Look for it folks... in the bottom of your tea cups. I am devining tea leaves. A Year, or ear, is at an end and if it all goes back. Recoils like a Red Ryder BB gun into nothingness, a small recoil, as sure as shit, she shot the cans from the top of a bail of hay. Oh, my word! What of all of this now. A tisket and a tasket, holy hell, baby's brains in a baby basket. The line between truth and fiction, or me and you, heaven and hell, has grown precariously close. I have spit Satan's hot venom out of my throat tonight, the morning arrives too quick. I made sweet sandwiches of Earthlike proportions for our dinner date. John has no shot. Howard is lurking. Noone says what I want but all try to come close. Maybe by next May.. or November at latest, someone will break through. I am tired beyond tired of fightng fights that I never signed up for...I wouldn't even make the cut. There's a SC, and NC, and GA... we have no shot right?! My heart pounds to get out of this place. Tuck tale and run. Make a new dream in some distant land. Forty-eight acres in northern Montana, a license for nudity if that's what strikes your fancy. Three acres-a-piece for the loving children. If you died in your sleep, I would end it all. Spleen, heart and lungs.
December 2003 Archives
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She was so pretty when she was young. Took great delight at the discovery of ice. How did we keep the freezer from her so long? She lived ice cream and seemed to have an inherent understanding of the substance. Ice, in and of itself, was a totally different beast. I made my way across town in my father's pickup tat he had left me when he left for Mexico in '97.
He speaks fluent Spanish now and struggles with certain parts of English. On the occasional phone calls it is as if daily certain words are leaving him. My grandmother had the same issue the three years preceding her death and we called it Alzheimer�s. Dad has just wound up in a new world full of tequila, late night discos of a different sort, and, I imagine, the occasional Mexican prostitute.
I was from across town, and the plant, coming home to you. Bacon I had bought at the supermarket hours earlier languished in the bed of the truck. But it's bacon, I figured it would still make for a decent morning meal on the coming Saturday.
I think the problem ultimately is that this is not a mystery although it seems like one at this point. Or, it is a mystery, just not one that the average will discern as so. I made my way across town with bacon in tow. A little drunk if the truth be known. I know I am too old for this shit, or that shit, should know better etc. Two cars I came across along the way. Little Jenkins was out by the road already waiting for the mail to arrive, which was not a possibility at least for another 12 hours. He heartily gave a wave as I went by.
See I guess it is ultimately a shift issue. It is not that you sleep or that I sleep. Hell, we all need sleep. I know I have raised a ruckus over this shit lately. Keep me off the gin at least until the weather makes a turn.
Henry was in the yard barking and barking as I made the turn. He ran to the car and chased me that half-mile, lapping my heels as I exited the truck and up the steps, into the house, I let him in as well. I know you don't like this shot, but it is a cold night, or was. I locked him in the mudroom so don't be scared. He's just a dog.
But here's where everything got wonky. I watched the replay of the Orioles game on HTS, or at least the last three innings. The phone rang but I didn't answer it. Julia came down stairs and I gave her orange juice and asked her how her day had been. She told me it had been fine and that she was sleepy and so she went back to bed. What am I missing?
Forty-five minutes later I came up the stairs and there you were sleeping. I laid down and had a time of it trying to get to sleep. I thought of the things I had overheard your mother saying about me on the phone two nights earlier. I thought of the way it had been two months since you had had a period. I thought even about my college friend Dan and how he was starting to make it in NYC.
Finally around 4 AM I started to dose. You rolled away from me and told me to hold you tight, and I did. Everything is going to be alright I thought and finally drifted out and away, and somewhere between then and morning a dream jumped from your head to my heart and when you awoke to go out this morning you shook me for morning kisses and we said not a thing until you made your final departure. A kiss on the cheek became a thesis. You turned as you after shower and makeup, deodorant, nasal tissue, and said, "Mama said, ' pessimism, boy, is for people who are well off."
Only a fool would buy an extended warrantee. Everyone knows TVs last for at least ten years and then, if it craps out on you, you just buy a new one. I've got a portable TV that's nearly a decade old and nothing has ever gone wrong with it. It's indestructible.
If you have an ounce of common sense you'll know that retailers make a mint from selling useless extended warrantees to gullible consumers - it's the ultimate in fear-consumption. Nothing ever goes wrong with modern TVs. You might be forgiven for purchasing cover for a new washing machine - they have moving parts, anything can go wrong. You'll be a grandparent before your television breaks down.
Every time you buy a new TV, DVD, VCR, PC, Hi-Fi, Washer, Dryer, whatever it is, you are faced with the hard-sell sales assistant on 10% commission trying to tell you that the top-quality comsumer durable he's just spent 20 minutes convincing you to buy is going to go tits up the day after the standard one-year guarrantee runs out. Fear; consume; live.
I bought a new 28" widescreen TV 13 months ago; I didn't get an extended cover plan with it - no fool me! The colour's all fucked up now.
here's what I have to write. Head all tight and all. You go into the garden morning and night and my fear is that I have lost... lost it all, and the fight. Make ways and waves and things unconfit. I don't know how your menu reads. I could go to an area in Central America and make a few strange puzzles in the ground there.
It will all become a bit simpler, I will make my aim a bit more accurater. I will talk to mermaids as they wash my feet, and kings as they polish my shoes. Happy 2nd birthday darling. It makes me feel like a father already. I can't wait to play it all for our children.
They bound my body in black plasic. Put me in the ground under 7 cubic feet of earth. I would breathe no more. They had done me in. Proverbially, I had been whacked in the most stellar sense of the word. I was not dead. Do you understand, fair reader, I was not dead. A wall had been masoned around me, but in blood I wrote on the interior, " I am not dead, I am here, what of all of this now?"
This is the way things go, right?
You've been dancing for hours on the floor and I have been in this suffocating rhythm. Your manager knows nothing of the way in which they put me in the ground. A forehead grew out of my forehead. I prayed to the God of the second moon and made sweet love to fair maidens of unhuman kinds. I have fallen in love. I have fallen... pure and simple. I am not dead, although they think me so.
Uncle John died. And upon leaving his funeral an albino dear skirted across the road precariously close to our car. Jaime and I went to see a movie that night. I felt the world overturn and upheave and reveal itself to me in an instant.
This is not Georgia. This is North Carolina. Georgians think they have monopoly over this shit. Cold and grey on these dark fall afternoons. I made my way from there and then stopped as it seems ot have happened. I am not dead. The plastic covers my face. I am suffocating. Yet, I have found reason and adequate air supply to bring it all back home. Just enough to make it all interesting. Some of you will understand. You prayed for my death. I promised it by 35. But no longer. I will outlive you all out of spite, secret southern beatification, if nothing else.
Get used to the way in which I speak. I have dusted off the clothes and the awkward suit they hoped to put me finally to bed in. I am your worst fucking nightmare here to see you home.
But some will still prey.
