10 Minutes Over Tea

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

The Wrong Tomato

Tomatoes In Tomato Droplets
photo by evilgreg3000.

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

06-06-06

Alien Fire
photo by noqontrol.

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

Lazy Days of Summer?

Noeremburg Garden 020
photo by brettanicus.

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

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

Directions Required

Pill Bottle Cap
photo by ocellnuri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Idols

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

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

June: A Month of Truthtelling

I'm going to change it up here for a little bit during the month of June. Up to this point I've mainly written stream-of-consciousness pieces, the first drafts of story ideas, just about all of it made up, most of it nonsensicle. Don't get me wrong, what I like best about writing is the chance to step into a world of make believe. The stories I tell usually represent something I feel but don't know how to express directly. But I keep coming across the fact that the writers I admire most write from personal experience, and yet whenever I turn the camera back on myself, I get bored.

This will be interesting, or maybe very mundane. Not that much happens in my life. But one thing I will do is try to post an entry every day. It's all about tenacity, right? I haven't decided yet how to deal with writing about people I know, especially the few that read this blog. I'm leaning towards uncensored honesty, but won't that piss some people off, or hurt feelings? Too bad. It's what you get for knowing a writer, or at least a computer geek with a blog, and you can always post a comment to get me back. I guess the least I could do is fictionalize the names. Who am I kidding, who cares? I think only four people read this thing anyway.

Why for the month of June? So that it can be easily categorized and buried away in the archives after I return to tales of insanity, murder, and upchucked diamond rings.

Bring Into Focus

I slide down the embankment, looking for cover from the eyes that watch, the voices that accuse. I seek shelter in a wayside restroom, cowering there on the tiles and the septic stench, imagining a softer world. By dawn I’m walking again along the shoulder of the interstate, until a nice old lady picks me up. She’s my surrogate grandmother for the day; a soft smiling caricature of kindness with pudgy arms opened wide to pull you into an all consuming hug. She smokes like a grease fire, but that doesn’t bother me. We drive to Reno and there she drops me off with a ziplock bag of her oatmeal cookies. An hour later at the side of the road I cry while I eat the first cookie, then save the rest, one per day, I figure, should grant me a few moments of peace for nine days.

By mid-week I walk into Jefferson and stop at the first phone booth, leaf through the white pages until I find him, buried there innocuously in the hundreds of other names like an undiagnosed cancer. Wayne Sturges. I tear out the page, fold it neatly into my pocket, then walk to the hardware store for supplies. Rope, electrical tape, pliers, utility knife…Any of the tools I think could be useful.

Sturges’ house looks about as run down and uncared for as I’d expected. If the color hadn’t started out as gray, then the peeling paint and the sun and dirt had turned it that way. Rotting shutters, two of them missing like gaps in a derelict’s smile. A gravel yard overgrown with tall weeds and refuse. Rusted chain link fence. The roof sagged, a broken spine. The front steps crumbled and cracked. A desolate home for a desolate man. I opened the gate, climbed up the steps turning to sand and rock and knocked on the door. Torn screen, torn from the inside out, somebody trying to get out?

When he came to the door in his stained robe, I could tell by the expression on his unshaven face that he thought he knew me from somewhere. Guess he couldn’t place me here, a thousand miles away from where he’d first run into me.

“Sturges,” I said. Not a question, but a statement.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve come to finish the job I started six months ago.”

He recognized me now. Those bloodshot eyes opened a little wider.

“She’s just about dead now. Can hardly get anything out of her.”

“Well I come to take care of that.”

He opened the door. That threw me off a little. I’d already examined the door to judge if I’d be able to kick it in. I would have been able. He knew that too, I guess.

The room stank. Pizza boxes, opened tuna fish cans, beer bottles scattered on the floor. The television was propped on overturned milk crates, the picture flickering . Oprah. Fuzzy picture with a coathanger antenna.

I dropped my bag of supplies next to the television, grabbed the pliers and set to work on the antenna. “You know I don’t like to leave a job undone…”

“Sorry man, but I was moving out here and had to get her out of the shop. Didn’t think you could do nothing for her anyway.”

“We’ll see.” I pinched and crimped the antenna, taped on a tinfoil pie plate I’d seen on the floor, trying to work it like a shaman bringing into tune the transmissions of spirits traveling invisibly through the air, getting into the groove of my life’s work: to focus the pictures that come in blurry.

Toy Boat

Toy Boat photo by Richbos.

He met her at the Bugle Coffee Shop on the corner of Sundry and Union Street, at 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon. He showed up fifteen minutes early so as to try to relax before she arrived, but she was already there, sitting in a booth. He grew anxious whenever meeting new people. Even more-so complete strangers that came out of nowhere with a phone message left in the middle of the night: “I have something of yours, something you lost a long time ago. If you’ll meet with me, I’ll return it.”

She had blonde hair, with about an inch of her bangs died black. They cut a sharp, even line across her forehead. She wore heavy eyeliner around green eyes. Her nose was pierced with a silver stud. She wore white fishnets, tall black clunky boots with silver buckles up the calves, a plaid skirt held together with oversized safety pins, and yet her rebellious clothes were betrayed by the crows-feet around her eyes that placed her somewhere in her mid-thirties. On the seat beside her rested a canvas sack with a drawstring.

He slid into the booth across from her. She sipped her coffee and peered at him from over the cup’s rim. He ordered a cup of tea from the waitress, and as she was walking away, the woman across from him asked for a bowl of barley soup.

They silently observed each other until the waitress returned with tea and soup. “There’s a story I want to tell you,” she said. He sipped his tea. “A young single-mother buys her little boy a toy boat. He plays with it in the bathtub until he grows tired of the small surface of water, the porcelain walls rising up on all sides. He asks his mother if he can float it out on the pond at the park. She says no, afraid that it might float beyond reach, and stretching to retrieve it, he would fall in and drown. He couldn’t swim. One morning when his mother had fallen asleep on the sofa while reading a book, he floods the bathroom. The boat sails from one side of the tiled floor to the other, but it bumps into the walls and the base of the sink. His mother finds him splashing in the shallows. She spanks him with a wooden spoon and sets the boat on the top bookshelf in the library, where he can only look up and see the top of the sails peeking out.

“After two weeks she gets down the sailboat. He brings it into the bath, laughing, playing the voices of pirates scrambling around on the deck. His mother sits on the toilet, legs crossed, elbow propped on knee, chin resting on the heel of her hand. She doesn’t know that he is faking this enjoyment to disarm her. He hatches a plan.

“On his way out the door one morning on the way to school, he slips the boat beneath his rain slicker. It has been raining for three and a half days. The gutters are swollen with run-off, parking lots become vast lakes of standing water. He walks to his bus stop, but as his schoolmates climb the steps into the bus, he ducks down into Mr. Olsen’s shrubs. After the bus pulls away, he climbs out of the shrubs and heads off down the sidewalk.

“Rushing rivers of water run alongside the curbs, swirling eddies of rainwater gather on the corners for intersections, whirlpools descend through sewer gratings. He sets the boat into the current. It starts off down the street, one block, two. He runs alongside it. When it gets hung up on debris, he steps into the rushing currents to lift it free. Further and further he follows his boat until he finds himself miles from home, outside of his town, somewhere off the interstate.”

He sets down his tea cup. He looks outside to the cold spring rain puddling in the street, half expecting to see a toy boat in the gutter.

“No, it’s not out there. Do you know where the boat went?”

“It kept going," he said, "for miles and miles. Every time it hung up on a branch or a piece of garbage, I freed it. It reached the Mississippi...”

“…and he ran alongside the shoreline, stumbling over driftwood, sliding down ditches, at times even falling into the banks of the river to watch his toy boat take on the greatest river in North America.”

“It stayed afloat, but I couldn’t keep up.”

“It’s lucky you scratched your name into its hull. I would never have found you.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Louisiana. My father was a croc-hunter. He found it the belly of a fifteen foot crocodile while gutting it.” She pulled out from the sack beside her the toy boat, setting it in the bowl of soup. It wasn’t deep enough to float, of course. It just sat there, lilting to starboard. He thought it might be the saddest thing he had seen in twenty years. The sails were frayed and yellowed with age. The carving of his name in the hull was warn smooth by the repeated stroke of a little girl’s fingers feeling out the name, like brail.

She laid some bills and change on the table, exactly her amount of the bill, and rose to her feet to leave. “How did you ever find your way back home?” she asked.

“I never did.”

She left. He watched her through the café window as she got into a rusted pick-up, swung around the parking lot to the exit, signaled right, then was whisked away into traffic and was gone.

Wolf in the Library

Strange nightmare, clinging to him in the late morning hours. He sips his coffee, stares through the newspaper into the dream. A gothic library afloat in a creeping gloam, with guttural growls coming from the rare books section held in the center of book stacks like the core of a rotten apple. Growls pursue him through winding labyrinth of books. He sprints to a spiraling stair, quickly ascends with the predatory breathing close behind him. When he reaches the top of the tower he finds, standing in an open window, his fiancé balanced on the precipice, white nightgown stark and billowing against a stormy sky. He reaches out to her as lunges across the tower room, but too late. With one frightened glance over her shoulder, she steps off the edge and drops into the weightless night.

He holds the stone wall and hangs out the window, looking down to the troubled waters of the mote. Ripples swallowed her whole, like the water creature purported to lurk in the moat waters. She was never found. Lept from a library window into eternity, and why? This question would plague him in the morning hours after sunshine had replaced the dream and his finance was back at his side, obliviously leafing through the Sunday ads. He wondered about the sound that had come from his throat when he tried to shout out to her. Low gutteral growl. The thick black pelt covering his arm reaching out to snatch her from the window. The claws that had only grasped the space from which she had escaped him into death.

He returned to his newspaper. Just a dream. His uncle wouldn’t think so. Uncle Theo, the eccentric of the family, famed parascientist who had written two treatise on dream encounters and their very real impact on a person’s psychic fabric. Maybe he would go out to Hedonshire this afternoon to consult with his uncle, look up the dream symbols in his library of the occult.

Strange Fruit

billie holiday photo by celogarta.

I was watching the Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home” and saw a clip from Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. I had never heard this before. Reading the lyrics is powerful enough, but with Billie Holiday singing them, seeing her . . . it was one of those moments of terrible lucidity.

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter cry.

Good Boy, Scurvy

(tongue)
photo by C Buckley.

Last week my dog threw up a diamond ring. It was an engagement ring, three round cut stones set in white gold, entangled with a weave of grass and bile from my dog’s stomach. Scurvy likes to eat grass in the spring, then pukes it up on the living room carpet or on the kitchen floor

I put on dish gloves, picked the ring out of the vomit, cleaned it as best I could over the garbage can and then rinsed it off in the sink. Scurvy sat by the sink the whole time, wagging his tale, thumping against the cupboards. Yes Scurvy, good boy.

I asked the neighbor lady if she had lost a ring recently. Nope, she said, where did you find it? Well….

I keep the ring in my pocket in case I come across somebody I suspect it belongs to. Like a worry stone, I find myself running my fingers over its edges from deep inside my pockets. It started to fray the front of all my slacks. Whenever I was at a store and needed to fish out change, it would come out in the handful of coins, and I’d get a strange look from the cashier. I’d stick it back in my pocket, smile off-handedly, and take my bag and leave.

I take it out and looked at it absently while I watch television. I am not sure if it is a real diamond or what it is worth, but that doesn’t matter. Scurvy threw up against three days afterward, and I found myself picking through it to see what he’d brought me this time. Just more grass, pebbles, an undigested piece of rawhide. He wagged his tale just as enthusiastically as I cleaned up the mess. I guess the difference in value between a chewed rawhide bone and a diamond ring meant nothing to him.

I drew up a Ring Found poster and made a dozen copies at a nearby Kinko’s, then tacked them up to utility poles within a three block radius. I figure that’s about as far as scurvy gets when he runs away. Within three days I got seven calls. None of the callers could correctly describe the ring. With each made-up story I grew less and less fond of my neighbors. One woman said she had been in an argument with her boyfriend and he had torn it off her finger and thrown it away, and she’d needed stitches. Another said she had lost it while helping an elderly lady from a taxi to the front of her house. A young man said that he’d bought it to propose to his sweetheart but had thrown it from the car window after she’d turned him down. I almost wanted to give it to him, but then I would never get the ring to who it really belonged to.

A woman showed up at my front door this morning, her arms crossed over her chest as though she was cold, but it was quite warm out. She wore sweatpants and a baseball cap with wisps of hair peeking out. It looked like she was balding underneath the cap. Her eyes were sunken and her skin grey. She smiled wanly at me and said she’d heard from her neighbor that I’d found a diamond ring. She told me hers had kept slipping off of her finger lately. She looked apologetically at me, shrugged her shoulders that poked through her sweatshirt. She said she could describe it for me, and started to, but I told her no. No need to go into details. I handed her the ring, and she closed her fingers over it. She said maybe she should wear it on a necklace for now on, at least until…but she didn’t finish. Scurvy was beside the door, thumping his tail against the floor and panting. She leaned down and petted him. What’s his name, she asked? Scout, I said. Good boy, Scout.

Mutiny of Limbs

Foot Prints In The Sand... photo by Flutterbye8567.

Most people are blessed with two feet that get along. The left foot and the right foot are soul mates, perfectly in good will and cooperation with one another. But Henry somehow ended up with two feet that just didn’t get along with one another. They would constantly bicker and fight, and this caused havoc for poor Henry. He’d be walking to work in the morning, and the left foot, being much more responsible and dependable than the right foot, would be walking straight down the sidewalk towards the office, but the right foot, being much more carefree and spontaneous, decided it would rather go for a swim at the lake and started heading off in other direction. Henry nearly fell to the ground, and people gawked at the man with one leg going down the sidewalk and the other trying to hail a cab. It was only in the most crooked and faltering path that he was eventually able to eek out enough compliance from his two feet to get himself to work.

His hands felt terrible, having to witness the communication breakdown between the right and left foot. They’ve been through tough times themselves, but have worked it out. Multi-limbed coordinated dexterity took a lot of hard work, nobody said it would be easy. Each of the hands sympathizes with a different foot however, which leads to their own disagreements. Spats flare up, like when Henry had to pick his nose, and the left hand said “It’s your turn,” but the right hand says “I had to do it last time!” Henry is nearly exhausted by the end of the day, just keeping all of his extremities under control.

His toes felt helpless and caught in the middle of all this. The little toe thought it was to blame in some way for the feet not getting along, even though the big toe stressed that they had nothing to do with it, and kept saying that everything would be all right. But it wasn’t.

Henry woke up one morning and discovered that his right foot had up and left sometime during the night. He slid out of bed, puts on his left shoe and stares sadly at the right, leaving it cast aside on the floor. He hops around town, searching for his right foot. Finally, in a crowd on the subway platform they spot the right foot attached to the ankle of an older man. They hop madly after it, but too late: they have gotten onto a subway car and disappear into the city.

He resorts to placing an ad in the paper “Man with one left foot, seeks single white foot, approximately 8 ½ inches, preferably mild tempered, enjoys quiet evenings at home, etc…” He gets a wide variety of responses. A right foot shows up one day that used to belong to a baseball player, but that foot is too itchy. Another foot won’t stop fidgeting and spends all day tapping under the desk. Another responds to the ad is from a woman’s foot, with bright red painted nails. Henry becomes too self-conscious when he has to go barefoot. A college football hero’s foot would spontaneously decide to punt houseplants or the telephone across the room. An old man’s foot kept falling asleep. One day another left foot mistakenly shows up, but Henry is so desperate at this point that he decides to give two left feet a try. This opens him up to too many jokes about being a bad dancer.

Finally, he’s home on a weekend moping around the house with his one left foot and his two hands, which still claim they are above all of this nonsense and had seen these problems coming for years, when there’s a tap at the door. There stands his right foot, in an old athletic sock with a big hole in the heel, looking beat up and forlorn, with a stubbed toe and too long of toe nails. They begrudgingly come together again. The toes are ecstatic to see one another, and even the hands fold together complacently, saying they knew the feet would work it out eventually. Henry is so happy, he goes to put on his old shoes and pauses and thinks, this is cause for a celebration. He goes out and buys new shoes, brand new comfortable shoes with plenty of room in the toe, and a nice arch, with a light material that can breathe, and the moment his feet slip inside them he feels a completely contented feeling. His feet are home now, and in these new shoes they dance around the apartment and down the sidewalks, and he wonders how he had been so stupid as to underestimate the importance of good shoes.

Contents Under Pressure

Campbell's Soup
Originally uploaded by emanelcaffè.

I was very nearly maimed tonight by a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. Part of me knew what kind of danger I was in when I saw the can bulging both at the top and the bottom. It easily spun in place on the counter top. This entertained me like the naïve child that I am; then I reached for the pull-tab on the easy-open lid.

I might as well have been pulling the pin on a grenade. The explosion was instantaneous. My ears rung. The spray of cream blinded me. I found myself turning in circles beside the refrigerator in shock, the tab still looped around my index finger, which stung sharply and which I stared at for several moments waiting for the red to flow.

The percussion had barely died down and I was already cursing myself for how careless I had been. How many times had my mom warned me about—wait a minute: …wearing clean underwear…strange men in vans…running around the house with a Que-tip sticking out of my ear…Nope, not once did she warn me about a can of soup exploding in my face.

For the rest of my life I will cringe when opening soup. I better sign off now; I still have to wipe down the ceiling.

Budapest Nights

Budapest by night photo by tfabas.

We were crazy during those drunken Hungarian nights, dancing in the garden, spilling wine on the hydrangeas and lilac and paprika. The entire village sat up in bed and listened to the wailing of us two boys at the moon, our chanting and singing, until the village peacekeepers made their way out the ravaged garden. A fight ensued. I'm not sure how I landed here. Mom, please get me out of this foreign jail. Through the barred window in the twilight of morning, I watch the gypsy girls scurry from the dockyards to the mule-drawn carts where their fathers wait for them, palms turned upwards, waiting for money. I watch the rats crawl from piers and back into the warehouses. I've scratched my name into the stone to ascertain my existence here, that it was not just a drunken morning hangover dream and please come get me.

What a wicked night I'd spent in a shaman’s delirium, on the edge of the Danube on a bridge that ended halfway across the water. I watch ghosts stagger out of the burning oasis of Budapest. The screams of specters still fill my nights, when I cower in bed in a cold sweat and strangling sheets, recoiling from the whirl of shadows on the wall. I had been deserted by my friend; the last I had seen him, he was lurking in the corner of a café, his gaunt face half hidden behind a fichus tree; then floating in the canal, bloated and smiling. The last I'd seen of Artaud, before he could whisper his instructions to me, was riding on the handlebars of a young girl as she pedaled oblivious down Vaci Street. By reading his purple lips I could catch his voice in my mind and the encrypted meaning of his words. They went something like this . . .

Hide in the Library

I rode my bike into town. Everyone stared at me. Did they remember me? What were they saying? I wondered. But it didn’t matter. I dropped the key off at the garage so my brother would be able to get into the house after work, and then I slunk away. I left for the cool confines of the library. The reference section had long oak tables and lamps with green glass shades. I brought a notebook and a pen and started to write. The blue ink ran along each lined row until a page was filled. Each time I turned a page and the paper crinkled, the old man two tables down would peer at me over the rim of his glasses, without altering the angle of his head. Then he would go back to reading. By the end of the day he would be one of the characters in my story.

The high stone ceiling in the reference library opened up a space inside me. This was the only place that would open up my memories of my mother. The more I wrote about her on my lined notebook paper, the more her shape and form would fill in, until soon I even had down the color of her hair and the tone of her voice when she told me I had to get something done, and that she didn’t want to tell me again. But you will tell me again, mom, over and over in this reference library long after you left. Your boy is nearly grown. Perhaps by the end of this notebook I will have filled out, grown to the full height of a man, and whiskers will have sprouted downy soft on my chin. Shit. Fuck. Damn. I can say that now. You’re not here to straighten me out. No matter how much I write you back into existence, you can’t stop me from doing what I want.

I push my chair back and rise up from the table. The man peers at me over his glasses again. I flip him off. I turn and stride down the long foyer, find the back stairs, and quickly spiral down the stairwell into the lower levels of the library. Staff only allowed. I am not staff, but I need the comfort of these buried rooms. I’m tired. I want to sleep. I want to feel the weight of a ton of marble and cement above me.

A barrel-stomached man works the files in the basement. Long wisps of red hair are combed over his baldness. He sees me enter the records room, whistles to himself and stuffs a few files into a drawer, then slams it shut.

“Gonna hide out here this afternoon?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Now I never did like a man of indecision. A man knows what he’s going to do and then strikes a path to get it done.”

“I just want to be left alone.”

“Then left alone you shall be. Family, friends, coworkers…nobody finds you down here. Believe me. I come down fifteen years ago, and everyone thinks I’m dead. Maybe I am.”

Why was he always being so melodramatic? And what the hell was there to file all day, anyway? I’d named him Dewey. I left him to his filing while I rested my forehead against a cool steel cabinet, imagined my skull emptying out like the great open space of the library foyer.

Neither Here Nor There

spinning
photo by sheeshoo.

I’m here, in the middle of nowhere, a place missing from the maps and unplaceable in memory. Can I get out of a place that is no place? Where would I go? I can’t go north or south, because neither exists, and east and west keep switching places with each other. Instead I’ll sit here, which is also there, and try to find a way to break this cycle of ever changing meridians. The latitudes and longitudes squiggle and loop and make right angles when they are supposed to be clean and straight. Maybe if I spin in place I will grow so dizzy that everything will come into focus.

Mysterious Gift

I got home and noticed a key stuck in my mail slot, meaning I had a package. I was thinking it was likely a DVD, as I've ordered a number of them lately, but as the desk guy Roger handed me the package, I could tell it was a book of some sort, wrapped in a brown paper bag, with no return address. I remembered my mom said she bought me a signed copy of "The Kite Runner" and that she'd send it soon, but it didn't look like her handwriting.
I tore into it and discoverd a hand made journal, with a cloth bound cover of midnight blue with silver stars. Inside was a little card that said "A journal for you...", but no signature.
How cool! I have no idea who you are, but I'm assuming you read this blog, so thank you, whoever you are...

Blue Beauty

I have found her, in the spirit of these tea leaves. She will keep me company tonight. I will light candles in the den, and brew this secret potion from god knows what tea garden; an oolong, the blue beauty.

She drifts into the room on a tide of music. She shimmers. Is this what candle flames would look like through tears? I don’t know, I haven’t cried in years. With her comes the silver notes of bells, the faint perfume of angels, the ever presence and comfort like a mother’s hand to a child. I cower behind my keyboard, furtive fingers typing words like a pentacle in which to bind her so that she cannot escape. I want to hold here here in my den, to keep me company through these luminescent nights. She brings all of the book titles on the shelves to a warm glow, yearning to be plucked from their perches and their covers plied asunder to expose what is inside. She makes the music play along all of my nerves like deft fingers. I hesitate to drink any more from the blue beauty for fear of reaching the bottom of the cup, but if I stop drinking, she grows cold. And yet with each sip she grows lukewarm, cold, colder still. So cold in here, now that she’s gone.

Antique Shop of Wonders

photo by Frinkiac.

Our town had this magical antique shop on a dead end street, down past two boarded up stores that used to be a bank and a used clothing store. A towering sign perched on the roof of the building read “Quiggly’s Antique Emporium”, spelled out in sequins pinned to the signboard so that they rippled and flashed in a breeze like the surface of water. Out front it had a twirling barbershop sign, an old church pew with so many names and profanities carved into it that it looked like a piece of bark. A sign shaped like an arm with a finger pointing towards the door said “Come Inside”.

A string of bells jingled when you came through the door. Just inside stood a tall wooden Indian, fingers curled as though clutching a fistful of cigars that had been smoked long ago, but when you walked past him you smelled tobacco.

You are always alone in Quiggly’s Antique Emporium. The owner, Quiggly, would only appear if you pounded on the bell at the counter; he was always tinkering away behind a display or buried out back restoring old furniture. He peered blindly through thick scratched glasses, a reek of turpentine and lacquer following him. Even the other customers were gone, no matter how many you had seen enter the store before you. It was as though each had disappeared into their own chosen era.

An old phonograph played scratchy music, voices crooning from decades ago yet lingering in the next room. Mixed in with the music were barely audible sounds of silverware on fine china, highball glasses tinkling with ice cubes, the undistinguishable din of laughter at a dinner party. In other booths you thought you heard the banter of baseball players, “batter batter batter swinga,” and the smack of a baseball into the worn leather pocket of an old glove. The vintage beaded dresses still looked as vibrant as though a flapper had just slipped out of it. Circus clown wigs and juggling pins, farm animal harnesses and bridles, Singer sewing machines and spinning looms, army knives and soldiers helmets.

The store held items from every family in town, and you weren’t truly considered a citizen until you had a part of your past holed up inside. Even though we were all afraid of Quiggly’s, we were drawn there nonetheless. We were searching for something we’d lost, something we wanted to understand, and each of us found our answers, in our own way. We felt at home among the items of the homes we’d lost.

Everyone finds something different. For some, bitterness and pain. For others, the pleading for forgiveness from their grandmother’s whicker wheelchair. For me it was always a reunion; from the ivory soap dishes came the smell of grandmother’s hands washed with Dove soap, the porcelain salt and pepper shakers shaped like hobos, the little black music box which played “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”. Uncle Bruce’s fishing gear leaned in the corner with my favorite lures that drew the lunkers out of the deep.

You had overstayed your welcome when the air grew chill and the glowing lights faded. It’s time to go, they seemed to say. Unseen hands ushered you towards the door and outside, where you are blinded by the sun, where it seems hardly any time has passed at all.

Invisible Photographer

A writer's camera
photo by LeoL30.

I’ve taken the day off because of a cold. Like the groundhog coming out of his hole, I sensed spring was here and emerged from the skyways to walk home outside. Now I have a sore throat. I’m sitting in the window at Dunn Bros Coffee, a 20oz mug of green tea warm in my hands. I brought “Tender is the Night” with me, but the book sits unread. Instead I watch in a daze out the window at the masses of people walking past, gliding by on roller blades and skateboards, or sitting at sidewalk tables. Maybe it’s the cold, but I feel this sense of peace and of seeing things differently, more precisely, less for-granted.

Several bike couriers sit around a sidewalk table, reclined low in their chairs. What a unique fashion style bike couriers have; all tall and thin, wearing baggy dirty jeans rolled up high, exposing little sticks of ankles, dark socks, and shoes with hardly a sole. Their hair is wild, swept off their foreheads, frozen in place from the wind on their bikes. Several wear those tiny bicycle caps with the visor dipped low over their eyes while riding, turned backwards and visor tipped up while they recline.

Two young women take a table just outside my window. You can always tell who are inseperable friends because they begin to look like each other. Same cute, short haircuts with little ribbons tied to locks of hair near the nape of the neck. One of them wears a charcoal gray skirt, a brown top, and these hideous orange suede boots with long pointy toes and floppy tops that gather around her ankles. Everyone stares. But she wears them proudly, a kind of fuck-you to all us clones. Her friend wears these giant bug-like sunglasses like a movie star. I wonder how big sunglasses will get before they begin to shrink again. The two women often look towards my window to inspect their own reflections.

There’s the older man with his wife, probably in his fifties; tall, in good shape. His face looks like an old baseball, his dominant feature a giant cleft chin, the crease in the middle so pronounced that it looks like butt cheeks, but it gives him a noble air.

The guy sitting next to me, tapping away on his laptop, pauses and watches me out of the corner of his eye. He notices I just stare out the window. I don’t care. I consider pointing out to him the bicycle couriers, the man with the cleft shin. They both look so regale out there, they would make excellent photographs. If I had the guts I would tell him, “I wish I could take their pictures without them knowing it, an invisible photographer, because as soon as they know their picture is being taken, they become self-conscious and the image is ruined.”

“But the camera isn’t your artitistic tool,” he would respond. “You’re a writer. You capture them with words, and in that sense, you are an invisible photographer.”

I think he’s right, but I I don’t have my journal with me. I see a Garfield pencil someone left on the counter after doing the crossword puzzle. On the back flap of “Tender is the Night”, I write:

-- Cleft Chin
-- Big Sunglasses
-- Invisible Photographer
-- Two Friends

Mexican Girl of the Sea

PuertoVallarta Boardwalk
photo by brettanicus.

A young girl splashes out of the sea, shiny brown and tiny. Up onto the stones she strides with her sandals held in one hand, dress in the other. She smiles little white pearls at me. From the rocks her father throws a fishing line out into the receding water, yells something back to her. She obediently hurries down the beach.

The father catches a fish, a large Dorado that breaks free before he lands it. I jump into the water to help him drag it to shore. He can’t speak English and I can’t speak Spanish but we manage to communicate that he is inviting me to his home, where he guts and then cooks the fish on an open fire in his courtyard of dust and rusted appliances. The little girl smiles at me, brings each of her toys to me one by one. The whole family sits around me, his wife, a grandmother, a cousin, and a son. We speak in gestures; only the fourteen year old boy knows English but he rarely offers a translation. The fish flakes white on the fork, cooked with butter, lime, Cayenne pepper, with some salsa on the side; chopped tomatoes and onions and papaya and avocado. After dinner I follow the son to a corner liquor store, where I bring back Dos Equis and we drink around the coals of the fire that cooked the Dorado. Before sunset I say my thank you’s and catch a cab back to the hotel.

Lie #3: The Last Lie

On my last day in Puerto Vallarta, I made up my last tall-tale as to why I was in Mexico. It was to an older couple traveling in their retirement years. I was eating breakfast at the table next to them. “I sell prosthetic limbs for pets. We figured Peurto Vallarta might be a good region due to the wealthy tourists. Mostly just legs for cats and dogs that have lost a limb from surgery or getting hit by a car. Once we created a tail for a cat that had lost hers in a car door. Yeah, it’s amazing what people will spend on their pets, but they’ve become like a member of the family. Have we ever sold one to anything other than a cat or dog? Let me think…oh yeah, in Boston there was a parrot owner that had a seafood restaurant. Kept the parrott right there in the restaurant. It lost a leg when it had been attacked by a cat, and he wanted us to attach a wooden peg leg, like a pirate. We refused, though. Too unethical. We’re not here to create carnival attractions. We’re just trying to make pets feel whole again.”

Lie #2: Identity Chip

RFID implants in hands
photo by ishmell.

Lie #2, invented as an answer for other vacationers in Puerto Vallarta curious about why I’m traveling alone: “Actually, I’m working for Lu___t Technology in a think tank about twenty miles between here and Guadalajara. I’m in the R&D department, and we’re working on a cutting edge new technology, but it’s highly classified, I shouldn’t be talking about it.”

They buy me my first drink.

“Well actually the classified part is more on how the technology works and the materials we use, rather than the concept. We’re working on an Identity Chip, which is a tiny chip placed under the skin on your wrist. This is prototype 4A…” I show them a tiny gray rectangle viewable just beneath the skin on my wrist, actually the lead tip from a #2 pencil stuck in me since the 5th grade. “It can store your driver’s license, your credit cards. So when you’re in a store, you just scan your wrist and your items are paid for. No signatures, no losing your card…Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The fear of having your personal information stolen or forged is our biggest hurdle with this product. That’s really where the majority of research is being done right now: how to secure your information, and control who gets what information. But that’s also the details I can’t talk about.”

They buy me my second drink.

“The chip interacts with your body’s unique chemical make-up, so if it detects a foreign chemical makeup, the chip is disabled. And it’s that biological link that interests me. We’re working on having it tell you when you have a fever, when your body is fighting a virus, possibly even test your cholesterol. It will store your complete medical and dental record. Another concept that’s generating a lot of interest is similar to Bluetooth. You can set up your own profile in your identity chip, with your interests, where you’re from, if you’re single and looking, even your picture, so when you walk into a bar with a receiver, it will tell you who else is in the bar, ‘Oh look, someone else here is from Minnesota, or there’s a Packer fan, let’s buy him some Cheese curds, or there’s a single woman who’s favorite movie is “The Cable Guy” just like me. When do we think this product is going to hit the market? I can’t talk about that.’

They buy me my third and last drink.

“We’re in a race with our sister think tanks in Paris and Sunnyvale California, all working on different aspects of the Identity Chip. The codename for our think tank is ‘Tortilla Chips’. The one in Paris is ‘French Fry’ (they don’t have chips there), and the one in California is ‘Highway Patrol’. I know, it kind of evolved into that. It started out as CHiPs, like the TV show with the motorcycles. Then we just called them ‘Motorcycle Boys’ because all the guys rode motorcycles to work to be like Pancho. Then a woman joined their team, so it was ‘Motorcycle Boys and a Girl’. Then another woman joined and it just became ‘Highway Patrol’.

“Well I better head on out. It’s been fun. Please don’t share this information with anyone.” They take one more look at the piece of lead in my wrist. “Yeah, technology just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Thanks for the drinks. Please please keep this information to yourselves, and Buenos Noches.”

Lie #1: Wife Kidnaps Iguana

First night in the hotel restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, I take a table by myself. As eyes stray over to my table, I begin to invent my persona. Or maybe, at this point it is more of an erasure of who I have been and who I invent myself to be. I’m now prepared for the next time someone asks me, “So what brings you down to Mexico all by yourself?” Sure enough, within minutes I have my first bite.

“I’m here looking for my wife. She emptied out our bank accounts and ran off with her yoga instructure. He’s originally from Puerto Vallarta. A credit card transaction showed they’d been down here.”

“That’s terrible,” the woman from Arizona says, her face a mask of concern and sympathy. “How are you ever going to find her?”

“I’m not sure, I’ve left flyers at several clubs and yoga studios. My biggest concern is for Lui.”

A sharp intake of breath from the woman, “Your son?”

“No, my pet iguana. I’ve had him for fifteen years.” Choking up, “I mean, she can have the money, that doesn’t matter…but what can she want with my iguana?”

Her husband offers tentatively, “Well, Puerto Vallarta is a natural habitat for iguanas.” I heard a bump under the table and he pursed his lips.

The woman behind the lobby counter was waving towards me. I rose from my chair and lay the napkin on my seat. “Exuse me, just a moment.”

I crossed to the lobby desk where the hotel employee greeted me. “Ola, Senior Wood. Your housekeeper has changed your bed linen. I am so sorry it smelled of smoke. It is a nonsmoking room.”

“Thank you so much.” Feeling the Arizona couple watching me, I reach across the counter and shook her hand vigorously. “Thank you! Gracias! Gracias! Please have a crème brule sent to my room.”

I strode back to my table, the Arizona couple’s expectant faces turned to me. While scrawling my room number on my bill, I said, “They’ve spotted her. They spotted her down at the Happy Frog! I’ve got to go…” As I marched off I heard from behind me the plaintive voice of the woman from Arizona, “Good Luck!”

I walked quickly through the lobby, down the steps to the taxi turnaround, said “Buenos Noches” to the doormen, then slowed my pace as I rounded to the side stairwell, climbed to my fourth floor room, and watched a Mexican soccer match on the television while I used a spoon to tap through the melted sugar crust of my crème brule.

A Writer's Struggle

1947 Continental
photo by olivander.

Let’s assume now, for a moment, that I will be able to focus my energies enough this evening to sit down and write. I have blocked off the evening, eaten dinner, avoided any stimulants of alcohol or medication so as to clear my head. The laptop now sits upon my desk, rather than on the Ouija board on the ottoman by the leather chair. This is serious.

[5 minutes later] Presently, I am cooking a butternut squash, on the recommendation from John Felling. The shepherd’s pie was not filling enough. After I eat that, and brew my tea, and tidy the apartment for it is simply an external reflection of my state of mind, I will begin to write in Stuttersville. Don’t be intimidated that Edgar is approaching the house of his uncle, and that you do not yet know how to handle the potential secrets to be uncovered there. It will all flow naturally once you fill Edgar’s shoes and begin to roam the house. You’ve seen it now, that Germanic village house atop the hill, circled by pines. Not a mansion by any means, but the home of a wealthy bachelor, with a sense of taste, not lavishness.

What time of year is it in Stuttersville, right now? Are there gardens out back, or the skeletal trees and trimmed back flowerbeds, the covered rosebushes. Yes, it must be fall. Pre-halloween? Oh shit, I don’t know.

[15 minutes later] I still believe that writing may be possible this evening, especially if I toss aside any pretensions of publishing it some day. This way I lessen the pressure of getting it right. Don’t forget that Stuttersville is intended to be a sandbox, a place in which I can retreat, and think and feel and narrate anything, even my own trouble as the writer trying to wrench it free from obstacles. Ready…set…go!

He spent nearly a decade chasing down the facts of his uncle’s death. What became of the doctor that had signed his death certificate? Why had the authorities shot down family requests for an autopsy?
For more years than family historians could trace, there had been deep rifts within the family. Not as simple as a sudden branching out of the family over the disagreement of two brothers. It seemed to be a genetic flaw that cast the members of this family against itself for generations. It thrived on conflict. Each member contained within themselves a voilent urge to scratch out the eyes of their brother. Others grew inseparable, every secret shared, lives entwined, homes no more than blocks apart, or children living with their parents well into their forties.
[10 minutes later] Okay writer, you’re struggling…the light is starting to fade….run ahead to catch up with it!

With the increasing years of decrepitude, one boy rose up out of the poverty in which his family had fated him. His boyish exuberance had caught the attention of labor owners, of warehouse stockmen, of dockworker supervisors. He didn’t have any brains, they knew, but he would give 100% of himself to slave away at a task, and all he looked for in return was a little beer money.

[10 minutes later] Crap, it’s all falling apart now. You see it, don’t you? The narrator has grown sleepy and his rationality has taken to drink. A glass of port sits beside me, a treat for having sat at my desk in the den throughout the evening, in the similitude of writing, even if the words were wasted on the wrong story.

Boot up, Tune in, Log Off

Whew, I finally dragged myself off the internet, and it feels like I can breathe again. Why do I get so obsessed with things, like browsing the internet, reading movie scripts, browsing Flickr photos, reading blogs of friends, rereading my blogs? Can I say blog one more time?

I come to my big leather chair by the window and my laptop resting on the Ouija board with the idea that I’m going to write. But I look out the window and stare over the dead gray city and realize I don’t want to write at all. I have nothing to say this morning. I can’t imagine pulling two characters together and figuring out what they have to say to one another. But I will not give up. I’ll just keep typing here, right? Isn’t that the important part of the word “Stream-of-Consciousness Journal?”

When I move about the apartment in the evenings, I am filled with ideas. Wonderful turns of phrases, situations of intriguing conflict, a desire to slip into an imagined world for a little while, but I’ve got to put the dishes away. I’ve got to sort the real mail from the junkmail. I’ve got to brush my teeth and go to bed.

I remember some of the ideas now, but they lay limp in my hands like dead fish I’ve held out of the water for too long. It’s like that Tenacious D song “Tribute”: “This is not the greatest song in the world. It’s just a tribute…to the greatest song in the world”. Things like a comic entry about how I keep piling the recyclables on top of each other in the grocery bag in the closet. It becomes like a reverse version of Jenga, and I come up with strategies of how to nest cans within one another, then a bottle, then an upside down can clinging to the bottle neck. Anything to avoid having to take the recyclables down to the bins in the parking garage. Like I said, this is just a tribute.

Or the entry about how I’ve got a crush on the surly Latino woman at the Turtle Bread store. I love her smoldering eyes, not an ounce of fake cheer or sense of customer service. She’s young, short, plump like a loaf of bread just beginning to rise (I’m sure she’d love that simile... and you wonder why I’m single!) When I get a flicker of a smile from her it is appreciated so much more, a small crack in her shell. But then it’s gone again, and I realize I don’t want her to smile at me, because I love her for this crossness and “piss and vinegar”. My god, is that a real phrase?

I wanted to start a blog titled “Squidup!”, or use that as a chat name. It’s from the Cable Guy movie when the Cable Guy is doing his Dizzy Gillespie impression.

I wanted to write about my tour of the condos and lofts, and why do I always get a crush on the sales women showing me a place? I feel this odd flirtatiousness or connection with her as we walk quietly through the empty rooms. I’m sure I’m imagining it, but I feel like they too are aware of this sexual tension between us.

Ah, see; I’m tempted to log onto the internet again. Restlessness draws me there. I thought for a moment that I would like to work more on my personal home page rather than my blog. It’s like wanting to work on your home, build it out, make it more presentable. Your own little space on the web, gardening for people without a plot of land, but I would probably be a better person if I disabled my modem. Somewhere Timothy Leary is chanting “Boot up, Tune in, Log Off.”

Proclamation of Decadence

Scrape me
photo by bekon.

Submit to your addictions, your weaknesses, your every libidinous urge! Let the devil run rampant through your homes, your government offices and citadels! We have held ourselves in check long enough. It is the time to celebrate the body, the instinct, the animal pantheon spelled out in constellations across the night sky. We drag out our dictionaries of the profane and illustrations of decadence. We make new national holidays of crime and atrocity. We teach our children the balance of the blade, the angle of the wrist when snapping a whip across the buttocks of their nannies. Turn out all of the animals from our zoos, release mice into the backstage dressing rooms of the opera houses. Mayhem, licentious laughter, sinister smiles on lips beaded with blood. Rub your palms together, feel the tingling in every limb, cry out your allegiance to the celebration of the unholy.

Love Note

The cynic in me says "Someone's going to get laid tonight". The romantic says "Why didn't I think of that?" The analyst says "look at how he measured off areas of the lawn first, to be sure all of the letters fit right. That guy could design crop circles."

Why?

Cookie
photo by waffler.

I was in my favorite tea shop, eavesdropping on a conversation between addle-brained Christian Fundamentalists about experiments being done on prisoners in Duluth in which a machine fixes their “mental problems” when I noticed that the tea shop manager, Lisa, was standing just at the periphery of my vision. I realized she had asked me a question.

“I’m sorry?”

“So why are you going to Mexico?”

It seemed a very odd question to me. Why was I going to Mexico? I didn’t know that I needed a reason, but evidently I did, and couldn’t think of one. “I wanted to use my frequent flyer miles and Marriott points.”

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later that I realized all that was expected of me was the answer “To relax.” But during that twenty minutes, I was perplexed with the question: Why am I going to Mexico? Why Puerto Vallarta? Chaos and chance; it was merely an alignment of the stars, or more accurately, an alignment of available dates for frequent flyer miles and hotel points. But why go on a vacation at all? I was dumbfounded by the brilliancy of her question, as simple as a child’s: Why?

I sipped the dregs of my tea and looked at the shocking beauty outside: a spring day in Minneapolis, bright sun, melting snow. A pair of Canadian Geese came flying in low over the city, wing tip to wing tip. I craned my neck to watch them pass overhead, bottomless blue parted by a pair of geese cutting across the sky.

Beside me, a little boy sat at a table with his grandmother. He ate a giant M&M cookie, crumbs on those pale cream cheeks, grandma smiling down on him. He bounced in his chair, enthralled with his cookie and the bustle of the tea shop. I want the same kind of thrill out of life, but I am no longer satisfied by a cookie. Maybe that is a better answer for why I am going to Mexico. Because cookies just don’t cut it anymore.

Bound for Mexico

Ah, sweet relief. I'm off to Mexico for six days at the end of March, courtesy of my frequent flyer miles and Marriott reward points (thank you BMG and Nextel for those long-distance projects back in 2000). I'm staying at the CasaMagna Martiott Puerto Vallarta Resort. I've never vacationed alone, but I'm looking forward to it. Now...do I want to plan a bunch of outings, or sit on the beach with a margarita and Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night".

NyQuil for the Soul

My teeth are stained green from the cold medicine that I drink. My mouth curls at the sickeningly sweet syrup, the caustic bite of the liquor, and then the more subtle strains of narcotic laced in this bright green concoction. Why do they make it so green, I wonder? I’ve also seen it come in bright blue. Perhaps so that once the narcotic starts to take affect, you peer at the bottle in the medicine chest, at its magical color, and you’re tempted to take another drink, as though sipping the sky.

My body has convinced itself that it needs medicine to be healthy. Or rather, the moment that my bloodstream has worked itself clean of any medicine, germs and viruses quickly descend and take over my body. And so I desperately tip back another shot of it, curl my mouth, wince with tears in my eyes, but instantly, beyond all physical possibility or reason, I experience relief pass through my gut to my limbs, my lungs, my mind. Everyone needs this, I think. A cure, a medicinal relief from that which ails us.

The Whale, Inc.

Jonah was swallowed by a large corporation and took refuge in its belly. He waited to see in what part of the world the great whale would spit him up, if ever. He lit fires in the belly and made shadow puppets on the walls of the stomach, while he waited. And waited. He would have completely forgotten what the outside world was like if not for the items the whale swallowed from time to time; a bicycle, a kite, a high school marching band, sometimes an outside consultant with tales of what life was like in other whales. Jonah wondered if life was better in another belly, if the perks were slightly better or the pay. And yet he always felt gratitude to the whale when, with a great upheaval and expurgation, it would expel from its gullet everyone it had collected over time, including the consultants, while he remained. Gone were those who were nearing retirement, those deemed redundant, those less emphatic about the greatness of the whale.

Jonah fumbled around in the dark for a time until he had gathered enough materials to light a little fire again. New people came splashing in the next day; young professionals fresh out of college, wiping water out of their eyes and trying to get their bearings. Their clothes were nicer than his, he noticed; silk ties and Kenneth Cole shoes and sweater vests, but he knew that given a few weeks in the digestive juices of the whale, they would look as disheveled as himself. And they did. With a trapped look in their eyes, some of them started searching the linings of the belly for ways to get out. They irritated the whale just enough so that they were either spit out or forced further down its digestive tract. Not Jonah. Maybe he was clever for having learned how to ride the corporation for all it was worth. Maybe he should have been ashamed with himself for having lost so much of his self respect and identity that he found himself content with life in the belly of the whale; but there it was, printed on all of his business cards, his stationary, even on the logos of his clothes: The Whale, Inc. Sometimes it felt safe to be so utterly consumed.

Gone Fishing

Obviously I've been away from blogging for a while. The new job at work has been hectic and has supplanted my morning ritual of writing. Each morning I have to log into our servers, run a query to extract data, and email out the results. We've moved to a new building. Our area is in a reorg and everyone has to reapply for their jobs (I can keep my contract through the end of the year, though, or take a position as an employee). While everything has been turned on its head, I haven't been in the right mental state for writing. Don't get me wrong; it's an exciting time at work and I'm enjoying it, but it's exhausting.

So I'm taking a break until, hopefully, early March. I should really take a vacation then. I'm thinking Mexico. I've never been. Where is there a nice quiet spot on the ocean?

Plant People

Garden 3
photo by brettanicus.

I wonder how long plants live. Do they ever die of old age, or always neglect or bugs? I have had the crawly strong plant (I never know real plant names) for almost twenty years. For stretches of time I forget to water it and it collapses in its pot like a deflated tire tube, but then I’ll cut it back to crew-cut length, and water it a couple times, and it bursts back to life like a woman out of a cake. If I was to nurture the plant, properly supply nutrients and fresh soil when needed, how long would it live? Could it outlast me?

Why do I love to surround myself with things that live a long time? I get a certain kind of comfort over having a plant or a pet turtle that has been with me over a dozen years, and I know will stay with me for a dozen more. It fights off loneliness, and I feel like they are the few creatures that realy get to know me. I am a constant figurehead, as they are for me. They have truly taken the vow to stay at my side through sickness and in health, if only due to confinement or a lack of legs with which to walk away.

Does anybody out there enjoy killing plants, getting some sort of pleasure out of slowly watching them die, or even torturing them, in a sense; feeding drops of saltwater or rubbing alcohol into their soil, lacerating their tendrils, possibly even slowly chewing on leaves? Do they imagine an unheard plea for mercy or cry of pain? You know this dementia has to be in the diagnostic book of psychology, and that Phizer has come out with a prescription to treat it.

There are two kinds of people out there; those with plants, and those without. Those with plants can’t live without them; they feel suffocated without a bit of greenery around them. Even at the office they need an ivy crawling down from their cabinets. Those without plants can’t tolerate them. The thought of taking care of it exhausts them; their houses contain maybe only a silk or plastic plant covered with dust behind a sofa. If you give them a plant, they will hate you for it and will watch it with a kind of fatalism as it dies. “See, I can’t keep a plant alive,” they say, not even attempting to water it, and it goes into the garbage with a certain satisfaction.

I am a plant person. I don’t know the names of them, I don’t talk to them, and I rarely dust off their leaves, but I notice when new growth appears. I look on them with pride when I see a flower bud appear.

I’ve got to get out of the house more.

The Limb

Sleepwalking Arm
photo by brettanicus.

Last night I slept wrong on my arm. I woke up in the middle of the night with this aching pain running down the length of my arm: it had fallen asleep. I tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. With my other hand I searched around for it, becoming frightened that it was so dead that it wasn’t lying where I thought it was. Then my fingers came in contact with my forearm. It was cold and lifeless, like a slab of meat. Images came to mind of “The Godfather” and the movie producer that awoke in the morning to find the severed head of his horse under the covers. With my left hand I lifted my right arm and set it down in a position in which blood could start flowing again. I cannot describe the agony of the next several minutes, like when a frostbitten foot begins to warm up again.

Why do I have such trouble with my limbs?

Many people sleepwalk. Several years ago I had a similar condition, only with an unusual twist; only certain limbs would become animated while the rest of me slept. One night I awoke to see at the corner of my vision a clawed hand hovering just above my head. It was my right arm, sticking straight up in the air, my hand reaching down as though to smother me.

I screamed, and the arm collapsed at my side.

Apart-meant

Marquette Apt
photo by brettanicus.

Okay dear readers, one last entry on divorce and then I promise to lighten up. This is actually an old journal entry from July 2004, but wanted to share it as it is a continuation of the previous entry, and I like the opening sentence:

My wife had left me some ten months previous, but the memory of her still hovered over the city, pulled rain down from the clouds, blotted out the stars at night. I’d given up just about everything in the divorce—the house, the car, even our dogs. I moved into a high rise downtown because the thought of being alone in a house frightened me. At least in an apartment I could feel like I lived in the midst of others. Little did I know apartment means “meant to be apart”. And from my perch 25 stories above the city I could look down on life teaming in the grid of city streets, the south metro, the steady crawl of cars along 94. I had hoped altitude would give me perspective, which it did, I suppose; Real life happens out there, in the distance, and in here I dwelled in my vacuum.

Divulge, Divide, Divorce

Card House
photo by saraweag.

She got up in the morning to let the dogs out, their excited whining and wagging tails echoing in the kitchen. Their house sounded hollow all summer, furniture moved out of the rooms so they could put a fresh coat of paint on the walls before the house went up for sale. Many rooms had never had furniture; what was the sense in buying things when they both knew it would mostly likely be divided in a divorce settlement. It is a strange and senseless way to live, knowing throughout several years of marriage that their life together was most likely a temporary thing. Yet they remained together, each day slipping into the next, spent in a superficial contentedness, laughing at the same movies, playing with the dogs, going out to dinner not to be romantic but out of a lack of energy to cook for themselves. The futility of the future weighs heavily on the shoulders of a couple constantly on the brink of failure. Small battles, little grudges, petty insults gather in strength until a dramatic trespass breaks the surface, and this house of cards starts to crumble. Either she slept with a client while on a project out of town, or he was caught in dating chat rooms on the internet. The ugly confessions and accusations come out. A rotten core in the center of a person they thought they knew, they thought was good, or maybe just good enough, until they took a deep bite and recoiled at the distaste.

62 Words Per Minute

photo by JanXVI.

He closed the door and crossed to the window. He enjoyed watching cars and trolleys passing on Lancaster Street. This view afforded him endless hours of distraction. Distraction from what lay within the rooms of his home. His wife moved from room to room as though to avoid him, as though he pursued her like a murderous stalker, and she fled like Little Red Riding Hood through the woods. Ah, but my sweetheart, you forget; The wolf doesn’t pursue you but plans ahead and lays in wait at grandmother’s house.

She was in the parlor talking with her mother. When his mother-in-law had arrived, he had greeted her and traded pleasantries for a few moments, but he felt his smile strained as he looked at her. The angle of her nose, her upturned mouth, her puffy cheeks formed a caricature of gluttony. He felt his stomach turn. He retired to the den, trying not to listen in on what they spoke about.

“Melissa has applied at Dorchester. Your sister is going places, Kelly. She’s taken that typing course and types 62 words per minute. I timed her, just the other night. Sure, she makes a few mistakes, but who doesn’t?”

Yes, who doesn’t make mistakes, he thought, pacing around the den. Maybe he could take down a book, start to read. He’d read most of them already, except for the garish looking books shelved mainly for appearance rather than content; medical journals, almanacs, a 1932 series of Minnesota state law and the cases of the time. Criminology had been one of his many interests, then profiling killers, then white collar crime, and finally war crimes, until “atrocity” had become one of his favorite words. It was something about the rip these stories would render through the fabric of life, something about the balance of other people’s horrible reality to his own pristine existence that appeased him. But how pristine was his life? A farce, a façade for the lust and violence that coursed through his veins. If they only knew, he thought. If they could only hear his thoughts.

Paradise This Way

Inviting Clarity
photo by bfranco.

I took my plane out to the island, my mind still reeling with the towering obelisks of New York, now soothed by the sight of the patch of land drifting on the blue sea; mists pooled at the base of Mount Waukashabi, and my hut lay there somewhere beneath the jungle fronds. Pedro would be getting my bath ready, placing slices of fruit on a banana leaf, and mixing my margarita. How long had it been since I had been out to the island? Seven months? Not since Frieda had left me, not since my daughter had disappeared somewhere in California to break into acting, most likely destined for porno.

But it was a different world now, especially since the merger and my buyout. This plane that once chauffeured me to meetings across the country now served only to transport me from one side of paradise to the other. I had always thought paradise would be across the sea somewhere, or on a mountain peak above the clouds; now that this dream had become reality I realized that paradise is scattered throughout our daily lives, in our own neighborhood; perhaps in the arms of a lover, in a bite of dark chocolate, sip of rare wine, the sun rising on a deserted city street. My island was not paradise; it merely provided safe harbor from the pain of loss, the failures of those things which had not been able to float on the sea.

But don’t think of those things. Drive those thoughts from your head or you will disturb the pale blue of the sky and water. The sea now glints innocently in the sun, but its anger lies just beneath the surface, sudden squalls ready to rise up at the least provocation. Sea birds snatched from the sky and plummet to watery depths, whale carcasses bloated and swaying on the sea floor. When rescue rafts are tossed by hail and lightning bolts, when black clouds mix with blacker seas, and trees bob up and down from islands battered in gales, then the human soul screams out to a deaf sky. Cold water lulls the mind to disorientation, to desert abysses, to mother tucking you in at night, to a pale light just beyond the horizon, growing closer, and the dull moan of wind and death fills your ears, drowning out the childhood songs, the nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss creatures waving from an island. You turn and roll in waves, uncertain if you breathe in air and drown in water or breathe in water and drown in air; reefs cut your thighs, you taste blood mixed with saltwater, but of course your body should be inherently mixed with the sea, it is only right that your body mingles with this greater and crueler body of water. Then you taste sand, and the foreign weight of land, the unrelenting force of earth pressed against your face, and the sea reluctantly releases you, recedes, calls forlornly from across the flats, and you finally submerge into the deeper sea of unconsciousness.

Atonement for the Dead

straw hat
photo by andreakremer.

In the curve of a cobblestone path a fountain sparkles. I stroll through the resort, wearing white linen slacks, matching jacket, a straw hat, limping along with my birchwood cane, a book under my arm. What book? Emerson? Something vivid enough to draw my eyes from the beauty of the gardenias to gaze down into the pages. Mr. Granger, they call me here at the resort. I’m a widower with enough money to keep me comfortable in my old age, enough so that I can come to this resort each August. And what is that one shadow that hangs over the garden, you ask? The memory of my dead wife? No, it’s somebody else here at the resort. An old lover who comes at the same time each year, yet I ignore her, try to ignore her to make amends with my dead wife for that transgression so many years before. At this very same resort, in fact. You’d think on a man’s fifth anniversary he could remain true to his wife. Yes, I was terrible, heartless, selfish.

Her name was Audra. A young woman of nineteen, traveling with her elderly parents. I’d seen her first in the dinning room; we were placed at the same table. My wife must have sensed the attraction in the few words we shared during dinner. I showed too much interest in her daily activities, laughed too hard at her small whimsical jokes. Or was it the way she lit up when we sat at table? I believe women have a sixth sense for knowing when their loved one desires another, even in total absence of substantiated facts.

The next night my wife had requested we be placed at a private table. I felt ostracized, humiliated, enraged, sitting alone in a corner while most others at the resort sat at large community tables, laughed and drank and occasionally looked over to us, eating sullenly, not speaking.

I saw her by the fountain the next morning, before my wife had woken. Audra. Even when I say her name now it hovers in my chest a moment. Sitting side by side on the bench, our legs touching. Then a slow walk along garden paths, through the glen, away from the main house into the woods beyond. When I returned and served my wife breakfast in bed, she knew immediately. She threw a tea cup across the room, upended the breakfast tray, but didn’t say a word of accusation. She didn’t need to.

The next twenty-five years were spent in atonement. On her deathbed, the reconciliation between us was complete. I started going to the resort each year in memory of my wife and that great harm I had done to her there. And then I saw Audra, older now, but her eyes the same, her smile. Nothing was holding us back now, she pleaded. Am I to never love again? I am in love, I answered. To my wife. She persisted, and with each year my reserve slowly crumbled by the pangs of loneliness and the memory of our clandestine morning walks in the garden to the glen beyond. Do the dead watch from the garden gate, I wondered? Do the dead forgive?

Cellar Door

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that “cellar door” is the most beautiful. While reading Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood", I think I came across the most beautiful sentence:

At home, I sat on the veranda, watching the rain poor down on the garden at night and assembling phrases in my head (267).

Chemical Therapy

In the delirium of a hospital room, he slips away unnoticed by his all-consuming sickness out beyond these sterile walls. Drifts into the boulevard, boards a bus, goes to the beach. Or maybe he’ll ride the back of an albatross to Florence, that wonderful city of romance and history and art. But the illusion fades; he cannot deny that he is here, in a hospital room, fighting cancer. He wonders, Do we choose to be ill? Can we choose to be healthy? It has nothing to do with our cancer racked bodies, he decides. The idea of sickness is what overcomes us in the end, like a flame that quickly spreads beyond its cylinder of wax.

His flight from these thoughts are a futile act of defiance. He runs throughthe hallways , out the revolving hospital doors and down the sidewalk, hospital gown streaming behind him. He crosses against a Do Not Walk light. Cars brush through him like a whirl of ghosts. A chill creeps over him. He tries to smile and nod hello to the people that he passes. Everyone gawks at him in horror or pity. Lost in a ghost city, towering skyscrapers disappearing in mid air. In the windows the faces of ghouls laughing down on him. He begins to weep, and his body drains with the chemo down a sewer grating into the tunnels beneath. Rushing through the intestines of the city, deeper into the bowels, he is little more than a pool of screams.

And then it comes, like the burst of sunlight. Maybe it is the final mercy of a God that he didn't believe in anymore. He is skimming over ocean waves towards a shore that promises so many works of beauty. All the promises of Florence lie ahead, and despite everything he has gone through, he is smiling.

Broken Teapot

tea dispensary photo by aesop.

The tea pot was laughing at me this morning. So I smashed it on the floor. As it broke into a hundred pieces, it sounded like a fit of giggling, then fell quiet. I didn’t sweep it up right away. Let it sit there all morning. It deserves as much.

It was insensitive: the tea pot, not my breaking it on the floor. For several minutes I had been looking for it this morning, while it sat in plain sight on the counter. How many times must I have circled it without noticing? When I spotted it, the curving spout was a smirk on its face, the handle like a hand on its hip; how it must have crouched there quietly in glee like a child hiding from its parent. It should have been more sensitive to my concern with my failing memory and loss of observation. This fog is making me frightened, and a frightened animal lashes out. Maybe I should stop taking the pills?

I feel a trace of remorse as I sweep up the shards of my once favorite tea pot and dump it into the trash, but comfort myself in the excuse that a frightened animal, by nature, lashes out.

I turn to the other dishes piled silently on the counter; “Any other of you got something to say to me?”

They didn’t.