The Gulf

The clouds are losing, but only for a little while.  They got reinforcements creeping up over the south desert, dragging long trains of rain over the old sea mud of what used to be the Great Cretaceous Seaway.  It’s hard sometimes to think like that.  To think of the differences in sea levels, but also to think of a world where Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, et al. were ever at or below the sea.  It’s hard to think of a Colorado, The West in general, as a  littoral gulf.

There were days when the water looked like mercury.  The stillness of the shallow and warm water had not a single knot of wind blowing over it.  The water settled down into a flat and rippleless silver stretching away into the invisible horizon.  You couldn’t tell the hot silver sky from the cool silver water.  In the dark forest green translucent ripples branching away from the bow, you could see into the ocean.  you could look through the water as it tilted toward you in waves cutting out V’s into the edge of oblivion and see the sea snakes and the jelly fish, all enormous, and every so often a shark prowling.  But where the water was flat, it reflected only the silver sky, all the blue burned out of it.  The wake gave the only indicator of horizon, an unbroken green line terminating somewhere far away and always behind.  

The Persian Gulf is a rift.  The basin is pulling apart and may some day be an ocean in its own right.  Around the corner, past the Straits of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman is cold and deep.  The water is rolling and blue, like the sea should be.  But part of me will always love The Gulf, the name it is known by among those who have had to live it and breathe and go across it trailing silver and green on into the silver oblivion.  

My head is hurting, rifting due to minor tectonic fluctuations among the mostly fixed joints in my skull.  Or from too much good beer.  It is not all the way wrong that good beer leaves you feeling the worst.  I find my Scout, embarassingly abandoned in the middle of the parking lot, a man left behind.  The brewery is emptied out now, only a few cars are in the parking lot, all left standing alone.  There is something viscerally appealing and shameful about seeing a car parked in an otherwise empty lot, obviously put there when it was not the only vehicle in between the cat’s cradle of yellow lines.  

I get in and it fires up, even dead cold, after three cranks from the starter.  As the oil pressure builds, I move my seat back a little to accommodate my somewhat shaky system more comfortably.  Once the pressure hits about 100 PSI, I know the engine’s warm and ready to go.  The old Borg Warner model nine three speed clunks into gear.  The transmission doesn’t know it, but it is short for this world.  When the kit comes in from Kansas, I’m rebuilding a larger and more reliable Chrysler 727 to take its place.  The spell of warming and maybe a little burnt transmission fluid lets me know this is a priority.  While I sit waiting for the nickel steel heart of the scout to pull us out of the lot, I put my hands to my face.  My skin smells like vanilla and IPA and almost exactly perfectly not like my own.  

And I remember the other skin, the skin that smelled like girly soap, good hopped beer, vanilla and a little like me.  And I feel good.  My head hurts and my stomach burns and my body aches.  But I know I have a few bad decisions left in me.  It would seem I am not alone in that.

So

Here’s the plan.

I’m going to be gone pretty much the rest of the year, except maybe for an occasional update.  I’m trying to get that book wrote, but 18 credit hours this semester is kicking my ass.  I have all kinds of family engagements to keep, as well as a smattering of Christmas parties, a few drinking dates, a couple scheduled holiday libations, some related bacchial events, a beer to be consumed here and there, and a book I am actively not currently writing.  

I don’t think anyone else is really active much online the next few months anyway.

Also, me and my brother are making a drinking related backpack trip tomorrow through Dominquez and up onto the Uncompaghre.  

Don’t be concerned.  I do have one post in que that will pop up after Thanksgiving.  Yay.

Hock

One of them has a sweeter, rounder singlecoil pop to it.  Sort of like a sweet table red, or a well defined Riesling.  She gets dirty, but not in the usual sense.  I wouldn’t use her for metal or for the more toneless varities of jazz.  The action’s too high for any sort of fast chromatic finger wiggling.  No, she’s more about emotion.  She’s about frets worn down from hammered and bended and shaken notes.  When the gain gets high and the string harmonized with the alder of her, a thick wall of all day sustain and feedback comes out.  It’s a tone you can feel.  You can feel it in your hands and in your belly, where she sits and growls into your guts.  That is one hell of a guitar. 

There’s another one.  Like a T-bucket ‘rod with a cobrajet.  It isn’t that you can tell it’s fast, you can just tell it’s hiding something.  Jaguar switching (of course a guitar is a feline) opens up some overwound humbuckers into tonal possibilities not many can match.  It isn’t a straight line machine.  It isn’t a circle track racer, either.  It’s ported and polished heads full of possibility and a four on the floor.  It can burn a hole in the road or burn a hole in your ego, one quarter mile at a time, or it can take the De Beque cutoff like it was riding the rails.  The tone is a million things.  Every switch is a new version of angry snap and the tonal response to your fingers give you the bare possibility of clarity and sweetness.  A port, maybe. Or like a shot of bourbon with a little lemon on the rim.  

Another one is nothing but purity.  A spectre in pure smooth white with ringing wood tones that don’t cut into the pristine crystal harmonic symphonic smooth. You don’t play that one.  You approach and beg and plead at the alter of hard wooden vestal femininity for some time.  Nothing but pretty.  Not a scratch on her.  No marks from the pick hitting to heavy into the string when I had something I had to say.  She’s straight.  No fretwork needed and no glistening glaring evidence of cold or neglect.  Nothing but wine coolers for this one.

The glass in my hand full of smoke and love and hate and limestone filtered Kentucky.  It’s a rye with an angry life behind it.  It was borne to the surface of the Earth by the collision of giants.  By the fracture and orogenous behavior of that Iberian bitch, Caledonia.  Rye is meant to be strong, but when it’s mashed and distilled it turns to sugar and nothing but smooth.  Then the charcoal.  

Buddy Guy said once, “If it ain’t been in a pawnshop, it can’t play the blues.”

Casey said once, “If the rock ain’t got a history, I won’t drill that core.”

God and Casey Jones and Bourbon

John Henry died with a hammer in his hand and a woman at home who could drive steel like a man.  I wonder sometimes, when I’m drifting through another night of studying and struggling to understand esoteric truths that are not necessarily immediately useful, what it would be like to be a steel driving man.  

She tries to tell me things, sometimes.  It’s passive aggressive and almost always a means to end something that never was.  Ending with her was not like watching someone die.  I’m sure it would be hard to find that someone was no longer alive.  That what they were had ceased to be and would never be again.  That they had lost their individuality to the greater morass of life and left nothing for you to love or care for or talk to.  This was more like turning over in bed to talk to a lover and discovering a corpse, cold and long dessicated by the desert wind and the blowing dryness of the high lonesome, dead for months.  It is not waking to find the lover gone but to find them long gone and forever lonesome blackened dust.  It is always hard to see someone change, but worse is to see them not change and suddely become what they have been all along.  

John Henry may have existed.  He’s like Jesus or Buddha or that one girl named Connie in the Philipines.  Maybe real.  Maybe not.  In the lens of gone and covered by years of shielding deposition, whether or not figures were ever real is immaterial.  The idea of John Henry remains.  The steel driving man, born to die, locked in dubious battle, for no other reason than a hammer found in his infant hand.  He never had a chance.  But he may have been happy.  Probably was happy.  A shack with Polly Ann may have been a good time or a rough time.  Impossible to say.  When he pounded in that last stake, did he know that his work was over?  When he fell dead, did the Casey Jones yet to be tip his hat to the John Henry that was?

When she turned out to be dead, she drifted away a little at a time.  I didn’t care, really.  She tried to tell me about her biological father in a straight forwardly passive aggressive way I ignored.  I hadn’t cared in months.  Half the time I told her I had to do some important work, but I was sitting with a game of Madden paused waiting impatiently for her to wrap it up.  Her stories about her struggles, and there were so goddamn many struggles, strained through the the colander of the TV I was watching and the video games I was playing.  She never thought to ask me any questions that may have incriminated me as the attention deficient, unconcerned and terrible person I was.  I guess she did eventually.  She left.  One could argue I had it coming.

Was it the blasting?  All that suspended silica dioxide hanging floating in the air; invisible murderer, shackled menacer.  Did John Henry hesitate?  Did he keep hammering away through those blasted tunnels, driving steel like no other man?  Did he ever cough blood and scratch his eyes until he went blind like I did long ago at the concrete plant?  Probably.  But John Henry was a steel driving man.  That was what he was, not who, not what he thought.  He was a steel driving man, Descartes be damned.  I will never be.  I can run a sledge damn good.  I can demo out a sidewalk in a hurry.  I can make any large fixture small and manageable with a doublejack.  But I can’t die holding a hammer.  

It is appointed every man once to die, and then face judgment.  That’s what the Bible says.  We were loading up the van behind a cowshit smelling bar in Hanford, California. We had played hard and lived and died the rock and roll one more time.  The drums were carefully placed one in the other and battened down.  The amps went in first.  Then the carpet covered PA speakers.  We had done well as a band and had some enviable gear.  The close, wet air of the Central Valley, a tubercular disgusting strip of land on its way to rifting, pressed in on us and the heat, a yellow disgusting smelly city heat colored by the nearby stockyards, brought sweat out of us.  The gig had went well.  We sat politely through the opening act and the closers, a ragtag bunch of pretentious college kids from Visalia.  They had praises to sing to the sinking, transform cesspool of the Golden State.  Typical pop-punk.  She was up at the bar.  I knew she was but had long since given up on her giving up.  She would ride that sick and petulant rush to the very bitter end.  And she did.  She did without me, but she did.  I wasn’t the one who had to bury her, at least.

 It’s all the same.  The girl at the bar gig had her hammer in her hand.  The pointless pretending ontological chick-lit philosphy of the vapid zombie is a hammer.  My thinking and reasoning and damned rationality is a hammer.  I will die with it in my hand.  In my heart.  Written on the tendrils of my influence stretching out into the network causality of all humanity.  

Some of us were not born to be looked at.  some of us were born free of aesthetic expectation.  Were were born with hammers and hard heads and broken noses.  

I still think of them, though.  Not like they would want, but I think of them.  They were my hammer.  It could have happened no differently.

All Skanks Considered

NPR is so goddamn sexy. The dusky voices of overly educated women roll their sensual love of words around subjects unabashedly obscure or inaccessible. The breathy and bordering on pornographic alto modulation of Terri Gross, the icy cold business tones of Michelle (MEEchelle) Norris, the rolling and kind tomboy lilt of Melissa Block, these are the voices that play when I drive my Scout into the desert or when I have noise in the background while I slave away on homework. I haven’t seen pictures of them. I don’t want to.

It started in elementary school. I would listen to NPR while I built things out of legos to be taken out back and blown apart with a semi-steady supply of recreational explosives brought in from family out of state. Their voices colored my perceptions of what a woman should be at least as much as the hyper self sufficiency of the Old Church’s women did. These women used big words and abstract concepts. And they said it all in a slow and sensual way that would never fly on the screaming loud morning shows of commercial radio.

I listened to an NPR Neils Halstead session a while back. You probably don’t know who Neils is if you’re not into footgazers-turned-folk singers, but the female host of the show sure did. She may have been doing dirty things to herself while she flirted consipcuously with Mr. Halstead. I shared the session with a used to be carnal friend of mine who heard the same ridiculous lust in her voice. So me and the friend discussed our mutual fantasies about these soft spoken nerds free on our FM dial. Then of course we got into the subject of role playing.

See, I have heard from reliable sources* that some women, if they are comfortable with the guy and themselves, love role playing. Some women get off on the teacher/student relationship simulacrum. Some women enjoy the picked up in a bar relationship simulacrum. Some women enjoy those Rennesaince Fairs for pretty strange reasons. Take it from a guy known to wear a kilt**.

So, my role playing fantasies (created with help from aforementioned friend):

1. I am an eclectic jazz crooner with a beard. She is a postgrad with a job her parents wanted her to pass up. I have an old pawnshop Eko archtop, beaten and weathered by age and by love and by the rounded hard sound of Italian oak trussed by nickel wrapped ribbon wound steel. She tells me she is a big fan, from back in those college days she misses and the student loans she ran up before a few years of responsibility had found her. I tell her I dropped out of highschool and hitchhiked and stowed away to Spain and slept at the tomb of Andres Segovia, freezing and clutching at a bottle of Rioja. When I awoke, an old maestro took me in his tutelage/ninja coven. With steel resolve and the ghost of Django, he taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands and what the Dorian and Phrygian modes never could about guitar. The host would gasp as I hit the third inversion of a C#Maj7 with a chromatic walk up to simplistic suspended sixth of the Iberian take on the F major. And of course she would know some huge word to use to describe it to loyal listeners on listener supported WKSC (of course this is back East somewhere).

Scene.

2. She accidentally knocked her car into park while driving. She had to get help to push it into a parking lot. The car halts and now she cannot get it to start. She is terrified to call her old man. He is an asshole about simple mistakes. So she calls car talk, where I have taken over for the day. So I tell her: It’s fine. Mistakes happen. People have done worse. I have done worse. I tell her: disconnect the battery. The fuel pump safety cutoff has been activated by the jarring, more than likely. She tells me she will. She hesitates to get off the phone. I know why. I know she wants to keep listening to me talk and not think about the old man she has to go home to. The one with the beer gut and the expectations of her she can’t match. She wants to hear me tell her about her machine. She wants to hear about all these complex components she has never considered before. We joke and laugh. Then she turns to see that she is, in fact in the parking lot of my NPR branch. I tell her I know where she can get some coffee.

Scene.

3. The book I am actively not writing gets me onto Fresh Air. With Terri Gross.

Scene.

*Six thousand guys on a boat in middle of nowhere for months at a time eventually run out of normal people things to talk about. Trust me ladies, if you are married to a sailor, his shipmates know all about your closet freakiness. And your husband knows about all the other girls’ quirks. I’m sure that goes back as long as men have went down to the sea.

**I can wear the hell out of a kilt. And there are a lot of women with some odd Highland fantasies they probably wouldn’t admit to. Or don’t even know about.

Salsa (redux)

I was gifted a whole bunch of peppers this year.  Unfortunately, I was also extremely busy and I ended up letting a lot of them go bad.  I figured it was put up or shut up time with them, and there happened to be a damn good deal on tomatillos at my local grocer.

So, since I was too lazy to make a chile, I decided to make a good salsa verde.  When making green sauces, I always find a combination of fresh and cooked flavors work wonders.  The easiest way to achieve that balance is by roasting some of the ingredients.  I generally roast peppers I use in anything, but I also decided to step out on a limb and roast the garlic I wanted to use as well.

Anyway, the first thing you have to do with tomotillos is pull the heavy fibrous leaf off of them.  

The etymology of tomatillos is misleading.  The dimminutive suffix of “illo” suggests that they are just a small tomato. While a member of the nightshade family, tomatillos are in a separate genus.  The flavor differs greatly from that of a tomato.  They have a very crisp citrus fruit sort of flavor.  The name tomatillo could also vary by region.  A ripe fruit will be a pale green to yellow around here, but could be red or purple if you have varieties originating farther away from Mexico.

I put the peppers, a selection of bell, serrano, jalapeno, and anaheim peppers (all gifted to me by women with gardens) on a cookie sheet and placed them under the broiler.  I retained a couple jalapenos to give a nice raw and fresh flavor to the finished product.  It takes about ten minutes on a side to properly roast the peppers. You want the waxy skin of the chiles to turn black and separate from the pepper.

Notice the garlic as well.  The smell of the peppers roasting is a perfect and ambrosial thing. I’m not sure this step is necessary, but while the peppers and garlic roasted, I parched the tomas.  I really don’t think this is required, but that’s how I was taught to treat them.  It’s a flash boil, no longer than about thirty seconds.  It may just be to knock off the weird gooey stuff all over them or it may be to scare off the calyx demons.  See, I learned how to make green chile over a charcoal fire in Juarez trained by a toothless mute witch at midnight under a full moon.  Not really, I learned from a girl in LA I was dating.  I’m not even sure she was all the way Mexican.  Story for another time, my friend.

So, from the roasting pan, put the chiles into a freezer bag and place them in the freezer.  The hot, steamy peppers will actually steam the skin off of each other while they’re in there.  Then you have to peel the wax off.  At this point, you could vane and seed the chiles if you want.  The capsaicin, the chemical heat of the pepper, is mostly stored there.  Capsaicin is a natural antifungal that protects the all important next generation of the species by making the environment toxic to any small organism, such as bugs or worms or infectious bacteria and fungi, but edible (though sometimes painful) for anything large enough to consume the pepper and spread the seed.  I left the vanes and seeds in, except for the bell.  

So, this is the final set of ingredients laid out.

 

From there it’s a pretty straight forward process.  Throw the tomatillos, bell peppers, and anaheims and garlic in the blender and set it to chop with about a tablespoon or two of cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar.  Don’t go crazy with the blender.  You want to maintain a nice medium grain sort of consistency.  After about a minute, maybe, I dumped the rest of the peppers in with a lime’s worth of juice and gave it another minute or so of chopping.  It makes for a nice combination of well chopped and lightly chopped.  

The last thing to do was knife chop up about a half cup of cilantro and stir it in. I added a little cumin, too.  Not much, just enough to really work with the smokiness of the peppers.  So, to break it all down:

One pound of tomatillos

Four Anaheim

Five Jalapenos (big ones)

Four Serannos 

Cilantro, a little vinegar, garlic, and cumin.  

That’s it.

Now, this is what it looked like:

So, looks good.  Looks good as hell.  So I loaded up a chip with the stuff. Took a bite.  

Now I’m tough, but go back and read the list of ingredients.  This shit is a chemical weapon.  I wanted to cry.  It was painful.  Eyes watering, nose snotting up, etc.  The flavor was perfect and it took a while for the heat to build, but once it did, it was like licking the butthole of the sun.  Plus side: clear sinuses.  

So there you go, I have a quart of the stuff now.  I may cut it a little more with the vinegar and sugar to knock the heat down, I don’t know.

Ah, Yes…

This is indeed a special day for this purveyor of written word.

The giddy feeling shot down into my bones in anticipation.  It’s like Christmas for privileged children.  I woke to the sun and rolled out of bed to do a happy, happy dance.  See, this is the most wonderful of days.

This is the day Sears offers any fucking body 90 days same as cash on washing machines to say thank you to me.  This is the day carpet stores roll out the red 15% off berber pile.  This is the day used car dealerships shake my hand and tell me while they, of course, had other things to do, they did have a distant uncle of a relative who had, in fact, been in the merchant marines.  Then they tell me jokes they know.  We laugh.  It is a wonderful day!

When the big guns stopped firing on this day in 1918, the muddy and maimed said the silence sounded like the voice of God.  The slow marches, the killing fields full of new modern killing machines, the mustard gas, the last dying gasps of imperial Europe choking and dying on its own hemorrhaging blood; these were the mechanisms ending in the voice of God, the silence of the guns.  That was Armistice Day.  20 million dead. But the field fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and the blood dried and corpses were shipped home, some in boxes, some in ships returning them still breathing to factories and farms and wage slavery.  But the killing had ceased.  The guns were silenced, at least for a few decades.

But that was Armistice Day.  A celebration of life.  Of Peace, or at least its less reliable relative, ceasefires.

Armistice Day has no place in my schedule.  I don’t want the silent voice of God, not when I get a 10% discount at Best Buy today if I bring in my DD214.  I can’t wait.  I got a new credit card today, all red, white, blue, and platinum.  I plan on having that magnetic strip hanging in shreds after my patriotism lands me some new shoes, some new clothes.  Maybe I’ll go watch a movie!  I hope they have a real violent one, where the hero walks through the Valley of the Shadow of the Gun and comes out unscathed.  He’ll make it through with a body count in the dozens and a few quips. Maybe in the end of it all, John Wayne as General Captain Chief America will have some reassuring words, should a hero grow a conscience.  He’ll say, “Hey Bub, buck up.  Our job isn’t to question this wonderful machine, just live and die and kill until the credit crisis clears.”

Then he would smoke a big, fat American Cuban cigar and say something about God letting all the shooters into heaven by some rule that seems at least as ridiculous as God himself.

Then the credits roll and the audience claps and the Truth, ever celluloid and failing away, is the light in the projector.  Me and a friend who knows everything there is to know about the military except being part of it will tell me the History Channel history of the Browning .50 cal. He won’t know it can blow a person, good or bad, in half. But that’s fine.  This day is not about killing.  This is not Armistice Day.  This is Veteran’s Day.

So we’ll use my new newly shredded platinum (the red, white and blue is all worn off) card at Old Chicago.  Someone will see my Camo™ field jacket I wear because it is also Laundry Day and and my haircut and shake my hand and tell me about how they are a hero through their son, their husband, their boyfriend, their brother, and I will congratulate them on being born in such proximity to war.

On Armistice Day, the simpering coattails heroics would irritate the very fuckall out of my bones, but this is not Armistice Day.  This is the day Carville’s Automart has a Ford F-350 Superduty painted like my credit card lifted up and monsterized into a tank sitting on top of a fuel efficient little sensible car.  And I can get a hell of an interest rate on either.  Not because I am a veteran, but because that’s what Automarts do.  Especially on Veteran’s Day. And I’ll take that huge truck, nothing but pure testosterone and patriotism, and I’ll go find some fake tanned augmentation to take home. And when the girl, ever celluloid and failing away, will leave lipstick and makeup and whoreramble all over my pillow.

But when the sun sets on the killing fields of whatever I was willing to kill and die for, besides the Rush™, I mean, it will be armistice day again.  And I’ll sit at the same bar I always go to.  And I’ll pay in cash.  And everyone will know to leave that one alone.  The one with a good three fingers of something terrible in a dirty glass.  The drinking will be constant, but not forever.  Eventually I’ll pass out.  I have an arrangement with some good friends.  They come haul me out of a shitty bar once a year.

That was the plan.

The phone, a ridiculously complicated and button festooned machine named after a fruit, speaks from the edge of the bed.

“Hey, so this dinner you talked about…”

“When would work best for you?”

“Whenever, how about tonight?”

“Um…well, I was gonna get drunk.”

“By yourself? I won’t let you do that.”

“Ok, but I’ll have to use your kitchen to cook, the hippies have trashed mine.”

Down

This is a semifictional (mostly fictional) writing experiment. For the book I am currently not writing.

“So, I guess this is a good thing?”

“Mostly. It’s odd digging into the package of stuff and see so much of a life I don’t have anymore.”

“Do you have emotional reactions to objects?”

“I do. I barely have emotional reactions to people, but if I see an old sweater or car or tractor or something or smell it, I get this flood through me I don’t understand.”

A scratch of pencil to paper.  Long clear coated fingernails.

“So, what do you associate with this stuff?”

“Fall. I guess.  I don’t know, there’s a wooly I bought in Hong Kong.  There’s a pair of shoes I bought for a wedding. Some other clothes.  My Navy garment bag…”

“But nothing specific to that relationship?”

“No. Not really. She did try to steal the wooly, but so has every other woman I’ve dated in the last five years. It’s a nice wooly, some sort of weird soft Asian sheep.”

“It sounds nice.”

“It is, just too small for me, generally. Sometimes I wear it when I need to stay warm and don’t care how I look.”

“How much do you care about how you look?”

“We’ve talked about it before, more than I want to, but probably not as much as a lot of people.”

The scratching. The fingers. She has a light writing style.

“How are classes going?”

“Good. I haven’t been motivated in a while, but I’m trying to turn it around.”

“Not motivated?”

“No, I don’t fucking know why.  I just can’t pull my head out of my ass.”

Scratching.  She smells like shampoo.  One of the pricey ones.

“You know,” I mention, “I can’t help but put signficance into when you do and don’t take notes.”

“I know. I don’t always take them right away, I wait until we say more so I’m not guiding the conversation with when I write things down.”

“That’s pretty smart.”

“Not all scientists are in the physical sciences.”

She looks up.  She smirks.

“Yeah, what errors are you working with most of the time in this field? 35-40%?”

“Maybe on a good day.  I’m just here to get rich off the crazies, you know that.”

“Well, you won’t get rich at the VA. You must be in it for all the hot crazies.”

“Yeah, I’m just here for the benefits.”

More of a smile, really.  Her eyes are green today. She wore glasses once. She must have contacts. I look into her eyes, involuntarily smile.

“Me too.”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

She stares at me. Like a prisoner. Like an animal. Like a paycheck?

“Why do you do that? Don’t say ‘do what?’”

“Fuck, I don’t know. I don’t realize I do it, sometimes.”

“Do you do it all the time? Most of the time?”

“I don’t know. I hate it when I do.  I know I’m lying half the time when I get that way.”

“As a woman, I can tell you’re good at it.  I’ve also never seen a healthy person who was an effective flirt.”

“Huh. Neither have I, now that I think about it.  I date a lot of flirts.”

“How does that go for you?”

Later, when I was cycling the laundry around, I pulled out the wooly pully, a grey and soft thing.  It’s been in my life for five years.  My former wife tried to wear it out of my barracks room when I made a thoroughly stupid mistake and let her back in for a day.  C. kept it for months.  E. wore it for weeks after she broke it off with my best friend, and spent a little too much time around me.  M. stole it for a while.  The rest of the goddamn alphabet over the last few years I’ve been home stole it, at least for a while.  It was at this girl’s house for eleven months after an ill-fated camping trip.  She told me she was taking it.  For some reason I wasn’t Ok with her taking it, even though it did not fit.

In the laundry room, I held the damn thing in my hands for a minute.  I held it up to my torso.  The arms have shrunk up past my wrists.  The bottom of it comes up too high.  The neck looks positively chokingly lethal.  I threw it in the washer.

Before I added the soap, I looked at it, buried under a pair of jeans.  I stared for a minute and a half, give or take.  Then I pulled it from the drum and held it up.  It followed me into the next room where one of my room mates was sitting on the couch, designing one of her beautiful ceramic designs.

“This is too small for me, you can take it, hon.”

I laid it next to her and walked back to start the laundry.  I heard her thanking me as I walked away.  Soap. Cycle. Pulled the knob.

“Casey, I’m concerned about this lack of motivation.”

“I am too. I don’t know what to do.”

“Have you been working out still?”

“More than I should. I don’t feel right unless I’m sore or sweating. I just don’t want to do anything I have to everyday. I don’t want to be here.”

Scratching.

“Here?”

“Home.”

Are you bored?

I am.

You know that’s normal for you guys.

Green eyes.  Maybe a little brown.

I know.

Bullshit

If love is the delusion that one woman differs from another, then taste is the delusion that Seagram’s is not bourbon.

Right?

You know what? Fuck you. Choose your own damn adventure.

One of those statements is true.  Which one?

Inaccessable Ramble #34

I sit in hydrology and write poetry and stab my wrists with spoons, they’re never quite enough to get the job done but satisfyingly melodramatic.  I walk home in the rain, the leaves are gone, dead, the sun is hidden by the inversive nature of topographically affected convection.  The clouds hate me.  Apparently only me. 

The rain is cold and my hands hurt. I don’t want to admit it is time for gloves, not yet.  Not while my mind is resting on a sheer and daunting precipice opening up into the maw of the depth below,  of a good twenty inches.  Not fatal in the least, but satisfyingly melodramatic.

And you hear the words and the heart and the growling stomach she could not control.  It’s carrying itself on the wind, the sound, the audible piqued hurry of what ever that was.  The sun tries to break through the cover, but the clouds — the enemies of the sick, deluded happiness I loathe and and envy in so many others — refuse it. It’s enough to make me walk into traffic.  I want the street out in front of me and behind me and the open killing fields of rushing metal all around.  But I only want that if I have the walking signal and have looked both ways.  Again, less than fatal, but satisfyingly melodramatic. 

If I had to admit to myself the truth, that I don’t care, that I probably never did, that I am incapable of the sorts of passion and emotion that lead to real attempts with real knives, real falls, real traffic, i would find myself in the same maudlin grayscale of emotion from which I try so hard to hide.  I do get angry, but only when I am attacked physically.  The rest of the time, my meter struggles and never rises above the mediocre emotive state of a bored panda. Or a family of walri.  Hi-i-i-i-Yah!

At times I like to let go some obscure humor.  Meters.  Cissy Strutt.  Hi-Yah.  Oh, never mind.

I don’t know why I bother with you people.  I can feel your empathetic concern right now.  This was humorous, man. Cut your wrists with spoons? Obviously not a realistic way to attempt a preemptive shuffle off this somewhat grimy mortal coil on the seized release spring of the Earthly oil pump sloshing a too-fast thrumming rush of petroleum based lubrication to this galactic high nickel content engine block.  I have the subdermal hematoma to prove it.

Because it doesn’t mean anything. Well, in truth, it means nothing.  Not the same thing. Not really.  Apples and oranges my friend.  Fight the distinction all you want.  One makes you joke about falling to a twenty inch non-death, the other makes you sharpen your spoons.  Don’t bother if your spoons are silver.  The hardness of silver is around two or three on the Moh’s Hardness Scale.  Like a fingernail that’s been French manicured. 

Trying to cut through all the tendons and skin armor in your wrist with a sliver spoon would be like trying to fell a tree with a gilded hammer.

Did you catch that metaphor? I hope so. It took me a second to catch it. Some days I can write.  Some days I can imagine ways to fail at suicide.  Some days I do both.  Some days I roast chicken.  It is important to sear both breast and back of chicken before you roast it.  I prefer to use a rub comprised of lime juice, sage, garlic, and smoked jalapeno powder.  Obviously, you should use olive oil or bacon grease to prevent sticking while the chicken is under the broiler (the searing). 

And when the knife slides between the legs to snap the ties there, when the nickel and manganese hardened iron, all that steel is and all that it has, makes its solemn covenant to rend and destroy and to separate, when its honed and deburred edge frees the limbs, remember to check the chicken roasting in the other room and that the safe-word is “game hen.”  I forgot the safe word once.  It was “rutilatitory.” Unfortunate that “rut” is the word given to the violent and oh-so-intriguingly kinky mating practices of bull elk and buck deer and also that she had a stutter.  I thought she was just a freak who wanted me to prance in a circle and hit my head against things. 

When I woke up the chicken was ruined and my hydrology notes/poetry had been torn asunder from the notebook and rolled into some sort of improvised dart gun.  Goddamn Craigslist. Where do they find these people?