, and then hurt from going our separate ways, isn’t really a possibility for me. I have chronic anesthesia, I am desensitized from any prolonged sense of feeling. Especially once someone is no longer in my proximity, I tend to forget and get distracted by the shiny objects around me. I am essentially a simple creature.

I was surprised at myself when driving back from Milwaukee yesterday to still be thinking about her. The way she laughs and her easy smile, her unfailing confidence with a map even as we get more and more lost deep in the urban woods of Milwaukee, the way we picked out the same glass of wine with dinner. The bow shape of her upper lip when she pouts, or is she thinking? What is she thinking, with that Mensa mind of hers, or it is the writer, wondering how best to use me? Is it the Christian that wants to save me, or the dominatrix that wants to consume me? But what bows her upper lip doesn’t concern me, if I really want the anesthesia to wear off. When we wrote poems at the dinner table on scraps of paper, all of the words I contributed were suspiciously externalized. All nouns. All about the bright shiny objects around me.

Bed and Breakfast

2006-08-10T23:05:00.000-05:00

He sits alone in his room at a B&B, one of those restored Victorian homes in a rundown Milwaukee neighborhood, wondering what she’s going to be like. He’d read her blog for months, seen dozens of pictures her, her daughter, her friends. But what’s it really going to be like to see her for the first time the next morning, hug her like seeing an old friend he’d never met.

Outside the window, the base beat of music plays from the rundown apartment across the driveway. He turns up the air conditioner so the drone will drown out the noises from outside. Her turns up the Spanish music playing on the clock radio, a very small sound from across the room. He types in her web address, opens her blog, reads over all of her old entries like tracing the different patterns of moles across her body or the lines of her palm, trying to memorize her.

And what has happened to his Pharmacist? Their relationship had been downgraded to “friends”, and he wondered if you can really be friends after having dated, even if it worked out for Seinfeld and Elaine. He wondered if friends can still make out from time to time. He wondered if she was reading his thoughts across a computer screen in another city three hundred miles away, and if she was hurt knowing with what anticipation he waited for morning.

Let the Rain In

2006-08-09T07:14:00.000-05:00

Squeezed Lemon
photo by yanivba.

I let the rain come in, just for the hell of it. Lightning, thunder, rain trashed the room like a rockstar, and now all of my magazines on the coffee table are warped with water. I sit back in a damp recliner and feel pleased. Bring it all in. I don’t want to be shut up in here anymore but I can’t bring myself to pass the threshold of the door, so instead let’s let the world in. Wasn’t that once the tagline for the worldwide web? It applies to thunderstorms too.

I read different blogs and admire how some people feel so deeply that the torment is squeezed from them like a lemon. I’ve dried out. Maybe it was because I shut myself up in here for so long I can’t remember quite what it’s like to care for someone again. I don’t remember what it feels like, that torn up run-and-hide kind of passion and love that makes you miserable. So instead I sit contentedly in my apartment, trying to let the storms in.

Killer Koi

2006-07-29T09:54:00.000-05:00

golden crest
photo by la femme jen.

It was an early morning in 1973 when my father lost his leg to a killer koi. He was wading the koi ponds of Mr. Ellison’s estate, famed breeder of championship koi, harbringer of designer breeding in that ancient though clandestine field of koi-anetics. My father was the head koi-handler, scattering specially formulated fish pellets into the water, wading among the water lilies when the following events unfolded.

The groundskeepers were setting the sprinklers and trimming the hedges that early fateful morning. According to witness testimony, the estate was alive with birdsong, a light breeze stirred the magnolias, when suddenly an eerie stillness settled over the grounds. One groundskeeper recalled looking up from his work to see my father wading obliviously through the sparkling pools, then look over his left shoulder in the moment before the attack.

The first strike was a single violent pull on his heal, bringing my father bolt upright, like the first tug on a fishing bobber. Then, a single moment of shock and disbelief, followed by a violent thrashing that lifted him off his feet and submerged him in the shallow pool.

The groundscrew cried out, dropping hedgeclippers and pruners to come running to the waters edge. In the roiling water the head groundskeeper recalls seeing the flash of gold, white and black of the killer koi, and the flailing arms of my father. The koi had spun in a twisting motion, like an alligator roll, twisting off my father’s leg at the knee. By reaching out across the water with the handle of a rake, the groundscrew were able to pull my father out of the bloodied water to the safety of shore.

Panic ensued. Ambulence sirens. Crime photographers. A special committee from the American Koi Society (AKS). Although I was only a child, I remember staying at my father’s side throughout the night in the hospital. Perhaps it was because my father knew those fish better than his own childen that he had foreseen one of them rising up to claim his leg someday. From his hospital bed, through the haze of painkillers and delirium I heard him cry out, “Diablo Wasabi! Diablo Wasabi!”

How could I forget the koi of which he spoke? He always paddled at the waters surface with his head and eyes peeking above the water line, watching me, unblinking, the school of fish giving him a wide burth. Have you ever seen the eyes of a koi? Black, lifeless eyes. A doll’s eyes.

Mr. Ellison posted a $10,000 reward to capture the killer koi. A mob converged on the ponds of the estate. Half of the school was obliterated, captured in nets, stunned by underwater explosives, snagged by children with Snoopy fishing poles, and yet Diablo Wasabi eluded them all. Among the crowds of fishermen, ichthyologists, and media hobbled my father, a crutch in one hand and a gaff in the other.

The crowds parted, forming a corrider towards pond. As my father went into the water, the head groundskeeper clutched me to his chest so I would not witness the fight, but I heard the slow even wading of my father suddenly broken with fierce splashing, gasps from the crowd, and then a wet thud on the ground. I turned to see Diablo Wasabi flopping on shore, the sun glinting off the wet scales of gold and black. How small he seemed on the grass, yanked from his element, gills laboring in the open air. My father sat on the grass ten yards away, the bloodied gaff still clutched in one hand while rubbing the stump of his leg with the other. We all watched the killer koi take his last breaths and felt the same dissatisfaction my father must have felt, the futility of one more dead fish, the emptiness of revenge.

The Solitarian

2006-07-17T07:54:00.000-05:00

Solitary contemplation
photo by dinobirdo.

Why is it that the stories I like writing most are of tormented, solitary souls holed up in a slummy apartment, working at some inconsequential though personally critical task? Why do they all struggle with obsessive thoughts and delusions? Why is it that I like characters who inhabit the same space but don’t know how to communicate with each other? The closest they ever come are monologs recited for the other’s benefit. My version of plot development is when the guy moves from a rocking chair to the front step. Maybe he gets up one morning and stands baffled on the edge of a river, a hand to his forehead, trying to remember if it was flowing the other direction yesterday.

In Search of Distraction

2006-07-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

I go through phases where I want to lose myself in something. Love or books or writing or a video game. I don’t know who to love, but I’m loving the book Kite Runner. I’m starting to get into writing again, and the experience of writing at dusk while listening to creepy atmospheric soundtracks. The video games that tempt me are Everquest, WarCraft, Silent Hill, or Might and Magic. I lean towards Might and Magic because I can play it alone. I’m so shy that even playing a multi-person role playing game, especially one with Massive in the acronym like MMORPG, makes be afraid. Should I really start up any of these games, though? I am the personality type that will become obsessed, that will forget about work and relationships so that I won’t be distracted from the game, and every minute of gameplay will be tainted with guilt because I know the truth of it: I am wasting my time.

Ah screw it, where's the CD.

Lady of the Lake

2006-07-05T07:54:00.000-05:00

The Pharmacist was watering the plants on her balcony when she looked down and had this odd flash in her head, a disturbing image of a woman trapped under water. Was she dead? Was it a premonition of a woman drowning?

She looked closer; through the balcony slats she saw it was just a new table purchased by the skinny man with the pot belly that lived below her, a tacky table to go with his Target canvas foldout camping chair. The glass top was covered with overspray from watering her plants. But the image stayed with her throughout the day, especially the water beaded on the glass. Much to the chagrin of her neighbor, she continued to over-water her plants, hoping one day to figure out why this image stuck with her, this discount store Lady of the Lake.

What I Wish I Was Doing

2006-07-01T17:25:00.000-05:00

Grill Smoke
photo by Brian Teutsch.

I know her name now. The sultry tall woman at the coffee gallery who reminds me of Katie Homes in “Wonder Boys” is named Lindsay. Nice to meet you Lindsay, I’m Brett. It’s pretty dead here on a Saturday, huh? Yeah, she says, and really boring. We exchange Nice-to-Meet-You’s and I walk just as casually as can be to my table without sprawling into any chairs.

It is dull here. I watch traffic pass by the plate glass windows. It’s like I’m sitting on the curb, but protected from the noise and heat and exhaust fumes. Instead I hear classical music from speakers behind the counter. I hear keys tapping under my fingers, the scrape of wooden chairs across wide cedar plank floors, the clank of the cash register sliding open. Coins jingle in Lindsay’s palm and then drop into plastic trays, the coins I tipped her moments ago when I should have tipped paper bills. Too late to run back now.

Lindsay must be wondering why I am hanging around this boring place when I could be anywhere. If I could be anywhere or with anyone, where would I want to be? Sitting out on the banks of the Mississippi watching my dog swim. At home watching World Cup Soccer. Reading books all day on a park bench. What I’d really like to be doing is hanging out in the back yard of a friend’s house while he’s standing over a smoking grill. I’ve got a beer in my hand, and I’m doing some sort of trick to make his kids laugh. I’m talking to his wife about my latest dating follies, and she’s telling me about cute friends of hers that she’d like me to meet but I politely decline. Maybe he’s grilling salmon steaks and asparagus, and there’s fruit tart for desert that I bought at the Café Latte in Saint Paul. We play Spanish music from a CD I bought at a concert at the Cedar Cultural Center the week before, where I’d taken a woman out on a date. We danced at the back of the crowd, lost ourselves in the music and the buzz from the Corona’s, then went back to my place and lay on cool white sheets lit only by the city lights filtering in from the window. I’m thinking of this now while my buddy is talking about the Twins ore something I don’t really care about as he turns the salmon steaks. After we eat we light a fire in the fire-pit and show his kids how to roast marshmallows just right, toasty brown and melty. I go home around ten and find my dog jumping on the front door, excited for his nightly walk.

A Monster's Viewpoint

2006-06-30T06:40:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-25T11:41:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-24T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-16T22:54:00.000-05:00

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.”