heaven

to me, heaven wouldn’t have to be so perfect. it can have sadness, or at least not be without poignance.  or maybe it should encourage the whole range of emotions you feel the most--or all of them.

what if heaven started with your music library, all of them, the entirety of the music you’ve ever collected.  you get to listen to each song once, and cleanse and think and cry and remember, but you only get to listen once.  and then you have to listen to library all over again, and that’s it, heaven, all the music in the world over and over again at the end of your life.  iTunes always says the total amount of time your music would add up to, those would be the years you live in heaven, until you become infinity years old.

or the years could be turned into seasons.  summer is your music library, autumn is your poetry, spring is the art that has inspired you, and winter will be all the stories you’ve read.

only until recently have i felt that the afterlife, or a place like heaven, these places would be boring.  i have never known how to balance out the idea of meddling with something that is everything i could ever want, but i've always felt compelled to defy this idea.  it is only until now that i realize art is where i could live forever.

A Turtle's Existentialism

El Existencialismo de la Tortuga 

Sometimes I can't tell if my turtle just wants to call it quits.  This would be ironic, its having another five or six decades to plod through, minimum, but I can't help wondering if my turtle is satisfied with living.

It just sits there, ever underwater, beneath a big, fake rock, surrounded in a vulgar milieu of rigid, plastic plants and a bumbly pirate theme of sunken treasure--a treasure chest which bursts with bubbles on one end of the tank while a skull (adorned with a pirate hat) rests agape on the other.  And what could truly mock a longing for death like a skull, la calavera itself, in costume?  Its manufacturer's soft swing at realism leaves the cartoonish skull with a sparing amount of teeth; its mandible juts outward with a smiley underbite.  A pirate hat remains above the cranium, though skin and hair must have long since been eaten away, and in only such a treacherous abyss like the one found in a 45-gallon tank, the same tank that became the burial ground of this presumed Hanna-Barbera character's head, apparently lopped off and tossed into the murky depths of Baltimore City's water, sinking all the way to the bottom, all 18 inches, and where after some time was pecked bare in the livingroom darkness, is where only my turtle now lives.

Anyway, the turtle just sits there underwater, staring out at a bookshelf with books, old CDs and a framed quote from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you've imagined."

And that's what the turtle stares at all day from under its fake rock.  Looking away from the pirate scene and at the bookshelf, it faces a quote from one of the most progressive, ascetic minds ever, an enviro-anarchist at that, one who protested the very same capitalism that had these words framed in the first place, the same words that are probably on fifty-plus percent of graduation cards around the United States, all sold in mass and bought in haste for $4.99 a pop, most the time accompanied with a check from a guilty uncle, an awkward neighbor or an AWOL godparent, the child's name written legibly if the name is spelled right; these are the Go Git 'Em words of the future that this turtle stares at all day.

Her name is April, by the way, and she wasn't always like this.  She used to swim all day.  When the room was empty and no one was around, she would climb up onto her plastic, floating island and bask underneath the heat lamp.  This was back when she still had the island, and when the tank was filled to the top.  April isn't actually mine, either; she's Tommy's--I just live with the two of them.  Anyway, when her tank was full, Tommy used to have a floating, little island for April--he got rid of it when he lowered the level of her water.  She would swim feverishly around the tank all day, and when she wanted to rest, she would climb up onto the island and chillax in the human sun.  I never actually got to see her perched on her island because, back then, the slightest movement would send her careening back into the water.  I just know that every time I entered the room there would be a splash.  Now she just sits under the rock and stares.

I think it's sad, really.  Would she be happier outside, in a stream?  I feel like her life expectency would obviously be cut by decades what with predators and harsh MD winters.  But wouldn't she be more a fit to her natural role in life, if there is in a fact a natural role when borne into the human hands of captivity?    Tommy bought her out of a kiddie pool on a street corner in Brooklyn.  She even came home with a brother, Soapy.  The two of them were swimming around the inflatable pool with all of their brothers and sisters when Tommy saw them.  Actually, his girlfriend wanted them, so Tommy bought them.  They took April and Soapy home and watched them grow.  

Eventually Soapy got sick.  His eyes swelled up and he went blind.  He couldn't find his food, so Tommy had to feed him by hand.  Tommy would push Soapy's jaw apart and feed a vile of liquid protein twice a day for Soapy.  He even gave Soapy daily (and expensive) antibiotic eye drops.

The hard work never paid off, though, as Soapy would eventually pass.  Tommy felt super guilty and told himself that the same thing wouldn't happen with April.  He went to the pet store and consulted the pro's.  He took their advice: he bought the best dehydrated krill out there; he got cleaner and a new water pump, a treasure chest water pump; he started filtering her tank bi-weekly.  He started giving her playtime outside of the tank.  He got her a small crew of various little fish, for companionship he said, and even though she ate them one by one, he went out and got more.  The only piece of advice he didn't catch, or at least failed to infer, was that the tank shouldn't be full.

So for a couple years, that's how April lived, in a full tank, and that's when I met her.  I guess it's hard to tell if a turtle is happy, but I could tell that she was definitely more active.  When she wasn't swimming furiously about the tank, she rested under the heat.  When she was swimming, she would follow passerby as they walked past her tank.  She played with the bubbling, pirate chest water filter.  Each time a bubble emerged from the belly of the chest, the chest's door swung open.  April would float above it and try to keep the chest shut.  It was like her game, or her meditation in motion, or her daily workout; she would play with it for minutes on end.  

Then Tommy found out the tank shouldn't be full, so he emptied it down to a quarter its original capacity.  We felt guilty--should she have been forced to swim that much?  It made me think: with all that swimming around, she must have had some serious little turtle abs under that shell.  

Now I am not so sure.  Since the lowering of the water, I've only seen her sit under the fake rock.  The island is gone, too, just sitting in a shopping bag on the floor next to the tank.  And so she just sits there, staring out at the picture frame.  She pays less mind to the people who walk by her.  She gives her chest little attention, and when she does, her chest "wins" every time because she can no longer float above it--the bubbles swing open the door and blast her little arms away when she tries covering it.  It's sad, really.

So what is to make of this whole operation or ritual or cradling?  What, or who, is April, and what is the meaning of her existence--is her shell her home, her tank her planet and our house her universe?  What is the role of Tommy, or me for that matter, and where or how do we co-exist?  I've never felt that our lives are meaningless; I think that life, whether it is engineered or an accident, the results are a beautiful gift and should be showered with celebration every waking second.  But as for April, what is she doing here, in this tank?  It's like the tank is furniture and she is a toy, or she is just part of the furniture, a living piece of furniture.  Who started this mess, not just April's situation, but the whole declining population of turtles on this planet, los tortugas entiro de la Madre Tierre?  Who started selling turtles?  Who started buying them?  Who is breeding them?  What is this sick cycle we perpetuate, one that spontaneously sparks in me enough existential anxiety to cry in my kitchen on a Monday evening after work?  

This can't be what it feels like to be God, but if it does, if there is a "hand that feeds" from the skies, is a turtle tank a microcosm of it all?  Are we all stuck under a fake rock, just staring at the direction of a once-shiny quote, now hackneyed and mangled by the rest of us, casting spells and shadows at each other from our own tanks, cannibalizing our own kind, leeching off each other for shit like ego and money and material, which, when thought in the context of a turtle's tank, is all meaningless anyway?  Is that what we're doing, creating our own gods and killing each other with them, even killing ourselves, all with the same shit we adore?  And if these earth gods we create are in fact meaningless, what is to make of a God god--is a God god even there, or just forgotten?  Is there a God god circling around our overpopulated tank, checking in on us twice a day, making sure we are caught up on our premium crawdads?  And if so, if from outside the tank, if this is what it is to be a God god, simply by being a neutral third party which keeps us alive with minimal effort, if this is what it feels like to be God god, then a God god could just as easily forget the tank and start over.  Being a God god is to have no consequence.  Nihilism can be the name brand and the erupting liberation of no commitment is the currency.

It is only by this comparison, my life and hers, the human population and turtles', which makes me question whether April wants to die or not.  She is just sitting there: this is her eternity, her yesterday, today and tomorrow.  She doesn't have anything to feel and even less to work for, and just knowing that, to me, with this wealth of human experience, I could not live that existence.  I live to be moved, but that is only because I have felt what it is to laugh in fear and cry with joy.  But what about the pragmatic essence of never feeling moved, no pain and no joy, just... being, maybe, just maybe turtles in her position are lucky to be so confined, and maybe, just maybe they end up on top.  They don't have anyone else to quarrel with, especially about money or God, because to them, money is nothing and God is boring.  They, too, can live without consequence, just like a god.  In essence, the raw, concentrated peace of nihilism without knowing a damn thing makes them their own god, or better yet, breaks them free from God.  One day it will all be over anyway.  But for now, April can just be.

In the meantime, it is we who should never forget to enjoy the heat from above, even when you're swimming furiously.

Trailer Park on Air Force Base (to Flood of '72)

Trailer Park on Air Force Base
to melody of Flood of '72:

I am in a trailer park on
an Air Force base in Florida
cramped in Tampa
Bay
and wondering if today is Christmas
or just the twenty-second of December,
But I don't remember
because the members of my creation
can't bear such a presence in these quarters,
at least when we are in front of one another,
so right now I am standing by the water
watching cargo planes touch down with graceful terror--

But around me
are all these things like palms
from other places we forget
and brown beaches
thick with mud and carcasses
of armadillos.
Nonetheless I have my health
and the wind to blow away the smell.

pea (Towson Town Center Mall)

I can never find my way out of malls,
but I don't mind.

These places and stores
line inertly in the lasting low light--
everyone stands in their assigned places,
mannequins that can talk
and yawn
with an unglued mélange of boredom and pressure,
boxed and wrapped together with the stinging words,
"May I help you?"
It is commonplace that everyone in here looks at each other
without seeing a thing.

They should bring some dogs in here, or something--
you can't pet dogs on the internet yet.
Maybe that could work.

Everyone in here knows the truth;
it hangs above everyone's heads,
it crawls inside their covered mouths, and it saturates their eyeballs;
it is a frozen pea to a trachea;
and inasmuch no one will say it:
"We could all do this [shop] on there [the Internet] anyways."
Everyone knows it: shopping with your feet has become ersatz,
but not for me--I like to look at calendars up close before I buy them.

Except for the slow-walkers, slow-talkers
and a select few teenagers who can still feel
the integrity of this sad, tiled hum,
the same who still give this place breath in January
afternoons,
except for them,
everything seems kind of hollow, even the light.

I bite into my hot pretzel and keep walking,
encompassed with a cloudy, familiar blend of ten million smells at once.
Its colors always change, but the crisp smell of consumerism will always be the same,
that vague, familiar scent that never leaves once it stamps its mark;
it's ingrained in the tiles, in the moving hands and the swaying fabric,
in the faux wood of the faux eyelash kiosks,
in the bad cell phone service and the slight wobble of every table,
in the clumsy, nervous, ever-avoidant eye contact,
in the abyssful echo of the bathrooms and the drowning engines of the hand dryers,
in the yellow plastic and the wet floors,
in the light.

I leave with a fifty-dollar mustache razor
out of the wrong exit,
wondering, "How do they get the Jaguar to the fourth floor?"

Starfish

I want to cling to the skin of your brain
like a starfish on glass
and suck on the flesh of your thoughts,
gestating your mind:
your words, ideas, fears, horrors,
into a molten core
of my womb
until I grow and burst
into your entire world.

Coma

Here's something weird--Walter told me that prison was actually good, at least for him.  When I talked to Phil about his time in prison, he never said much, but it wasn't anything positive.  I doubt most anyone would say that prison, or jail, or incarceration for months on end was something good.  But Walter said it was good.  This was all before his accident.

Walter told me that when he stepped out of the yellow lights of Central Booking and into the acrid streets of downtown Baltimore, that he got into Austin's car and Frankie Valli was playing.  He said he broke down and started crying, and that Austin kept driving, not saying much.  Walter said that his bunkmate used to sing "(Oh) Baby Baby Baby" every single night while Walter and four other cell mates laid and listened silently in the almost-darkness.

Walter described the ride home as an ambivalent euphoria, a foreign sense of pure harmony, and I could only imagine--like a major blood vessel bursting with emotion, of freedom and safety and cleansing, of graciousness, an end to the months of longing, of longing to return to a life that would never be the same.  He said he wasn't crying for any reason at all other than that his feelings, like himself, were no longer locked away; they were no longer dormant or put on hold, that they were free to crawl around the walls of his heart, swelling and pushing, bouncing and careening until finally bursting out the corners of his eyes.  He said that hearing that song in Austin's car had unlocked the chest in his chest, the steamer trunk they were stored in, and that the song was the trigger, the crowbar that cracked open their seal and let them come wild and flyin' through.  Oh, baby.

He said that while his bunkmate would sing, he and the others would listen in contemplative silence.  He said they had a bond, everyone in jail did, but especially the six who shared Walter's cell, that moments like this reminded them that they were still human, that they could still feel, that they needed to remind each other of these simple facts.  He said that while Kevin, the crooner, a forty year old black man who coincidentally grew up ten houses from Walter, that while Kevin crooned, Walter would picture his life leading up to his incarceration.  Walter said he would think of Maggie, and how she would ask to take walks around their neighborhood in Charles Village, or down the green paths of Wyman Park, or even just around their own block on 27th to look at the old rowhomes.  He said he never went, but would, at that moment, in his cell listening to the nightly crooning, most obviously do anything to go for a walk with her.

Walter was telling me all of this while we sat in my living room.  I hadn't seen him since he had gone to prison.  We'd known each other for ten years now, and in intervals of every couple days, weeks, months or years we would cross paths.  We were sitting together in my living room, rain dripping through the crumbling ceiling, plaster littering the couch in melted globs.  He told me that prison was good for him, that now he was almost finished with his engineering degree at UMBC, that after this semester, he was going to start applying for jobs.  We had picked up right where we left off that rainy night, like we always did.

Where we had left off before that rainy night was before he went to prison, and before I had left the country, at my old house in P-ville, after we had discovered we were living down the road from each other. We started catching up again.  He brought a blunt over.  We talked about Salisbury, WuTang, our lost, sick friends, college.  He had just started going to UMBC, and I at Towson--neither of us lasted at Salisbury, and it had taken us both a while to academically readjust.  I had always known that he sold herb, but I wasn't aware of how much he was pushing anymore.  That said, I wasn't surprised by the amount he was pushing because Walter was a yes man.  Nothing could stop a yes in Walter's life, not even the ramifications for being considered a kingpin to both the city of Baltimore and the county.  I guess it's all relative, but Walter has always just been Walter to me, and I feel like Walter has also maintained the same, genuine self-understanding--whether he was giving you a gram or picking up 25 pounds, he was always just Walter.

And Walter never said yes out of self-profit, or even for the wealth of experience; he said it out of the well-being of the people he cared about.  I'm not saying that Walter went to jail for all of his friends; I'm just saying that Walter was there for all of his friends.  He was the guy, and no one ever stopped him.  If someone asked him to stop, I bet he would have, but no one ever did.  So he kept expanding, and so would the people, all gathering under the radius of his giant wings.  He was the guy, there for you when you needed him.  He was unconditional--he never held a grudge, never raised his voice, never flinched at the request of a "fronted bag," met ya when convenient, and overall, never made it a business, at least not first, second, or even second-to-last.  And Walter doesn't live with regrets; in that growing sea of all of those yeses, it's just how he operated.  The only yes to which he would never subscribe was the only yes that would haunt him--Maggie's request to go on a walk.  He brought that up in my living room, before the accident.

This story is not about the time Curtis stabbed Walter with an ice pick.  However, I think it's important to mention because I think that's when Walter said yes to the game.  This was freshman year, when Walter lost three grand of herb to the Salisbury football team, maybe more.  In a way, it wasn't even Walter's fault.  After setting up the deal between Walter and some old teammates, a mutual friend/ex-SU football player tried stealing a tiny nugget (for himself) from a QP bag.  During the exchange, Walter waited in the car while the mutual friend attempted to liaison the deal.  The mutual friend stepped outside with the little nug in his hands, claiming to "smoke a cigarette," only to have the players kick the door shut on him.  Someone jumped out the window with the goods, leaving the mutual friend, and consequently, Walter empty-handed.  After that, Curtis came after Walter in a cocaine rage, broke into his house, stabbed Walter in the side and left.  Walter didn't even fall over; he said it felt like Curtis had punched him, but then he looked down and saw blood pouring down his hip.  When Walter left the hospital a few days later, he never actually gave away Curtis's name.  Anyway, I think that's when Walter said yes to the game that put him in prison for five months.

That was all before the accident.

tbc...

When Stony Shot Someone

Talk about not having an ego--Stony killed himself with a plastic bag.  He put it around his head and drowned in his own exhalations.  He died from his own living breath!  I heard he shot someone in Florida, and that his life had gone downhill after that.  I was the first person he had ever sat next to on the bus, back in ninth grade, right there in the second to last row, this pudgy kid walked confidently up to my half-empty seat and asked if he could sit next to me.  Of course I said yea, and we got to know each other briefly.

I knew he had anger, sort of, but not the brand of anger that shoots somebody, or let alone shoot somebody and start kicking their body while they lay on the ground.  I don't think the person died, and in fact I heard the person had only been shot somewhere in the arm or the shoulder.  Maybe the person lay there in shock, maybe he or she played dead--I won't know.  But Stony shot someone.  I also know that Stony wasn't a bad guy.

I don't know why he was in Florida when that happened.  If I recall correctly, his mother lived down there.  He lived with his father in HoCo when he and I had met, and I don't know if he considered me his first friend, his only, a meaningful friend, or a friend at all, but he was mad when a newer guy sat next to me from an earlier stop, this guy we called Greg Thanewguy (that's how I put him in my phone back then).  Anyway, I never asked for Stony's number, and I didn't fight too hard to say that the other fifty percent of my bus seat wasn't actually vacant, but maybe I had a disarming vibe back then where new kids had less trouble approaching me.  Maybe it was because I had been the new guy so many times, or maybe it was Greg Thanewguy's awkward inertia that carried him to the back of the bus on the first day he stepped onto it and had no choice but to desperately ask if the one open spot was open.  I remember when Stony stepped onto the bus and saw tall, skinny, awkward Greg Thenewguy sitting next to me with his backpack on his legs, but Stony muffled something that was meant to be heard but I didn't hear it.  He put on his headphones and Slipknot could be heard growling out of his earphones a few seats up.

Anyway, so I think Stony only attended school for about a year or two longer, but since my mother had moved thus changing my bus route, and since we were all on the precipice of a driver's license, I am not sure how the seating dynamic continued really after that year.  Stony didn't sit next to me again, and I don't recall feeling too worried about it.  I remember his getting out of hand from time to time, but it was only in the sense of a rowdy chubby kid trying to make his peers laugh with the only means he had--over exuberant physicality.  I remember he would poke the back of the heads of kids in front of us, or he would yell PENIS as loud as he could, or do dips between the seat and kick his feet around.  It was annoying, but it wasn't anything atypical.

Then one day he quit coming to school.  He got suspended for breaking a window.  Then he got caught spray painting the trailer classrooms and the gym doors.  Then he fought someone who made fun of his dad's boyfriend.  Then he just quit coming to school.  No one knew why, but people could make their guesses.  Our homogeneous school body had rejected him like a bad kidney, sent him--no, catapulted him--to Florida.

I heard he started selling weed down there.  This was around eleventh or twelfth grade, or after.  I remember hearing he had a gun, but didn't believe it the way I wanted to believe it.  I didn't hear much after that, and after a while, it seemed like I had reached a point to where it almost became normal in my mind--I ended up meeting other people who sold weed, other people who had guns, and other people who invested in both.  I remember having a handgun pointed at me in jest, another time someone forgetting their gun next to my couch, and I remember unzipping a duffel bag in someone's pickup only to find a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun.  I remember the same kid reassuring me that it was only to scare people, that it was only loaded with beanbags, and that he would figure out what to do later when that point came where, even if no one was murdered, there was an inevitable case for assault with a deadly weapon were he to ever use it.  I remember thinking, "All this for green?"  Even so, even with all of us sipping a lofty cocktail of invincibility and curiosity, it never seemed real.

I don't know when or where it was when I heard that Stony shot somebody.  I think it was at Hugo's.  Hugo was a genuine kid who also toed the margins of acceptance in our white-washed school, unless, of course, he was throwing a party--then everyone showed up.  I think it was inside his dad's garage, through a cloud of cigarette smoke where I heard that Stony shot someone.  One of Hugo's friends was friends with Stony's brother.  Stony's brother had stayed behind, had chosen not to go to Florida, and instead expressed his defiance through studded denim and a mowhawk.  Stony's brother was a year younger, but looked years older--he didn't have the boyish pudge of Stony.  He was quiet and brooding, unlike his brother, and usually kept his back against the wallflower wall, too.  I remember seeing him tonguing his lip ring a lot.

I think it was in that garage when I heard that, down in a Florida parking lot, Stony had handed someone a half ounce of weed, expecting to be paid the standard 180 dollars that it cost back then for said amount.  I heard, instead, the kid turned and ran with the bag, and Stony, whether cursed by impulse, heavy legs or probably both, lifted his pistol and fired.

The story is as hazy as the night I heard it.  The details are filtered through the mouths of many, through the minds of more, and embedded by half-lives somewhere in the ore of my decaying memory of him.  I heard Stony shot the guy in the back, or his arm, or his shoulder, that the kid fell to the ground and Stony started kicking him.  I know nothing after that.  I just couldn't believe he actually did it.

I don't know what happened to him after that, or before the last thing I ever heard about him.  Just a simple search on Google initially lead to no traces of his existence.   I clicked Google Images only to find a swath of different faces.  Then suddenly I saw it, that baby face pudge emerging like a live ghost, like a face from a black lake.  Staring back at me was Stony, with a flatbrim Ecko Unltd. hat, heavy peach fuzz on his upper lip.  I clicked the picture, and sure enough there he was, on a myspace account which now seems like a preserved artifact.  I looked at the few pictures he had existing, one of his pet snake, some pictures making funny faces, friends drinking handles of rum in random apartment living rooms.  One picture bore the caption, "My life style is party hard. My drink of choice, the CAPTAIN," yet the photo was of his brother holding a bottle of Port Royal.  His location did not say Florida; it said our hometown--Lisbon, Maryland.

I don't where it happened when he did the next thing, or who found him.  I don't even really know why he did it, other than what I'd suspect was an unbearable existence, probably riddled with legal problems, possible addiction, and the lightning quick realization that it is very easy to disappoint everyone you know.  I don't know why he chose to use the bag--maybe because it was the cleanest exit, maybe because it wouldn't hurt, maybe because it would take just long enough for someone to find him in the nick of time.  I don't know why he did it, but he did.

Somewhere in this timespan came a complete reversal of invincibility.  That same stinging warmth we all used to carry around infectiously, feverishly inside an impenetrable bubble of youth, the same youth that led us to believe that we could operate the way we did, had vanished for Stony.  For the rest of us, we still had our red carpets to walk on; they would unfold until one by one we would earn our first couple, very privileged strikes, or until the monsters we create came to life and consume us whole.

I never knew Stony more than I wanted to, but I know that I would now give up my seat for him, and not out of fear.  It's because he became real to me again.

When the Shaundertaker Killed 300 Monsters

I walked through the door flaps and entered the kitchen.  Shaun was standing at the dish sink, washing out the soup containers.  He had his portable head phones on.

'What's up, Supaman,' I asked him, rolling the black sleeves of my work shirt up to my elbows.  I was looking around the kitchen line to find evidence of today's potential specials.  Nothing in sight.  Shaun continued washing the soup containers.

I turned around and ask Shaun again, a little louder.  'What's the motherfuckin' word, Supaman?'

He turns around and removes an ear phone.  'What's up, Captain motherfuckin' Crunch?'  He says it enthusiastically and claps my one hand and half-hugs me. Just for the sake of brevity, picture Macho Man Randy Savage in camo shorts, sporting a thick goatee and oversized thirty dollar ear phones.  He's our daytime dishwasher.

'I need you to get me a diet soda,' he says, handing me his own personal 32-oz. plastic yellow cup.  He is always drinking diet soda, and he is always asking me to fill it for him from the bar.  He's afraid of our owner.  'I hope I don't die from this next one, huh.'  He laughs.

Henry told him that diet sodas will clog his colon and kill him through a long, constipated  cancerous rotting of the asshole.  Henry said if you drink too many diet sodas, the olestra and the high fructose corn syrup will collect in your lower intestine and outlast your stomach enzymes, and then your stomach enzymes give up on breaking things down, and in turn, break down, and then the shit you eat, the regular shit, it will become impossible to shit.  Henry says dying inside out, rectum sphincter first, is one of the worst ways to die.  Henry also says if you snort Xanax it doesn't last as long as if you just eat the whole bar on an empty stomach, and he's right, but, well, yeah, I digress. 

I come back to give Shaun his diet soda, but he and Henry are talking.

'Who do I need to write it to?' Henry was asking Shaun.

'Just the MVA,' said Shaun.

'What does it need to say?'

'Just that I been good, you know, workin' here the last ten months, been good, no problems with no one, you know.'

'Like how you tried to stab me twice?' Henry said with seriousness in his levity.

'Yeah, that, you can put that on the second page, man' he said and put his ear phones back on.

Shaun is ten months fresh off of an inpatient stint at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital, where he received treatment for bipolarity after being picked up off the side of the road in Daytona Beach selling an assortment of things ranging from coat hangers to crack.  He told me they used to call him the chef, he could cook it so good.

He did some time at the Westminster incarceration center and after was put on parole.  He was living with his mother up until his birthday, when he went to a restaurant and racked up a huge bill, gorging on food and alcohol.  Nobody in his family came to visit him, so he left without paying and began walking down Route 32.  The police picked him up about ten minutes afterwards.

He told me the monsters sent him that way.

If you ask him a question the wrong way, he will think you are interrogating him.  I asked him where he lives one day and he took off his ear phones and stared at me dead into my eyeballs, all the way to the back of my skull.

'Where do YOU live?' he asked me.  I told him Woodbine, but he backed up and walked over to Henry, never taking his eyes off of me.  Henry laughed and kept cooking.

Another time Shaun told me he killed three hundred alligators in Louisiana.

'That's ten alligators a day,' he said.  'Shoot 'em right in the top of the head.'

'What were you doing in Louisiana for a month?' I asked him.

'Killin' all them gators.'

'What would you do with them after you killed them?'

'Killed what?'

'The three hundred alligators,' I said.

'I don't know,' he said, and put his ear phones back on.  'They're all monsters.'

A different time I told him that he looked like Macho Man Randy Savage.  He told me that's bullshit, and that he's the Undertaker.  

I now call him the Shaundertaker.

Crackhead Mark and Me

 (As morning sniffles and coughs out day, the May flowers tremble through the comforter of earth.  Weeds sway like feathers on a hawk, weighed down by glassy beads of water. 

The heavy, grey yawn of dawn smells a little lonely.  I feel like it is something easy to overlook in the grass-spit, fog and dog shit.  This morning looms but doesn't linger.  A sleepy greeting to everyone and for no one, a glowy stasis between yesterday and afterward, undisturbed peace without resolve because there is not yet a wrong to make right.)  

The engine in my muted silver two-door Hyundai Accent grumbles moodily (in actual hue, I prefer the more suitable moniker of gunmetal) .  I am waiting in a quaint driveway, squeezing out the last staticky bit of All Things Considered before Mark lugs himself into the passenger seat and starts talking about enough or not enough coffee, advil and sleep.  In front of me is the covered frame of an old pickup truck with a blue tarp tied by bungee cords to its top.  The end of a ladder pokes out from its rear through a tear in the plastic. It doesn't take long for Mark to exit the rancher home of his mother.  The screen door whishes and slaps shut.

Grey shirt tucked in, gut tucked out, Mark follows his belly to my car with a proud hobble.  In his younger days, his dirt-bike-on-main-highway days, he found himself being tailed by a state trooper who wanted him to pull over.  He made his great getaway by turning off I-70 and into the woods, just out of the stretched fingers of the law.  He dashed between poplar trees and oaks, over logs and through the tributaries of the Patapsco, until the blue and red lights were a distant hue of the interstate.  He did his hip in good that day, he told me, he did his hip in real good.  

What happened was this: In a determined attempt to make it to a local bar, his bout with reason came to a ceasefire when he agreed that he was far too buzzed to drive his old truck anywhere, so he took his dirt bike instead.  Fortunately for him, he could also take his dirt bike into the woods.  His escape from the cops that day was what saved him from a DUI, an obvious thorn in the side (not necessarily the hip) of anyone's driving situation, but unfortunately for him it cost him the loose movement of his right midsection.  He hit a log and slapped his body against a tree, giving him the lifetime fluidity of a broken popsicle stick.  What was hurting his driving situation these days, the reason for why he had not owned a legal driver's license since 1989, the reason for why I was waiting in his driveway so he could make it to work, were those seven other DUIs on his record.

Anyway, that's why his hip is bad.

He opens my door and hands me two orange Powerades from across the seat, and then helps himself into my little vehicle.

"I couldn't 'member if you like blue or red juice, so I brought you the orange," he says after breathlessly strapping his seatbelt.  "Fiffy nine cents apiece for them little guys at the Shoppers market there.  I went and got me myself fifteen of them bastards."

I thank him and switch to the classic rock station, turning Ted Nugent down a tad.  

"S´pose to rain today," he says rolling my window down and making his elbow comfortable.  "My ma says the news says at four o'clock.  S'pose to be a big ol' thunderstorm they say."

*****

I wiggle and weave throughout the inertia of 695, fulfilling the daily routine of an asshole calling everyone else an asshole:  'This jerk behind me is tailgating me like a jackass.  Do you hear him revving his engine?  Yeah, there he goes, right there, let him pass in that shiney, Whinnie-the-Pooh yellow.  Ugh, I just realized that I hate yellow now.  And look--fancy spoiler he's got on that, what is that, a Cobalt?  Ha, I bet he spells 'wheels' with a 'z'.'  

Mark always agrees, nodding his head and looking at his hands.  His hands look stoney and mangled, years of missing the head of the nail on rooftops, or victims to heavy-placing porcelain toilets.  They look like they would jam a sawzall.

My hands are still babylike, fresh and fleshy. 

Mark, a weathered Elmer Fudd and a raspier Foghorn Leghorn, talks with one eye.  His head never faces the listener, only that bulbous old-blue eyeball, his periscope, his ambassador for conversation, as if to move past the surface of his skull, one must first dance with his dominant eye to rightfully see his face.   Above his eyeline is the horizon of forehead that stretches far back to the center-top of his head, where a few sparse curlies tuft out like a sea anemone.  It is safe to say that had he his whole set of bottom teeth, he would have a distinct underbite, but instead his mouth slightly jowls downward like an old hound.

He precedes each sentence with an 'I tay-yah what,' and then he tells you what.  This time he tells me that he only had two beers last night, the first and the last--'the other eighteen in between don't count none.'    

*****

Traffic doesn't lighten as we approach the Francis Scott Key Bridge.  This is the city's tribute to a major figure in our history, an anthem to his Anthem--a toll bridge. It reminds me of a large, sleeping stegosaurus, resting heavily across the black Chesapeake.  Factories sprawl across the short horizon ahead, their smokestack towers blasting cumulus nimbus factory clouds like cartoon church organ pipes.  The cargo ships float inanimately, docked beneath blue brontosaurus cranes.  Abandoned warehouses and jejune jetties, old and forgotten remnants of piers, perches for black crows, are all part of the entrance of watery South Baltimore.  It's pretty in a can't-turn-back-because-this-is-what-we-are-now kind of way.  Gone are the days of golden eagles and birch canoes and happy crabs and clean marshes. This is the rustic side of Baltimore now, the industrial side.  Even Bethlehem Steele has called it quits, shutting down and bleeding into the river until lawyers come and clean it up.

Dundalk approaches and the smell of Baltimore's sewage surrounds us.  It is not malodorous, but dank and almost sweet like burning potpouri.  We pass the two sewage towers, the giant golden eggs of Dundalk, for what it's known for: the giant poop eggs.

I continue driving towards the propane yard.  The traffic is still stifled.  Mark says, 'Guy in fronta us is drivin' almost as bad as this jackass to the side of us, huh, like what, one horse power?' Bumpers push onward, starting and stopping abruptly, like two south poles too shy to ever kiss

*****

At the propane yard, our job is simple: don't inhale and don't blow up.  The radio plays until the batteries run out.  If we were to split the cost of more batteries, it would mean we should probably skip lunch.  If we don't buy batteries and don't skip lunch, it means we could probably leave a half hour earlier.  That's if it doesn't 'thunnersterm' at four.

The job is actually not simple.  It takes lots of manual labor to unscrew the brass nozzle from a steel, semi-empty propane tank.  It takes a seven foot steel pole and the force of two mens' arms to pull the nozzle off.  When the nozzle is separated, the propane comes shooting out.  It is your choice as to whether or not you inhale it, and even if you choose not to, you will still inhale it.

To pass the time, I listen to Mark's treasurable honesty.  He talks about the time he smoked a bunch of queludes before a Led Zeppelin concert.  He talked about the time a guy was bragging about having six hundred dollars and how he hit him over the head with a rock after they both left the bar, and how he went and bought himself a "big ol' blast."  He talked about hitting the tree on his dirt bike, and the time he lost eighty pounds smoking crack in Denver when he was on the run.  Or it was meth.  No it was both.  And he talked about the Marriotsville reservoir where he'd go take big ol' blasts with whichever girl he or Kenny brought.  I asked him "A big ol' blast of weed, or of crack?"

"Weed," he said.  We kept working.  "And crack."

Clown

Clown

My stupid red nose:

That bright cherry red foam

atop the exploding strawberry that breathes beneath

porous and spongy

and hidden

above my permanent frown.

And I did not choose to be the sad one

-- they needed me to be sad:

‘Cheerless Charlie lost his fingers,’ they said

‘Juggling fire

and so he drowned in the dunk tank.’

And so my friends are seals and zebras

And whips and little people

who dream of being shorter.

And I dream of hair

in the middle of my scalp

not so red.

I dream of feet that walk in straight lines

and make no sounds

to the applause of my defeat

Four Scenes on Addiction

Cue Scene 1: "Recovered" friend of roommate enters home at full volume, sweating profusely and talking about being a DJ. Takes puff of vape pen and slugs energy drink. Claims he can fix missing sound on record player. Overly trusting friend (OTF)/roommate gives go ahead, so N.A.-Hero (NAH) simply cuts out equalizer and hooks phono straight to receiver. Works briefly. Beirut is playing, NAH starts scratching vinyl to prove DJ integrity.

Bite tongue, leave to get lunch with tsunami of a cringe.

Scene 2: return to find sound from record player completely unresponsive, even though everything is aligned. NAH nods in and out from couch, does not hear about newfound bent needle. Rework system with new turntable and NAH asks "What's up with this African record?" (Graceland-Paul Simon). Stands up and knocks over glass in process. Breaks said glass, subsequently makes four jokes about it being OTF's fault. NAH says he's been sober for ninety days. Takes a sip of whiskey and passes back out.

Scene 3: NAH asks for water. Asks where the ice is. When told "In the freezer," he asks "Is the bottom one the freezer?" Leaves freezer ajar.  Walks back to couch, claims to be bored with the football game on TV, changes channel to X-Games.  Says, "I want to write a book.  Me and [OTF] are gonna make a movie one day."  Looks at OTF, says, "Get some pictures of me in my WuTang jacket."

Scene 4: NAH accuses everyone of letting him fall asleep again for "not paying attention" to him. Immediately asks for everyone's Facebook names. Immediately asks everyone to accept requests. Immediately tags everyone on FB with post about his shoes. Falls back asleep.

A few thoughts about Putin's calendar

From Sarah Jayne's Facebook post about Putin Calendar 

http://distractify.com/news/2016/01/03/mark-putin-shirtless-2016-calendar

A few unsolicited thoughts:

• I love the average quality of film in the photographs, as if to say “It is not wont of a keen eye which radiates my mystique with such low definition and awkward placement, but the reality that I am impossible to capture outside of my everyday, glorious candor. This is just me, a simple man--now watch me fish with moobs aplenty.” 

• I love that Putin is a dog-lover, dedicating a whole month to dogs. I love the terseness of his joy for such creatures, and the symbiotic role they play in each other’s lives: “Dogs and I have very warm feelings for one another.” Pure affection, thirty days of pure affection summed up in just ten words; no more, no less. Not a prime number, but definitely a prime leader.

• I love that fishing takes up the majority of the hottest summer months. It’s like he’s saying, “When the heat hits the hardest, fight a river.”

• June is great because he is surrounded by kids whom are almost as tall as he is.

• March is great because Putin is smelling a weed. Holding this weed, looking off towards the swelling, imminent spring sky, he says he loves Russian women, calling them talented and beautiful. Who wouldn’t be left stricken with tumescence?

Carl Blasé

Carl was a normal guy with six legs.  He had a home, he had a college degree and he had a enough money to buy coffee every morning.  Even though he felt like he was always catching up with the rest of the world, he felt like his head was usually above the water.  He quit smoking and eventually started watching his weight.   He finally gave in to his mother and went to see an eye doctor--the doctor said he could use some glasses, so Carl now uses glasses.  He owed a lot of money to the government for his education, paying on time when he could and not on time what he couldn't.  He rented his home in the city and not much arose to make him question the price or location.  The water in Carl's life was very undisturbed.

Carl walked into the Office of Preparedness and Response.  The walls of cubicles weaved inward into the large office, creating a maze of wall hallways.  Carl didn't think that he was like a mouse in a maze because he didn't think that way.  He walked up to the secretary at the front desk.  She vomited into a trashcan and wiped her mouth.

"Can I help you?" she asked politely.  She looked pretty and bored. 

"Yes, hi, I am Carl.  I'm here for the interview with Mary."

"Sign here," she said, pushing forward a visitor sign-in sheet.  "She will be with you in a minute."

Carl felt nervous.  The aggressive halogens above his head made him want to chew his arm, but he didn't.  It's just the way he thinks.

Mary walked around the corner and asked Carl if he was Carl.  They exchanged names and followed her through more hallways into a little office.

"So why do you want to work for the OPR?" she asked.  "Your resume indicates that public health and policy is not your field of expertise."

"Well," said Carl, "If it truly opens me up to a more fertile career, then maybe it is better than teaching history."

"What do you find wrong with teaching?" she asked.

"Well," said Carl, "I guess it depends on what kind of teaching you want me to talk about.  Teaching youth is not something I want to do, and the collegiate environment that higher education provides makes it a bit difficult to live, well, comfortably."

What Carl said was true--this was his fifth year of teaching at the university level and so far all he could muster was a sub-poverty salary and a sinking feeling that he would be hired and let go three times a year, as long as spring, summer and fall will always be in session.  He felt unappreciated, and he guessed that so did 73 percent of the rest of the nation teaching in higher education when he found out that number.  Everyone told him what a solid gig he must have landed teaching at a university, or at least that doors should open for him left and right.  That was not the case, alas, for he had to continue climbing the ladder to become even a consideration for something full-time.  His long-time dream of becoming a professor had slowly turned into a very lucid delusion.  

"How does working for emergency and response mean that you could live comfortably?"

"I'm not really sure.  Maybe out of default."

"Teaching is that bad?"

Carl struggled with this.  He couldn't make up his mind as to whether teaching was bad or if he allowed it to be bad.  Was it more than he anticipated, and if so what?  Students don't need discipline and don't fail much at the college level, and adult conversation is what really stimulated Carl's mind.  Was teaching really just teaching, or is it more than that?

"I think it's just administration that I have problems with.  Or maybe it's HR and payroll.  I don't really know."

He sat there in silence for a minute while she took notes.

"I guess I want something I can believe in."

This story will continue, one day, but for now it is just a riddle...  The moral is:

History repeats itself even when it's wiped out.

Question: Who, or what, is Carl?

Dead Larry

11/4/15

Norman rustled his mustache.  It smelled like coffee, and begrudgingly, his upper lip.  It smelled like coffee and his upper lip, which worried him.  Did his upper lip smell bad from coffee, or did he have a smelly upper lip?  

The body lay in the swampy grass, about fifty yards from the patrol car.  The door was still open and the radio could be heard bumbling muffedly.  This is not how Norman wanted to spend his final days before retirement.  He leaned in close and could see blood was still coming out of Larry's mouth.  Dead faces looked more peaceful than Larry's, even murdered faces.  

He hoisted himself back up and examined Larry's full body.  

Could be the bullet lodged behind his ear.  Could have surprised him.  Could be the exit wound in his armpit.  Suppose they got him twice. Terrible time to retire with Larry like this.

Norman rustled his mustache.  He traced his way back to the patrol car.  Larry's nightstick was on the ground, as were his glasses and a pack of cigarettes.  Larry didn't smoke, so the cigarettes must have belonged to the killer, or the killers, but the glasses, those were Larry's for sure.

My Old Landlady

This may be too personal, but I just found myself locked out of the apartment wearing gym shorts.  The cold is extremely bitter tonight, so drastic measure lead me to calling my 82-year-old landlady.  She is a sweet old lady, but lonely and sometimes the effects show in the way she talks--she doesn't have much a grasp on time, she asks me the same questions often. That said, she is still very sharp, even without all of her wit.  

She has been in the same apartment for fifty-something years. 

She answered the phone and asked me around to the back of the apartment building.  The backdoor lead to her living room, beautiful, high cardinal walls covered in art, a black, marble fireplace, and a hue of dust on all the pillows..  Her yorkie was yapping.

She said her day was weary.  

This is not my first episode with her, nor Erik or Matt.  Two weeks ago she asked me to come down to her apartment because there was a discrepancy with the rent (there wasn't).  Though it was a brief debacle, it required the consolation of also Matt and Erik.   Later the three of us were asked to carry a 300-lb cast iron "couch" from her basement to the hallway, where now it just sits, waiting for any passing leg to clip.  But after that, we talked to her for over an hour.  We talked about the history of the house, the history of Mt. Vernon (the hysterical district), and about her, a bohemian model once-married to a successful entrepreneurial beautician.  After he died, she started adopting children, and eventually stopped fixing the apartment building.  It is not in disarray, but it's slight upkeep is one of the reasons our toilet recently toppled over and flooded her closet below.  It was four in the morning when that happened, and Erik had to clean her silk robes from China.  He stayed there until the sun came up.  One time, Matt went down there after she called because she wanted to show him pictures.  We guilt-tripped him into doing it, but he came back with some bemusing stories.  The other night, she asked Erik to take her yorkie out.  The three of us went down to her apartment to say hello.  We walked in and she wasn't wearing her pajama bottoms.  We took Sunny outside and he consequently attacked a great dane.  When we walked back to her apartment, Matt reminded her about all of the pictures she had shown him, so it became Erik's and my turn to see them.  It was true, she really was pretty.

As I write this, it doesn't seem as awkward now as it did an hour ago.  

She said her day was weary.  Though I felt sad for her, I didn't want to enter the rabbit hole of sad conversation.  She rightfully feels sorry for herself, and she can rightfully let go of the notion that life can be good again.  She lived in the zenith of Baltimore's greatest time period ever, the '50's, and travelled all over the world collecting art and antiques and unimaginable things you only see in museums and Disney films.  And, she has also seen the city decay.  She stopped looking out her window in the last couple of years.  She cannot see the wonderful things that are starting to happen now.  And she rightfully doesn't have to, because they already 'started to happen' and have already ended, and I wonder if the art and the 'scene' that I know could ever be as meaningful as what she has experienced.  But I do know that she can understand why we see what we see in everything we make in this part of the city, if she were to just see it all.  

She calls us her boys, and I guess we are.  It makes me think--Where are all of the kids she raised?  Where are the daughters in the pictures that she showed Matt?  What happens to the apartment building after the big inevitable happens?  She once told us, "I'm 82 and I'm a realist."  That's why we moved the couch.  She wants to sell it.

I complimented her beautiful living room.  Sunny was barking and she talked like a baby to him, not moving from the back door.  I got the sense that I couldn't just "keep walking" directly out of her apartment, so I stood there and started blabbering nervously; it's just what I do.  I talked about work and the gym and something else that I don't remember because she nodded and cut me off.

"Yes, that is wonderful, dear," she said walking towards me.  I don't think she remembers my name.  She was wincing a little and rolling her right shoulder.  "Keep talking, I'm listening.  Just get these knots out of my back."

I think I blinked a couple times.  Sunny was still yapping.  She turned her back to me.   She coughed into her hand a couple times, stood straight as bent 'i', and waited.  I don't know if it was shock or disbelief, but that is when I started massaging my landlady's back.

I put my hands on her shoulders and started crab crawling away.  I forgot what I was talking about so I started talking about whatever was in front of me.  "That pillow on your couch is cool."  "I like your walls."  I even started talking to Sunny.

"Don't be so gentle!  You're not gonna hurt me," she said.  "Dig in there."  

I could feel her scapulas.  They felt like uneven go-kart hupcaps.  Her back felt like a sun-warped coffee table.  I dug in.  She started moaning.

"Harder," she actually said.

I started doing things like poking her shoulders with my fingers, and rolling my wrists around like a horse would knead dough. She started moaning louder, but I just kept doing whatever it was I was doing.  She moaned louder until finally she almost yelled.  She stood there for a moment, and released herself.

"Thank you so much," she said.  "I feel much better now."  She walked over to Sunny and picked him up.  "My daughter usually does that for me, but--" she stopped.  

I raised my eyebrows and stood on my toes.  I did a "well, look at the time" kind of thing and gave her an awkward hug.  We were in the kitchen now and I could see all of the wine bottles in the sink.  She hugged me a little longer and let go when I thanked her for letting me back into the building.  She said goodbye and I walked up to my room, grabbed my car keys and sat on my couch.  I thought about her daughter; I'm scared to ask what her name is.

I don't think this is the end.

Idea on how to live forever

A man has the opportunity to know his death or not, but if he learns the date of his death, he can possibly live forever, only under the conditions that he can live a "full" life, whatever that means.  He gets a good deal of 88 remaining years.  He will live to be a 115 years old.  He thinks that is a good deal, and a life worth living, especially without the risk of death at any moment.

He accepts, attempts to live a "full" life, and spends the next ten years traveling the world and giving money and fully living out his life, seeing many things and living impossibly well.  Then one day he becomes paralyzed and must live the rest of his 78 years as a paraplegic.

After much sorrow and reminiscing and guilt and regret on many levels, he eventually learns to accept his conditions, living a life full of positivity, albeit incapacitated.  This unlocks his 115 year death mark, which will allow him to live forever, in the "fulfilled/full-life" harmony, but accepts death as a form of completion, the last part of perfection, the last part of being "full."

hammerhead sharks and pineapples

November 14, 2014

when i was little, i saw a hammerhead shark for the first time and said 'wow, that’s a cool shark--not my favorite shark, but a cool shark.'  i accepted that the weird-looking shark with the T-shaped-face like no other creature on earth was the hammerhead shark. from that point on, it never wowed me. until just now, while sitting here thinking about them, what in the heck ever caused a hammerhead shark’s face to develop into that shape. the mouth isn’t incredibly accessible to the meat of its prey, and it’s t-shape certainly isn’t hydro/aerodynamic. it’s strange to think about.

My thoughts later-- 01/04/16:

The same can be said for pineapples.  A pineapple is such a beautiful freak.  It is ugly and coarse on the outside, and even in all its delectable flavor, when opened and chewed the fibers cling to each other, making you work through the toughness to truly wring out all the sweetness onto your tongue.   And one day, you are told that this weird looking flavor bomb is a pineapple, and a pineapple is a fruit.

You learn what a fruit is at a young age, that there is a family of fruits, and then you learn about all of the fruits--maybe not in that order, but I bet.  As you grow older, you learn to associate certain fruits to their sweetness and their color.  You learn that they are sugary, even healthy.  Maybe you see more exotic fruits as you grow older, but they are immediately put into your fruit compartment of your mind and eventually you desensitize yourself to the idea of fruits.  

How did we ever let go of the magnificence of a fruit?  They are sugary ovaries.  They are varied in multitudes of texture, skins, indigenous locations, flavors, colors, flesh, etc.  They can be very different from each other (eg- a kiwi from an apple), yet we always lump them together.  This is where the point I am making about pineapples comes in.

What the hell is a pineapple?  Who was the first to try one?  Was it perfect when he or she tried it?  A pineapple's integrity is held by the perfect conditions of ripeness, or otherwise it is tart and chewy.  Also, it is ugly--if I were walking past one, I would keep walking.  It's like a mini-tree aggressively poking out of the ground, daring any soft hands to touch it, to remove it from its place and explore the depths beneath its spiny skin.  

I used to hate pineapples.  I thought they looked alien when I was younger, and when my grandmother would serve me canned slices, I always found them unsavory.  As a picky eater, if I didn't like something immediately, I would go years without trying it again.  I just did as others do with pineapples, lump them as a fruit, but for my own personal preference, put them at the bottom of my list for likable fruits.  

I don't remember when or where it was that I had my first taste of a pineapple and changed my mind, but it was Xmas Eve when I really started to examine one sitting on my step mother's kitchen island.  I determined that I had come a long way with pineapples, as they've now reached my echelon of favorite fruits, but not just because of their flavors, since I am still new to knowing when one is ready to be eaten.  However, just staring at this fruit mesmerized me.  It is unlike any other fruit which I can picture--its tree-like nature, its precarious conditions for flavor and texture, the fact that it is one big ovary shrouded in alligator skin, its 90's cartoon hairstyle.  The pineapple is truly one of a kind, unlike its other fruit counterparts which hang aplenty.  The pineapple is truly a beautiful freak. 

fireworks in lowercase

july 4 2014

the fireworks are out there somewhere, and so am i, i suppose.  i can't open this overpriced bottle of beer--it has a cork in it.   do i need an actual bottle opener?  do i even need a beer?

it's getting darker, but it's not dark yet.  the fireworks continue to make the sky pop with colors, as they usually do.  all the people watch, but i'm not even looking out my window.  i've seen it all before, the colors and the big kerouac sky spiders. pink and blue phosphenes, little vision birthmarks you can only get from the sky when you close your eyelids.  i'm still trying to get this bottle opened.

an hour ago i walked to my car off monument st.  i had left my pot in the trunk, so i walked out there.  it was a block from a free concert, too, and I met up with billy who was there.  i don't know him well, but he was still the same nasally, dry billy i'd known before, but just drunker and dryer.  we have work together tomorrow, but he is drinking and now so do i.  when i asked him for a beer from his backpack, he offered me the one he was drinking.  

the band played and i didn't listen to them.  i spent my time sitting in the grass and looking at what surrounds me, at all the kinda-sad buildings and the not-so-happy people that comprise the tableau of my neighborhood.  the ground and the monuments and the sky and the foreign feeling of belonging somewhere all fit together clumsily.  sean talked to his friends about dancing and riding his bike to vegan cafes.

the definition for seasonal depression implies that a case of depression is onset by any given season, not just winter--but who ever blames their depression on summertime?  no one ever says 'i am stricken--there is just too much daytime and warmth.'  it's just a thought.  

i am not depressed, but it is easy to say that something is usually always wrong.  right now i am just accepting that things are that way.  things are always wrong.  it's liberating, like beer.

i am not watching the fireworks.  there is nothing wrong with that.

i got the bottle opened.  i know it cost too much money, but so do fireworks.  i liked the name of the bottle--ephémeré, with two accents.  i still don't know how to pronounce it, but maybe i will want to name my daughter one day.

some people just need to feel like this, others choose to.  i'd say most are unprofoundly in the middle.

An Achronological Diary: Fake Graduating/South America/ Baldwins

It was a dark feeling that morning, waking up knowing I was the only liar I would see that entire day.  There would be thousands of them, the non-liars, all hugging each other, thousands of smiles set on 24-hour lock--set to kill, set to congratulate--and then there was me, the only one with the truth.

These fucking happy people.  They were so happy.

I was alone in a line of 2400 other college kids, with my stupid green name card in one hand, a clenched fist in the other.  I hoped that my name had been spelled wrong, or that it was illegible or something unpronouncable.  Alexander L23chfyey.  Yes, would a Mr. L23chfyey please come and take his diploma. 

I pondered how things had come to this point, this far, like all the way to here, in this auditorium.  How far can a lie actually go?  It was bad enough accepting money from my grandmother this morning at the party they threw.  I guess I would just be saving it for South America.

I couldn't believe how fast they were calling names, that we were already to the L's.   What if they didn't call my name?  

Well, I thought, I guess they shouldn't.

Each following second felt like oversized sand grains squeezing through the hourglass.

My name was called in slow motion, or underwater, or over a faulty loudspeaker in a nuclear test site.  Or something like that.  

I walked onto the stage, grabbed the rolled-up, fancy piece of paper I was cordially handed and shook hands with all the people bearing names I had never heard of, and walked quickly off the stage.  I did it.  I was a college graduate.   And I did it without even graduating.

**********

Yellow, it's the color of joy and insanity.  Look it up.  

It's all that's around me, a thousand yellows, right here between the mountains and the ocean and the cities and the highways--tall, illuminated shadows and cobwebbed sunlight trickling between the trees, the yellow canopies of autumn, fields ripe with one last breath, the soft smell of earth shedding its skin in pretty decay.   

And I'm beneath it all, this joy and insanity, ephemeral like a candle at the end of its whick, a dalliant flash and then a whisk of ribbony smoke and darkness.  Tired mornings and shortened afternoons, grey, wintery nights with no stars.  It makes me insane.

I have to enjoy the end of this Octobor, Maryland's, where I cannot leave for at least two years.  It makes me insane.  I have to enjoy each day as a day in autumn, the yellow before the grey, the fire before the smoke.

***********

I scanned the 'Dear Graduate' letter and sent it to the South American program I was trying to get into.  The only thing that kept me qualified from being able to join was a college degree.  

Well, I didn't have one, I told them, not yet at least, like not physically in my hands, because my final semester just ended.  It was in the mail, I said, but this is a Letter that my university had given me at the graduation, it's all I have for now.  The flight was about to leave in three weeks, way more time than it would take to get a diploma in the mail.   They relented, for some reason.

Three weeks is also enough time for the spring semester's grades to finally go through the system, since graduation was three days after the last final exam.  

It's also enough time  for a letter to arrive saying that you aren't getting a diploma because you did not meet the final requirements of an English Bachelor Degree of the Arts with a minor in Creative Writing because you did not pass one last class.

When that letter arrived, I put it in my backpack and zipped it up.  I threw my backpack on the other two suitcases I had prepared for Chile.  I rolled another joint just to calm myself down and freaked myself the fuck out.

I had anxiety that could make Flipper fly.

***********

Everyone has problems, it's just a matter of how you hide them.  I told myself that.  Well, technically I told it to the lady that had just left the bar, remarking that I had problems, but I didn't think of that until after she was already gone--my comeback was on a three-minute delay.  So basically I just told myself that, behind the bar cleaning the syrupy dust off of the purple and green and red bottles of house liqueurs.  Everyone has problems, man.  

She was on the cover of our wedding brochure; my manager recognized her while the lady was waiting by herself at the bar.  She had been married in our restaurant eight years prior, she said, but she had no idea she was the literal posterchild of Baldwin's wedding advertising.  Now she was sitting on the deck drinking wine with the man she had been awaiting.  She told me he was 'quite funny' before he got there.  They were now chatting at a cocktail table, and I could see her naked left hand playing with the stem of her wine glass from where I stood.  In bartender mythology, it dictates that things like peeling beer labels and basically any other overhandling of a drink is a sign of frustration, typically sexual frustration. 

Before he arrived I told her jokingly that I was funny, and she laughed, and then looked at her watch.  'Yeah, you are funny, but you have problems,' she said.  

That sat with me a little longer than it should have.  She didn't know me, and in fact, nobody that comes into Baldwin's Station really knows me.  I'm just a bartender, a waiter, living every day day-to-day.  And that's all I am supposed to be, the line between Point A (the customer) and Point B (the customer's stomach/liver), but with this lady, for some reason, this lady, I wanted her to know me as more than that.

I was taken aback by how very pretty she was when she walked in, and yes, she did look eight years older than the brochure appeared, but not eight years older than me, if that even matters.  I was looking at it now, the brochure, after I had ran upstairs and searched old boxes in the owner's office for the wedding brochures.  She was very pretty, wholesome looking with chin-length auburn hair and a round, smiley face.  She looked very happy in the photo, at least happy enough.   

I recognized the backdrop of the photo, too, with the Potomac tableau of old train tracks and pretty oaks and birches.  The only thing I didn't recognize in the photo was the man behind her, the groom, his arms around her.  His spiked hair reminded me of Freddie Prinze, Jr. and his chinstrap goatee reminded me of Vanilla Ice.  Where was he now?

I looked back at the cocktail table where they sat.  No Freddie J or Vanilla Ice in sight.  Just a man that looked as 'quite funny' as his muscle shirt, which I understand is a biased thing to say, but I just said it.  His muscles looked younger than his face, and his outfit looked younger than his muscles.  She was laughing.  

Why did I want to prove to her so badly that I am deeper than just a guy that handed her a glass of wine?

The reason she said I had problems was because she overheard me speaking when I told my manager I couldn't attend a party the following night because of 'recreational obligations,' and she butted in that it sounds like I'm going to AA.  Her smile was genuine and cute, but didn't match the couth in which she carried herself.  Was it because her appearance seemed different than who she actually was, is that why I wanted to prove to her that I was different than an alcoholic bartender?  Or was even something deeper inside of me, that I am different than that.

***********

A real panic attack is when you lose yourself.  Whatever cerebral top-dog you got piloting your mental and pysical balance up there in your cranium--your breathing patterns, your vision, your fingertips, your serenity--s/he/it takes a stage dive and misses even the floor.  It's a free fall from/of reality.

My first panic attack happened about two months earlier.  I hadn't gone to class for about four weeks because I was

ASK FOR REST OF THIS PART

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I walked through the door flaps and entered the kitchen.  Shaun was standing at the dish sink, washing out the soup containers.  He had his portable head phones on.

'What's up, Supaman,' I asked him, rolling the black sleeves of my work shirt up to my elbows.  I was looking around the kitchen line to find evidence of today's potential specials.  Nothing in sight.  Shaun continued washing the soup containers.

I turned around and ask Shaun again, a little louder.  'What's the motherfuckin' word, Supaman?'

He turns around and removes an ear phone.  'What's up, Captain motherfuckin' Crunch?'  He says it enthusiastically and claps my one hand and half-hugs me. Just for the sake of brevity, picture Macho Man Randy Savage in camo shorts, sporting a thick goatee and oversized thirty dollar ear phones.  He's our daytime dishwasher.

'I need you to get me a diet soda,' he says, handing me his own personal 32-oz. plastic yellow cup.  He is always drinking diet soda, and he is always asking me to fill it for him from the bar.  He's afraid of our owner.  'I hope I don't die from this next one, huh.'  He laughs.

Henry told him that diet sodas will clog his colon and kill him through a long, constipated  cancerous rotting of the asshole.  Henry said if you drink too many diet sodas, the olestra and the high fructose corn syrup will collect in your lower intestine and outlast your stomach enzymes, and then your stomach enzymes give up on breaking things down, and in turn, break down, and then the shit you eat, the regular shit, it will become impossible to shit.  Henry says dying inside out, rectum sphincter first, is one of the worst ways to die.  Henry also says if you snort Xanax it doesn't last as long as if you just eat the whole bar on an empty stomach, and he's right, but, well, yeah, I digress. 

I come back to give Shaun his diet soda, but he and Henry are talking.

'Who do I need to write it to?' Henry was asking Shaun.

'Just the MVA,' said Shaun.

'What does it need to say?'

'Just that I been good, you know, workin' here the last ten months, been good, no problems with no one, you know.'

'Like how you tried to stab me twice?'

'Yeah, that, you can put that on the second page, man' he said and put his ear phones back on.

Shaun is ten months fresh off of an inpatient stint at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital, where he received treatment for bipolarity after being picked up off the side of the road in Daytona Beach selling an assortment of things ranging from coat hangers to crack.  He told me they used to call him the chef, he could cook it so good.

He did some time at the Westminster incarceration center and after was put on parole.  He was living with his mother up until his birthday, when he went to a restaurant and racked up a huge bill, gorging on food and alcohol.  Nobody in his family came to visit him, so he left without paying and began walking down Rout 32.  The police picked him up about ten minutes afterwards.

He told me the monsters sent him that way.

If you ask him a question the wrong way, he will think you are interagating him.  I asked him where he lives one day and he took off his ear phones and stared at me dead into my eyeballs, all the way to the back of my skull.

'Where do YOU live?' he asked me.  I told him Woodbine, but he backed up and walked over to Henry, never taking his eyes off of me.  Henry laughed and kept cooking.

Another time Shaun told me he killed three hundred alligators in Louisiana.

'That's ten alligators a day,' he said.  'Shoot 'em right in the top of the head.'

'What were you doing in Louisiana for a month?' I asked him.

'Killin' all them gators.'

'What would you do with them after you killed them?'

'Killed what?'

'The three hundred alligators,' I said.

'I don't know,' he said, and put his ear phones back on.  'They're all monsters.'

A different time I told him that he looked like Macho Man Randy Savage.  He told me that's bullshit, and that he's the Undertaker.  

I now call him the Shaundertaker.

****************

I was looking at Jeremy's photos.  All of them looked adventurous.  His facebook location said Quillota, Chile.  I hadn't heard from him in nearly six years.

I asked him what he was doing there and he sent me back some necessary information for me to make my escape from everything here.  Just leave the country with a purpose.  My purpose was to get away.  So I applied for what I needed to and waited. 

I met Jeremy on the front steps of our dormitory.  He had to flee to St. Louis during Hurricane Katrina.  He had been sticking around New Orleans to see what it was all about.  He and the one friend he made at Loyola, NO, had to hop in a pickup truck after the evacuation and make their way to Missouri.  He left all of his things behind, including his wallet, cell phone, his laptop and two sheets of LSD.  His parents had no idea where he was.

Now I was smoking a cigarette with him listening to his story.  He had dreadlocks and a nasaly voice that enlongated in inflection when he used the word 'man':  

'My mom was so pissed, maan,' he told me.  'She thought I drowned or got caught up in the riots.  It was crazy, maan.'

He was tired, having not really slept from two weeks of house hopping and couch surfing across the midwest, back to Salisbury, Maryland's eastern shore.  

I admired his adventurism.

We both got kicked out of school.

*********************

I was working a folk concert tonight that was so bad it made me want to shove fecal matter into my ears and jump onto a grenade. The audience is a different fine-dining demographic, much different than your political or corporate type.  We're talking spritely guitars and mandolins covering James Taylor covers of James Taylor covering a once-much better version of 'Leavin' on a Jetplane'.  A baby-boomer sea of Barbara Streisand wannabes singing along, holding hands with Plaid Chad or Cordo-Roy. Combovers and Conquistador beards, elbow cleavage and topaz bracelets for the ladies, unsweetened ice tea's by the hydro bomb. Everybody toe-tappin' absolutely and/or obsoletely, everybody smiling, everyboody thinking 'real' change is still just around the corner. 

Well, it's not--it's the bathroom actually, which is the second thing they all seem to be in search for, a sign possibly more descript than the one that reads 'Restroom' on the first visible door one sees at the entrance of Baldwin's Station.  They block the only server's walkway like a bad artery, dawdling politely towards one end of the restaurant to other, bemused in all their sense of aura, yet urgent enough to express mild alarm by stopping an encumbered server to ask where we keep the restroom hiding.  They can never seem to find it. Just the way, because they get right in it. 

Bad pun.

The settings are always quiet, except for the kitchen, which can be heard explicitly from the adjacent concert room. Actually, anything can be heard from the adjacent concert room, because the building is 150 years old and the concert room was actually a freight room from an old train station. The walls are like paper maiche and mud, not a reasonable concoction for preserving a wholesome coffeehouse setting for joy and unconditional idealism. I can hear bacon sizzle from the freight room, so obviously a few things can be heard from time to time from the outside intimate setting.

Anyone that has worked in a restaurant knows that kitchens, kitchens are fucking vulgar, man--they are vitriolic, venomous, and the epicenter of chaos on a busy night. A quick mentality is required to keep business moving, as is very thick skin. Ungodly things are not just said, but projected with oscar-like animation and usually at the decible level of god. No one ever dwells on what is said because before it can be registered, the next horrible thing is being screamed. There is no time to feel insulted, only to insult, just for the sake of flow. The entire ego of good men are wiped out on a nightly basis just for the sole purpose of that palletable hint of cajun rosemary you sensed in your in your rasperry red wine reduction. That floral caramel design surrounding your white chocolate walnut apple cinnamon cheesecake, a child inside of someone died.

Because of this, on concert nights, there are rules that are set. Like not being able to walk through the room when the musicians are playing. In fact, a server isn't even allowed to leave the doors of the kitchen, and must walk around to the front of the restaurant from the back doors.

There is always a half hour intermission, where we give the audience their deserts.  This guy was giving me crap the entire night.  He looked like Kenny Rogers.

'This ginger ale is funky!  Adam!  Did you hear me?' he said to me, in front of the audience, while I was passing through checking on people.

'Can I get you something else, sir?'

'Well, only if you have lemonade, I guess.'  He was scoffing to the rest of the people at his table.  They looked embarrassed for me.

'We have pink lemonade,' I said with the most synthetic sincerity.

'Give me that, then,' he said.  'Unbelievable.'

I had other people to take care of, with much larger bills than his eleven dollar tab.  But he was a customer so I had to humor him.  I gave him his pink lemonade, and he quickly took an emphatic sip, and spit it back into his cup.

'This lemonade is crap.'  I knew he just wanted me to cater to his self-importance, but something clicked the wrong way in my brain.

'Sir, that's probably because lemons aren't pink.'  Nobody laughed.  Everyone was staring at their plates awkwardly.  Luckily the musicians were starting to walk back onto the stage.  I walked away before I could hear what he said.

That is when I took a huge rip of Collin's pipe and lost my bearings.  My eyes glazed over, I didn't realize that we the table in front of me expected split checks.  One can imagine, that I did not separate the checks correctly, that the ginger ale and the punk lemonade didn't land on the correct check.

This story just gets worse and brings me down to write. 

*************

The riots persisted.  Every Thursday.  The schools were all 'en toma', which essentially means taken.  Kids would enter their schools late at night or early in the morning and take over.  They would grab desks, chairs, chalkboards, anything to block an entrance, and then live inside the school.  Often I would walk by a school in Santiago and a tin cup would lower from a fishing rod.  I would look up and see a few students looking down from the roof.  They needed to buy bread.

[Name] was waiting for me up in Valparaiso, but I was stuck in Santiago during the two-day national service strike.  My host mother told me if I even wanted to make it up to Valpo that week (the week Begoña invited me), I would have to leave on a Tuesday because Miercoles y Jueves would be stopped.  No buses going anywhere.

The riots were for free education, but the service industry protest was because busdrivers were sick of being bullied in the riots (they showed a shot of a man on the news get dragged from his bus and beaten) and the cab drivers were sick of not being able to raise their prices, so hey, why not start a protest a day early?

I left Tuesday night for Heather's.  She was my coordinator in Santiago and told me I could come when I told her my situation.

I waited outside her apartment building, watching two men across the street messing with a drunk man at a bus stop.  It was 05:30 in the morning--I decided to wait a half hour before I bothered Heather.  The two men continued pushing the drunk man around.

05:46 am:  And they were really in his face.  He pushed one and the other man hit him in the face.  He got up and ran down the street, the two other men riding closely.  I watched him back into a doorway a block away.  The two men walked in after him.

05:51 am:  He emerged from the doorway and ran towards me, bloodied.  I stood up from the sidewalk and grabbed my bag.  I threw my clementine on the ground and started walking towards the doorway of the apartment building.  

The other two men had left the building and continued chasing the man, until they saw me.  They slowed their run to a fast walk.  I stepped inside Heather's building.

I didn't know that was only the beginning of what I would see that day.  

******************

to be continued