In the Morning

Hunger cuts your tongue and singes your stride. Hear the rumble of hunger when it suits you least; when it can strangle you most. Wear hunger like a shawl, with its many holes. Let it fall from your fingertips and pick it up a minute later as a forgotten but often necessary object. Accept its sneers. Keep it as one does a secret, most times with impunity. It changes only your color, not your character. Paint it on as such. The function of hunger is only to inform you of what to provide, it has nothing to offer in itself. Hunger is reliable in its torment. Fall asleep and hunger will be there in morning.

On Boredom

Small talk is evil. It is two people who just stop loving each other, which is devastatingly worse than having a legitimate reason. Listless and bored, the invisible hand of intrepidity strangles and suffocates me until I have to shove the conversation into something about which I care. If I wanted to hear about the weather I would have consulted Frost or Thoreau. If I wanted to talk about my clothing I would have discussed the beauty of the human anatomy with da Vinci. But the infinite abyss of unwanted pauses leaves me in a coma void of thought and action. And it's blatant dishonesty. These dusty topics do not interest me.

I would much rather my words be laced with regret. Words erupting as if off of springboards, dead with the mold of too many moments buried inside me. Clipped short with anticipation and curt cynicism. They were frozen and sunken inside my stomach and have been hurled out by my tongue. As soon as they enter the warm air I want them back, but at least I have someone to bounce my ideas off of before they are edited and absorbed.Speaking on top of drawing boards is lovely when it is with you. Our conversations are surgical procedures and I'm scalpel-happy.

Prune Hands

I want to go swimming. I don't want summer. I don't want the beach with its dissonant waves and its cranky mothers with veiny legs. I don't want a party. I don't want toys and bikinis and prayers against the storms. I want a dank, damp, pool in a building that pleaded with its constructors not to add shitty tile floor, but whose cries went unheard. I want to feel that tile underfoot as I pad to the edge of the concrete. Fluorescent lights hum down on me as the water - a sickly cerulean - churns below. I don't want to dive in, full of escalated joy. I want to slide in, to slink in; the way a criminal or an ill mutt does around street corners. I want the four feet of ugly 84 degree water to swallow me whole, one second at a time. I want to dread putting my head under, but can't stand to be half wet. I crave that splice. And then the rhythmic, infinite laps of back and forth. Every time I approach the far wall, I have a panicked vision of slamming my lower lip into the cold slab of stone and bleeding into the water as my tooth goes through. I yearn for that feeling. I want to go swimming. I really do.

Better Battery

And the ebb and flow of it all,
And the woe of it all,
and it was that gray morning that
It occurred to him who was fighting who:
Who was thrusting mutiny on the other.
Nineteen years old - maybe twenty now.
(Who won?)

Moving forward in time,
Without reason or rhyme,
Feet in socks,
Socks in shoes,
He stood up.
And then sat back down.

For how could he?
How could he complain,
While under the wing,
How could he...

He couldn't.
And he didn't.
His fight, the fight of us all.

Realism, Trial #4

Trudging along to the beat of trial and error, the sweat and toil of forced experience, he raises one slender hand in protest. Silently, silently lashing out. Passively, passively calling it the wrong name. To wit: gracious.

No, no! It cannot be received. No validation where there is a deliberate skipped beat, a mistake that is not a mistake, a miss that cannot be perceived as an accident - no.

Crass and humorless. An intentional injury of reputation only, but the trial and error system cannot fail; it can only be counted as an error - a door to another trial. There is no failure inside the system; only a benevolent, albeit vicious circle.

I've erred. I discounted your thoughts, rejected your theory because of the name slapped harshly on your chest, paired with twelve years of subconscious judgement. I've attempted to strip my brain of this tag, and now I'm left with a cold counter-top of expectation.

South of Washington

For chrissakes it's not PLAUSIBLE for a reasonable sane person to have these opinions and be taken seriously in this town. After that most people give up and conform to the wildly liberal platforms brought on only by having a friend, or at least a friend of a friend, who is

• gay 
• had an abortion
• is black yet shops at the Outlets
• or can read Hebrew. 

Being raped by diversity is a different kind of oppression that forces you to adhere to the un-sticky. Can you even fathom how impossibly difficult it is to participate in this Kum Ba Yah nonsense while still hosting the facade of not giving a shit about anything? Makes me wonder how we would react if shipped to Mississippi for a exchange student program. The sad part is, we're not even that diverse. 90% of the people living here are white, upper-middle class, college graduates who shoot the breeze with their neighbors every morning. People who get a kick out of vacationing to Florida or Texas because it's so damn foreign to them. EXCEPT that we kid ourselves by believing that "there's good in everyone and by the way I have slightly agnostic viewpoints because I'm cultured and I read blogs sometimes". Venture 12 miles to the north and you instantly realize that the one time you held a gun belonging to your friend's father does not make you brave/dangerous, it makes you an asshole for assuming as much. Oh, and posting an article with the comment "kind of interesting" is not taking a stand; it's a cowardly coping mechanism that allows you to see how everyone else feels about the matter before agreeing with them. Whatever.

The Fish Market

It gets real windy in Ohio. Like an invisible ocean sweeping above my head. I hear it while I'm lying in the loft. The wooden boards below the straw creak in protest, pleading with the wind to cease its manipulation. Sometimes I fear the roof to be ripped from the walls; the only thing separating me from that ocean. I toss in the hay, visions of a giant pencil in the sky sketching the lines of turbulence. A crack, and the wind sends a tree branch cascading to the Earth, the sound finally muffled by the wood's blanketing leaves. My eyes flicker open at the din. It's official: I can't sleep through windstorms.

If you ever wind up gravitating toward a valley in your life, remember: if you can't convince them, confuse them. Fairhaven honed my perception of the valley, and it confused the shit out of me. Once you stop resisting the reality of it, you experience the shit you would normally overhear in a smokey bar in Queens. Shit like... an old man as a child, taking his younger brother down to the fish market, but being too poor to pick up dinner. They've survived this long, though. How? There must be some method to the daily scrounge which has become their entire futility. One of the grubby kids clears his throat, yells a few choice curse words up at the fishmonger, and is rewarded with a grin and a codfish hurled down at him from the boat. Brilliant. Insult the sailors in the right way and you have a free meal. I muse this glory of culture shock as it enters my ears. "I'll have to remember that one".

Still Time Yet: A True Story

"He was such a dick... Fuck him. I-"

He broke off. His eyes twittered up to me as he caught his own words in his mouth. He considered censoring himself but dismissed the thought.

"I don't even care that I'm ruining my father for you. He wasn't a bad man. He just wasn't a good one sometimes. Here's something you have to understand about men: there comes a time in every father-son relationship. An apex, a turning point. And it happens to varying degrees in every family. There comes a point when the boy says 'I'm not taking your shit anymore. You will never touch me again.' Well my father liked to poke me. He would grow his fingernails out too, so it hurt when he jabbed you in the chest."

He smiled to himself a bit, remembering. The passing of years made fondness possible.

"This time I poked him back. Well, he didn't like that. We went a couple of rounds. So I left. I didn't take a bike, I didn't take the car. I was your age. I didn't know where I was going, I only knew where it was I was leaving from. Every time I saw a pair of headlights, I got the hell off the road. I saw to it that no one knew where I was. I wasn't afraid of... you know. Bad people. I was afraid it would be my family.

"It took me some time before I realized I was heading in the direction of our church. Can you tell we went to church a lot? In my addled brain I somehow thought that the doors would be open, you know, as a safe-haven. Well it occurred to me later that they stopped doing that in the sixties because drunks would sneak in to use the place. I ended up sleeping in a clothes donation dumpster. Actually I don't think I slept that night."

He was sort of huddled over now, the memory forcing him into the child he had to be that night. His claw-like hands gripped each other. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. I noticed how old my father was actually becoming.

"I walked back in the morning. Twelve miles all together that night. The driveway had both cars parked in it. I was not going back in there to face him."

Laughter at the thought of his teenage decision process.

"So I walked four miles back! I knocked on the church door and the priest let me in. And then he raped me! Just kidding. I called my mother, she picked me up, asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I wanted this not to be happening. I couldn't have that wish. So I went to him. Me. To him. He should have come to me. Prick."

Sullenness now. A cut reopened. He leaned back in the chair, his brow furrowed with pain, regret, betrayal. He was exhausted by the opium of the past. I just sat there watching him. Waves of guilt washed over me. Why had I been allowed to live a perfect life, no cracks, no blemishes. I had escaped early childhood without abuse. Escaped middle school without an eating disorder. Self-harm played no part in my life. Death and terror were foreign to me. I was livid. I'm weak, I thought. I'm soft and naked. The test tube life had prepared me for nothing extraordinary, I could only pity others. What right do I have? I didn't want to live through these things; I just wanted them in my arsenal. I wanted to be able to reach back and say, "Look at the shit I survived. Look how strong I am because of it."

There's still time yet.

Huts and other Musings

According to my calculations, an abundance of houses are for sale in my hometown recently. They beckon to me as I drive by, realizing that I should probably be focusing on the road instead of the trim. Upon being informed that spring and summer are the best times for putting one’s house on the market, I realized that I am guilty of musing at houses a lot more once the warm weather rolls around. Obviously I am incapable of buying a cute little shingled cottage with a large drive way, but my thoughts need to be occupied by something on the way to school or doctor’s appointments or wherever else it is that I stumble to all day. I guess it’s just the simplistic indie vibes in me that long to make my own preserves to shelve in my adorable kitchen, or spend hours choosing the perfect shade of wood floor. Still I have no shame. I hope this counts as an issue worthy of posting because if I had to force myself to write about the flesh eating man from Miami hopped up on bath salts this entry would have been dreadful. 

.....just kidding.

How 'bout my uncanny and most times unwanted ability to notice change only when it has passed? I often become so obsessive over details that I fail to notice how dynamic my life actually is.

As cold as it may seem, tragedy is a socially conditioned behavior. The death of a beloved dog is tragic, while the death of a Midwestern pig is dinner. The brutal car accident in one’s family is devastating, while an I-495 crash is just morning news. However, since we are mentally unable to truly see a situation from the perspective of anyone other than our own, tragedy is completely subjective.It’s always been mysterious to me that we our supposed to value one set of people we know over another set of people we know to be considered good humans. I guess this can be derived from the fact that I've never had great tragedy strike my life. I assume the logical course of action to take if it ever did would be to sever this conditioned attachment in order to move on from the tragedy. It’s also kind of insensitive to view this as a math problem but I’m trying to approach this in the only way I know how. What I’m saying is, there’s no effective way to cope with great tragedy, and I don’t need to live through a plane crash to know how difficult it is. If a disaster occurs outside of my control, how can I expect to control my emotions about the disaster? The key is surviving it, not avoiding it.

Through, not around.

Tar in the Afternoon

How like last summer it is. June's sun unfolds down between the tree branches onto my skin. I sit on my stoop and pour a bottle of water onto the sidewalk where tar is re-liquifying. The water, who has more freedom than I will ever know, almost immediately begins to evaporate into the stale air. Across the street a large black dog watches me waste my drink through eyes of mild arrogance. He shifts his gaze, not wishing to arouse any territorial rage on my side of the street. I rise and stretch my limbs into the toxic dust clouds of summer-stricken suburbia. I stare at the fire hydrant down the road, its cap hacked off my crude young boys who now play half-nakedly in the spray of frigid ground water. An old Cuban man sits in a discarded lawn chair by the street, watching the boys. His wrinkled scowl grows more furrowed every time he is splashed with the water.

A memory slithers into my mind: it is my grandmother washing my mouth out with soap. She had hoped to burn the offending words from my tongue without having to form an actual lecture out of standard child-rearing rhetoric. I sat there, gangly legs dangling, understanding that my grandmother thought she was acting toward the collective relief of the entire community by keeping me from spitting these curse words out of my cocky little head. What she didn't know was that it was that very neighborhood who had taught me to spit those words on serpentine tongue to any that were younger than me. It's a beautiful hierarchy. It has existed for years.

1/2

Obviously I only post to dish out teeming bacteria cultures of negativity; please know this is but one half of me. I sometimes find it hard to break free from my own tyranncal head - scratch that. It's not tyrannical at all. My thoughts are my religion. I immerse myself in modern existentialism and online psychology journals. I save ideas on the back burner of my brain and come back to them weeks later. They develope a nice smokey flavor like that.

I wrap myself in NPR and spoken lectures. NPR is, in my mind, the adult version of story telling and comfort food for thought. The internet history of my laptop is wrought with earthy self-help articles and free verse poetry blogs. Perhaps the largest justifications of this narcissism is that I predict all of this reflective musing will in some way force out a selfless and more sympathetic attitude.

The point is: you must understand that the thing I like to immerse myself in least is my own self-pity. Blogging is the release, the purge of deprication, the reason to stop sulking and move on. It is the disposal of this infective analytic thought. As the host of a constant abundance of tide-like mood swings, it is fascinating to me to be forlorn, to be miserable. However, sulking is extremely unattractive. And melancholy acoustic remixes get old after a while. Dan Pink said that we need to get past carrot and stick extrinsic motivation, so here it goes.

Cooperation

I've grow weary of the endless translation of other peoples' rules. In a subconscious fit of childish refusal, my body defies cooperation in even the most innocent of  daily endeavors. From this is born acute panic attacks, and sheer terror at the mere mention of my name from a place of authority. It wasn't always like this; I vaguely recall (or more accurately, dwell on) a time when every nerve projected stability and potential. That window is closing. Having accepted this new state of normality, after an exhaustive battle of adolescent awkwardness, the least I can hope for is another involuntary transition into foreign homeostasis.

The idea of this subsequently compels me to start a new life in some sort of underwater pressurized submarine house, but I've always sort of felt like doing this anyway. Perhaps the next course of action should be to bury my lack of control in a smoking gun, or maybe a rusty razor blade, but this notion hardly interests me. I've never been one to entertain typical consequences. My escape fantasy replaces suicide with retreating into a reclusive Adirondack shack, but living off the grid will most likely just result in in a repeat Uni-bomber scandal.

Subtraction

He existed as a laceration of my doubts, more than anything else. I watched his car disappear down the dirt road that August and couldn't help but think of the exact distances between the tire treads. It couldn't have been more than an inch and half. Maybe two inches. I realized what I was doing with a scowl. It clicked together in my head like Lincoln Logs, echoed like a public reading: I was trying to block the image out. Where my mother would take a shot of Sazerac to dull the abilities of her memory, I did internal math problems. My mind flicked back to the inside of my closet. I had squatted with my back against the door, whispering times tables to myself while the firemen searched the rest of the house for me.

Truman's leaving awoke that familiar escape inside my head. It wasn't enraged or even awkward. My whole life I knew Truman would just as soon kill you as shake your hand, but I had forced myself to see past that small area of his character. I know now that I was only inviting something to come and change my mind. It arrived in the form of a newspaper headline. The local police were following up on a murder case, searching for a man of average height, dark hair, Caucasian. When Truman arrived home that evening, I was waiting for him in the kitchen. I had spent hours practicing looking casual. I didn't want to frighten him back out onto the street. I didn't speak, only held up the front page of the paper.

He stared at it for a few seconds and then raised his eyebrows at me.

"You're looking rather elusive tonight, aren't you Tru?" I said, my voice faltering. He cleared his throat and waved his hand, as if to dismiss the headline as entirely libelous. The subject was dominating the room and I found it hard to break away from it, but we both knew it was too large a question to leave hanging in the kitchen that night like a wet dishtowel.

"Did you kill that man, Truman?" I directed the question at him as if it were a guided missile. I wasn't angry. I was curious. I wanted to be free of all doubt before I let him leave. He gave a terse nod. I sighed and pointed the newspaper toward the door, hanging my head. He unhooked his hunting jacket from behind the door where it had been disrupted from it's stationary sleep so soon after being deposited there. I watched from the window as the car drove smoothly down that dirt road and the math started up again in my head.

An Update

I'm just floating in this state of thorough, heavy, wrapping exhaustion. It's contenting. My muscles feel weighed, as if they are lead pipes for my blood to flow through. My head ebbs and flows into and out of consciousness as thought it were a red and white fishing bobber. My eyes are a dying camp fire.

It's only eleven, but it feels like the morning after a war has ended. When you can feel an entire city of people breathe through the hangover of death and napalm. I should be concerned about how malleable warm temperatures have made me, like this increase in daylight is making me stretch my roots out. I should be packing for tomorrow, I should be going to bed, but I don't want to peel this Band-Aid off quite yet. I love this feeling.

An Excerpt

Summer was a season of imprisonment for my younger brother. Like most families with neighborhood age offspring, he tagged along constantly. Jack and I undoubtedly felt that he was contaminating our scatters outdoors and indoors and dealing with this harboring of exasperation manifested itself into locking him in the basement most days, after which we would realize we had nothing to do. Playing with Legos or struggling with Jack's older brother's baseball Playstation games were infinitely more fun when we had someone to blame the failures on. So he would be released from the cellar, scowling; but his expression of victimized disdain would be temporarily relinquished when we included him in whatever we were doing that day. We all played boisterously, fought constantly, and broke things pretty much all the time.

This forced my brother to develop survival skills, at least until he found his own friends to pick on smaller kids with. He soon discovered that if he was charming enough to make us laugh, he would be better equipped to duck the punch when we struck out in MLB 2007. As the smallest one on the couch, the power to amuse and disarm was extremely helpful to him. A person who is making you laugh is a very hard person to slug, a concept that probably saved him from many a bruised arm.

Winters saw us overcompensating for the absence we felt during school hours. Jack and I both understood that, because I was a girl and he was a boy, during school our friendship was nonexistent. This was tragic, but abandoning our association for six hours was necessary for the sanity of everyone involved. However, after the last bell and on the weekends, we were kept warm by winter coats and the sweat produced by endless shoveling and tunnel-making.  If a successful hole through a snowbank could be dug, the day was not wasted. The Big Dig had nothing on our frozen architecture. This chain-driven relationship was something I could put in my pocket and forget about as I grew up into learning that I was supposed to be friends with girls instead.

Charles Bonnet Syndrome

Dear sir,

More specifically, I see beautiful people in Eastern dress. I see children with huge, gleaming teeth. It's not like a dream, it's like a movie. A boring movie, but a film all the same. I've lived ninety-five years and this is my first hallucination.

It is curious to me for two reasons. It is first because these people have waited most of my life to introduce themselves to me. When I say most of my life I mean my adult life, for no one questions the illusions of a child. No one calls a child schizophrenic, but rather prone to meeting imaginary friends. The second reason this is curious to me is that I have been blind since the age of forty-three.

The last time I saw anything at all (apart from those I have mentioned just now), I was going to school in Paris. I was living with a friend and going out drinking every night and dancing on the weekends for cash. My friend and I would use this cash for cigarettes, mostly. We would sit on the fire escape and inhale and exhale with the cigarettes perched between our lips. I always allowed the smoke to absorb into my eyes. I liked the feeling of pain and the feeling of seeing through the smoke. This was obviously very damaging. I was blind within four months of living in Europe and had to be deported back home to my mother.

The figures I see now: I do not recognize them. I had been fascinated with Freudian determinism but I assure you I have never in my life met this population of illusions. The only person I have ever seen and recognized is that of myself in a bathrobe and tobacco pipe. The mirror image of myself was then divided into four other people and at that very moment I shut my eyes because I did not wish to experience this horror any longer.

I wish to  be very clear, sir. The only reason I am seeking help now is that I have become very bored and tired of meeting these people over and over. They do not age. They do not develop as characters. They do not even change clothes. If they acted as real people I would be most excited to entertain them in my life, but not so. I would much rather be blind again.

Regards.

Waiting on the Stairs

February. Monday. After a long streak of nights electrified by the joy of being absolutely nothing.

I sit and cease to exist until the quiet hours of the morning thrust me back into warped existence. Covered in the mucus of structured work and destination. It is foolish to think I am the first to tear through this banner... after all did not Shakespeare at some point litter his own floors with crumpled up pieces of paper? The difference is that my demons lie below me in the PVC pipes and his were right there in the lines of scrawled ink.

Is this what evolution has prepared me for? Escaping into a mirage of painted symphonies and walking the dog? At some point I start to wonder when the hurricane is coming, just so I can ignore the danger and taste the rain.  I keep putting on an extra layer, leaving the light on at night, as if growing up is a crumpled check I forget to cash. And now:

A Few of My Favorite Things

1. Getting back in the car after filling the tank up. alllllll the way up.
2. Grilled cheese for breakfast
3. Snow, for god's sake, this was the oddest winter ever. While 2011 went through puberty one of the reasons I actually like Massachusetts was invalidated. I WANT SNOW.
4. Climbing stairs. I don't know?

It's coming down stairs that freak me out. 

It was one of those stupid moments in which two people are approaching each other and neither person knows which way to go. I dodged and she stumbled around me. My teeth started to form "Sorry" but something about the situation stopped me. I stopped moving altogether and glanced in her direction. Late 40s, short, stocky. She trudged around the carpet in large galoshes and hid her brow under a knit cap, soggy from the rain. A ragged coat hung around her body. It looked as if it failed to keep any cold out. I struggled to see her face more closely but wasn't invested enough to care. She was carrying a backpack in one hand and a large drawing pad in the other. Homeless? Not frequent enough in this town to be a definitive explanation. Suspicion and paranoia bristled on my neck. I put my hands into my coat pockets and shrugged.

I was barreling down the stairs  minutes later when I saw her again, this time from the back. She had planted herself right in the middle one of the steps. I saw that what she was still clutching wasn't a drawing pad at all, but a white rubber bathmat. The before encounter still chilled my core. I swallowed hard and spun on my heels to escape the way I came but she craned her neck around to look at me before I could get away. I could feel beady eyes slicing into me like a laser cutter. Her wrinkled cheeks looked weighed down with years of neglect, and her eyes were as yellow as her finger nails.

"Excuse me," I said, leaping over her bag onto the following step. Almost out, I thought, few more steps. 

"Cold hands?" she gestured to my pockets, still filled with my clenched fingers. Her voice was wet and smokey. I wondered if she had been drinking the rainwater.

"Uh, yeah," I smiled politely, avoiding eye contact.

"Or a weapon..."

I was already down the hall. My anxiety was spiked and this last comment propelled me past being rational. Did she really think I had a gun in my coat pocket... Maybe I should start carrying one. 

The Ground Up

For the first time every goosebump on my arm is filled with worth and anticipation's hum. We're all so close-knit that we breathe together. My inhale is their exhale. And I'd say we were a machine but there's too much life in us to be made of nuts and bolts. Instead Band-Aids and soggy mittens. Coffee cups, inheriting thumb war strategies, and forgetting. A dollar here and there to contribute to the Consistency Fund.

I wish I lived in the time before existentialism was invented. They didn't have to question their existence because they were too busy not to have a purpose. The thought never even crossed their minds. It's answer was splayed out physically in the black dirt underneath their finger nails. The sweat in their eyes would blind them from seeing their own inaccuracies. But me, I fill pages with wishful thinking and over-analysis. Because I can. Because I give myself too much rope and then hang myself with it.

One Old Cigar

I settled into adolescence without assistance. Even if I didn't understand something, instead of instinctively asking for help, I would rather leave it blank. It wasn't pride, or that I thought I was weak. It just never occurred to me to require anyone else's expertise.  It started with homework, 5th grade. My father would refuse to do my math for me, as I'd heard so many other kids brag that theirs' had. "Figure it out yourself, you're smart enough," he'd say, not looking up from the newspaper or occasional WWII memoir. I would trudge down from my prison of a room like one of the soldiers in those memoirs for the tenth, eleventh, twelfth time that day. "Is this right?" I'd ask, not making eye contact because I knew it wouldn't be. He peered at my scrawl of an answer: "Nope, try again." Christ, it was taunting. Even when I did ask for the problem to be explained, he poked at me over his glasses.

"Dad, I need help on this."
"On what, be specific."
"On this." Pointing, exasperated.
"I'm not a mind reader, ask me a question and I will do my best to help you."

He's always spoken like that. Canned, artificial, as if reading from a telemarketer script. He's always been frustratingly calm and rational. Sometimes I just wanted to provoke him into screaming profanities at me. Maybe his tight, woolen sweaters prevented any fresh air from getting to his lungs. Maybe one too many tobacco pipes had finally shriveled his brain-stem. Maybe raw feeling was raped away by periodical haircuts and old Clint Eastwood films. I had experimented once with a leftover cigar I had found in the garage. As I inhaled slowly, I could feel the flavor of 40 years' apathy slithering into my mouth. The feeling was familiar, not one I had already felt but one I would grow into. I wasn't fooling anyone, I was going to be just like him. A turtleneck.