12/6/05
summertime and the living is easy
First there was a vegetable garden: tomatoes, zucchini, squash, rosemary, thyme and sage. We patched it together with four wooden slabs and a chunk of rocky earth. It rained hard in the evenings, but the sun was heavy and hot. The herbs were moved indoors and a tomato plant perished.
My daughter refused to swim. She thought sharks lived in swimming pools. In the night, she would awake, terrified, swimming through her sheets and fighting off her pillows. She kicked a girl in the face at a birthday party who was swimming and neighing like a horse. I guess she was afraid of horses too.
Fourth of July was barbequed in Chicago. We sat in lawn chairs in front of dad’s house drinking boxed red wine and singing Fleetwood Mac against the bands playing in the park. Debbie danced barefoot in the street. Fireworks exploded. The grass was wet. It had rained all day. Two young boys lost in the festivities had me drive them home. When I dropped them off their father began to beat them at the door. I tried to explain how good and polite they had been and how it had not been a problem to bring them home. But their father would not listen. He told them to get the fuck in the house and then he slammed the door in my face. Sweet boys. Ugly man.
We ate chocolate chip cookies in the sand in Ocean City. It was foggy for days. I got sunburned. Pictures show women and children squinting, grinning, and surrounded by toys and junk food. I guess it was fun. I don’t really remember.
August was spent out West, picking sage off the side of the road and living in tents. We road tripped. Four women and a child crammed into a hatchback. We ate tuna and vegetables out of cans for days. We slept under a tarp, our cotton sleeping bags soaked by morning from the nightly desert monsoons.
In Arizona we stayed a night on a reservation. The Navajo gathered around midnight somewhere near where we slept, yelling into the dark and beating drums until we had fallen asleep. It was lovely. The sky was so large, filled with skipping stars. The earth hard and toned by dust and dogs, wild, wandering starved through the canyons.
We backpacked into the Grand Canyon, rotating between the four of us a twenty-five pound child in a twenty-pound backpack. We dripped and panted and struggled for four days: in and out and in and out. Hardcore.
In another part of Arizona we hiked into a lush canyon, shimmying through rust colored rock and jumping gaps between the trails. We ate tuna next to a herd of mangy sheep. They were herded by an archaic Native American woman, her skin leathered, brown, her hands, thick, held a carved walking stick.
In Utah we passed children playing basketball in the middle of an empty abyss as a dark storm gathered in the distance. A group of shacks cluttered together appeared vulnerable, naïve to the impending clouds. Beyond, lay nothing but gray mountains and a cliff with a stone portrait of Jerry Garcia.
For weeks we ran the coyote fences of Sante Fe, drinking Tequate and philosophizing, solidifying and romanticizing. I fell in love with Jackson. We painted, sewed, and slept. Jalapenos and black beans with everything.
Maryland humidity was suffocating. I couldn’t sleep. East coast was harsh, brittle. Hard to be back, in the grind, in the bitterness of it all. Summer halted.
Now all the leaves are brown and the skies are gray …
11/1/05
Walking in the Write (week 9)
I write in necessity. Like taking a long awaited shit in the privacy of your own home or gulping down a cold glass of milk on an empty stomach, I find that writing is impulsive, unpredictable, and an urge that will hit me sporadically, and often indefinitely.
There is no method to the madness, only a few rules. I cannot write while someone is chatting with me. I cannot write while listening to music with words, unless it is the Grateful Dead. And, I cannot write during the day.
Often I write mid-task, while cleaning or completing homework, reading, cooking, or even while gardening. I cannot write for long intervals at a time. Two hours straight is the maximum, yet I doubt that I have ever reached that point without an excessive amount of interruption, self-imposed or not.
I despise rewriting, even though I know it is always necessary and never completed. Writing, at least my own, I feel can always be reworked, played around with. Writing, for me, is play. Often, it is in the rewriting that I will lose or choose a piece. Rereading something I have written has the potential to be quite frightful. I tend to cringe whenever I reread. I try not to.
Essentially, then, it is the cringing that is responsible for the constant separation due to interruption. I am always with intent, even though it may not appear so.
In fiction writing and now literary essay, I cannot plan ahead. I just write. I barf it out, and sometimes it works and other times it does not. This has always been a problem. I know what I want or what I want to say, but often what I do write is something entirely different. That is the magic, the gamble of writing that I so love.
And just I am taking a gamble now, I am distracted.
There is no method to the madness, only a few rules. I cannot write while someone is chatting with me. I cannot write while listening to music with words, unless it is the Grateful Dead. And, I cannot write during the day.
Often I write mid-task, while cleaning or completing homework, reading, cooking, or even while gardening. I cannot write for long intervals at a time. Two hours straight is the maximum, yet I doubt that I have ever reached that point without an excessive amount of interruption, self-imposed or not.
I despise rewriting, even though I know it is always necessary and never completed. Writing, at least my own, I feel can always be reworked, played around with. Writing, for me, is play. Often, it is in the rewriting that I will lose or choose a piece. Rereading something I have written has the potential to be quite frightful. I tend to cringe whenever I reread. I try not to.
Essentially, then, it is the cringing that is responsible for the constant separation due to interruption. I am always with intent, even though it may not appear so.
In fiction writing and now literary essay, I cannot plan ahead. I just write. I barf it out, and sometimes it works and other times it does not. This has always been a problem. I know what I want or what I want to say, but often what I do write is something entirely different. That is the magic, the gamble of writing that I so love.
And just I am taking a gamble now, I am distracted.
10/24/05
Whole of hOly
The Whole of Holy
We live in it; we eat from it; we screw from it or in it; and we are born from it, and die to it. It is a form of transportation: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It is a transformation, transcendence: a motion, an action, an entity, a love, a loss, an answer, a void, a wanting. It is a geographic location, a connection between space and time, desire, infinity, closure.
The Beginning:
I was pacing the walls of a dim, curtained space. The walls were pale and gray, but white. The room was lined in closed cupboards without handles to open. There was a metal- framed bed with pink paper sheets, and cotton-slippered stirrups. I paced: back and forth, around and back. A paisley-print hospital gown flapped open. There was a chill. I held my lower back, gritting my teeth, hissing under my breath. Sit down, the nurses said. Calm down, do your breathing exercises. I didn’t know any. I paced for forty-five minutes, while my lower back contracted. They did not think I was in labor. Two freshly admitted medical students had examined me and declared I was only four centimeters dilated, when the previous day I had been dilated to eight. I knew she was coming. Give me drugs, now. But, it was too late. I was dilated to ten, plus two, cursing like a mad woman. She was fast, I split, my vaginal space eroding into blood and mucus and new flesh, to life.
From a hole emerged a fresh being. A clean slate of person in utter perfection, from nothing and from everything. So close to God, or what may be, I had thought of her. And into the void of living and circumstance, the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the earth of the black hole, she was planted, a tiny stalk of potential.
“…to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist…” - Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the hole in and of itself is an existentialist entity in being. He felt that the hole, presented, was an empty image of him, an excavation to be carefully molded about his flesh. Sartre felt that the emergence through a hole at birth was correlated with the human tendency to indulge orifice. On the most basic level, orifice indulgence is for one to put their finger in their mouth or ear or nostril, or to put food in one’s mouth. Sartre also compared women to that of a hole. He found them to be a gaping wound, with their power relying predominately on that they contain this empty space between their legs, a void expecting fulfillment. The male desire to complete the hole, he feels, is largely related to the idea of castration, as men lose power in their instinctive drive to feel whole, imbedded in the recesses of their minds from birth with their initial emergence. The Middle- Exchanges:
There was always that saying, about men, you know? About how they spend the first part of their lives trying to escape from it, and the rest of their lives trying to get back in. Assumably, they try both literally and figuratively. I know. I am a single mother. I tend to date men who have lost their mothers. It is an odd coincidence.
Darren wanted to keep me in a box, under lock and key, to encourage and maintain only as he desired. He mourned his mother’s death into my life. Charming his way into a world he did not belong, he was a rigid type, sharp to a point, never wavering in his morals or expectations. He was an immediate father for my young daughter, but always so strict and cold. He hurt to his bones. Eventually, though, his sincerity became disenchanting, as I learned that he had sucked me dry of my desire and ambition. Books harden people to the real world, he would argue. You don’t need an education, as long as I am supporting you, he would say. I had become a housewife, minding at all times my p’s and q’s. Covering my mouth when I coughed, excusing myself when I burped, attending to my specified duties, and ultimately dying inside. I became someone I never wanted to be.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Einstein
Albert Einstein explains black holes as regions of space with an excessive amount of concentrated mass, so much so that any nearby object could never escape its gravitational pull.
Greg called to tell me I was going to die. You’re going to die, he said, they did. He was talking about the women before and after me. They had died. The first was of a broken heart and then a stroke. The second was from an accident. She had been drinking and had asked him to pick her up. He didn’t. He loved them. He had never loved me. Years later, one phone call sucked me back into his world and the void, the wanting, the black hole. Love me, please. Want me, please. But, he was lost to the black hole of pain and self-pity, depression. Just like Darren, he was drowning and wanting to take me with him. I found a wormhole.
“Deep in my body my green heartturns, and thinks of you. Deep in thepond, under the thick trapdoor of ice, the water moves,the carp hangs like a sun,
its scarlet heart visible in its side.”-Olds
A white hole is a reversal of the black. It is a hole into which nothing can fall. Theoretically, it is the wormhole that connects the two, serving as a tunnel in which travel between great distances is made considerably more convenient. Just as the implementation of a third party to a relationship can aid in the momentum at which things crumble. Einstein was well aware that the gravitational pull could not explain or define love, yet some part of him knew, to an extent, that they were connected. The Revelation:
I sat, once, on the tip of a limestone outcropping that jutted out, high above the deep colorful folds of a great fissure. There was a shaded crack, black, running deep through the green of the bottom layers. The shadows of clouds cloaked the earth in dark blue patterns. I watched a storm in the distance move closer, the lightning fierce, determined. My mind felt the grandness, the capacity of the universe, the possibility. I was small. It was Grand, indeed. In one moment, I could be gobbled up, in a great big hole.
I realized, then that pressed into that space that great big hole, the cavern, the abyss, was nothing but myself. I was and I am. The awe.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotionis a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstein
The End:
Death brought them to a resounding halt, yet not without expectation. In the elder years of two women, grandmothers, the end was delivered. Tenderness void, their last days were crude, raw, and ugly.
We called her Rose. She was of no relation. Five feet, eleven, withered, but still lanky despite her age. Long fingers and large feet, she was a sea of peach colored limbs, bone thin. When I knew her, she would sit, always in an orange chair, reading Reader’s Digest and watching Soaps. She thought I was her husband’s sister. I was her son’s stepdaughter. We loved to paint small ceramic-gnome figurines. Our paint was in tiny plastic vestibules attached much like the plastic rings keeping a six-pack of soda together. Always our talk was of her dead husband, of the after-life, and of her visitations from the otherside. I would catch her talking to it, to him, or to them. She knew when she was going to die. She told us all. She did. She left the known and drifted away, into somewhere; a void it is felt to us, here, still apart of the known, the side of birth and life.
My mother’s grandmother, we called her Georgene, lived in Alaska most of her life. Born on a reservation, she was a French Sioux, birthing three children before the age of twenty-one. Her skin was dark, her hair red; she was short and thick, with a passion for bickering and cooking. She lived to cause ruckus, and when I lived with her, I hated her, and it wasn’t until she developed dependency due to age that I learned to love her and all of her hardness. In her last moments, she screamed in denial. She didn’t want to go. She refused. Arthritis pained her joints, bloating her entire body. I visited her in the dank dark beige of a shared hospital room. Georgene was frightened. Don’t leave me, she begged, stay with me. I’ll haunt you, she said, if you don’t play the piano at the funeral. So you are dying? I asked. No, absolutely not, it’s not time yet, she said. But, she died anyways. I had believed that she wouldn’t. There was no resolve, a lack of acceptance. We mourned her ashes into the river.
Rose kept her body. She wanted a place in the earth for it. So next to the grave of her late- husband, Rose was buried. I watched as they lowered her. Stubborn roots poked through the sides of the red-brown dirt, scratching against the shined cedar of the casket. A crimson bouquet of roses, elaborate, almost ridiculous, was still atop. I don’t know if they ever removed it. It seemed as if they should. My stepfather dropped the first handful of dirt. We followed, dropping moist clumps of earth into the crease of petals. It was strange, her being put into that hole and covered with dirt. Her long thin arms crossed across her abdomen, limp, awaiting decay. Into the hole went the casket, topped with a swollen belly of dirt. In time, the brown mound turned green with grass, and eventually yellowed from draught.
Georgene’s body was burned to ashes. We took a tiny boat out into the Chesapeake and with rose petals, ash, and memory showered the waters. She showed up, clouded with ruckus, delivering a hailstorm and a broken boat to her family. We were helpless, stranded beneath her fury. We swam to shore. But, there in the sky, was a hole. Not into the earth had she dropped, but into the sky through fresh-water veins.
The hole is an ending, a break in life, perhaps, of something or for something else. The hole is the unknown for the before and after, the middle circumstance or indeterminable ground, a vacuous vacuum of time and space. In which do we resume, within or without? Is it coming or going? Are we traveling through it, always, in a systematic notion of presumption of what is and as it should be, or as we would like it to be? But it is a hole, and it may after all be then, void of meaning; unless, meaning is only what is prescribed, the individual’s associations. In art, the debate is often whether or not art should be left to the viewer’s discretion, or should art exist entirely within the artist’s intention. But, does it matter? In the end, in the vacuum of a whole of holes, does it truly matter? Is life fulfilling, or is it the before or the after? Why is it that “hole” is apart of the word “whole”. There may or may not be a grand master plan, but, indeed, there is a question.
“Coming home, an intersection,crossing of one and many,having all, having nothing-…this must be the edgeof being before the thought of itblurs it, can only try to recall it.”-Creeley
We live in it; we eat from it; we screw from it or in it; and we are born from it, and die to it. It is a form of transportation: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It is a transformation, transcendence: a motion, an action, an entity, a love, a loss, an answer, a void, a wanting. It is a geographic location, a connection between space and time, desire, infinity, closure.
The Beginning:
I was pacing the walls of a dim, curtained space. The walls were pale and gray, but white. The room was lined in closed cupboards without handles to open. There was a metal- framed bed with pink paper sheets, and cotton-slippered stirrups. I paced: back and forth, around and back. A paisley-print hospital gown flapped open. There was a chill. I held my lower back, gritting my teeth, hissing under my breath. Sit down, the nurses said. Calm down, do your breathing exercises. I didn’t know any. I paced for forty-five minutes, while my lower back contracted. They did not think I was in labor. Two freshly admitted medical students had examined me and declared I was only four centimeters dilated, when the previous day I had been dilated to eight. I knew she was coming. Give me drugs, now. But, it was too late. I was dilated to ten, plus two, cursing like a mad woman. She was fast, I split, my vaginal space eroding into blood and mucus and new flesh, to life.
From a hole emerged a fresh being. A clean slate of person in utter perfection, from nothing and from everything. So close to God, or what may be, I had thought of her. And into the void of living and circumstance, the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the earth of the black hole, she was planted, a tiny stalk of potential.
“…to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist…” - Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the hole in and of itself is an existentialist entity in being. He felt that the hole, presented, was an empty image of him, an excavation to be carefully molded about his flesh. Sartre felt that the emergence through a hole at birth was correlated with the human tendency to indulge orifice. On the most basic level, orifice indulgence is for one to put their finger in their mouth or ear or nostril, or to put food in one’s mouth. Sartre also compared women to that of a hole. He found them to be a gaping wound, with their power relying predominately on that they contain this empty space between their legs, a void expecting fulfillment. The male desire to complete the hole, he feels, is largely related to the idea of castration, as men lose power in their instinctive drive to feel whole, imbedded in the recesses of their minds from birth with their initial emergence. The Middle- Exchanges:
There was always that saying, about men, you know? About how they spend the first part of their lives trying to escape from it, and the rest of their lives trying to get back in. Assumably, they try both literally and figuratively. I know. I am a single mother. I tend to date men who have lost their mothers. It is an odd coincidence.
Darren wanted to keep me in a box, under lock and key, to encourage and maintain only as he desired. He mourned his mother’s death into my life. Charming his way into a world he did not belong, he was a rigid type, sharp to a point, never wavering in his morals or expectations. He was an immediate father for my young daughter, but always so strict and cold. He hurt to his bones. Eventually, though, his sincerity became disenchanting, as I learned that he had sucked me dry of my desire and ambition. Books harden people to the real world, he would argue. You don’t need an education, as long as I am supporting you, he would say. I had become a housewife, minding at all times my p’s and q’s. Covering my mouth when I coughed, excusing myself when I burped, attending to my specified duties, and ultimately dying inside. I became someone I never wanted to be.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Einstein
Albert Einstein explains black holes as regions of space with an excessive amount of concentrated mass, so much so that any nearby object could never escape its gravitational pull.
Greg called to tell me I was going to die. You’re going to die, he said, they did. He was talking about the women before and after me. They had died. The first was of a broken heart and then a stroke. The second was from an accident. She had been drinking and had asked him to pick her up. He didn’t. He loved them. He had never loved me. Years later, one phone call sucked me back into his world and the void, the wanting, the black hole. Love me, please. Want me, please. But, he was lost to the black hole of pain and self-pity, depression. Just like Darren, he was drowning and wanting to take me with him. I found a wormhole.
“Deep in my body my green heartturns, and thinks of you. Deep in thepond, under the thick trapdoor of ice, the water moves,the carp hangs like a sun,
its scarlet heart visible in its side.”-Olds
A white hole is a reversal of the black. It is a hole into which nothing can fall. Theoretically, it is the wormhole that connects the two, serving as a tunnel in which travel between great distances is made considerably more convenient. Just as the implementation of a third party to a relationship can aid in the momentum at which things crumble. Einstein was well aware that the gravitational pull could not explain or define love, yet some part of him knew, to an extent, that they were connected. The Revelation:
I sat, once, on the tip of a limestone outcropping that jutted out, high above the deep colorful folds of a great fissure. There was a shaded crack, black, running deep through the green of the bottom layers. The shadows of clouds cloaked the earth in dark blue patterns. I watched a storm in the distance move closer, the lightning fierce, determined. My mind felt the grandness, the capacity of the universe, the possibility. I was small. It was Grand, indeed. In one moment, I could be gobbled up, in a great big hole.
I realized, then that pressed into that space that great big hole, the cavern, the abyss, was nothing but myself. I was and I am. The awe.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotionis a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstein
The End:
Death brought them to a resounding halt, yet not without expectation. In the elder years of two women, grandmothers, the end was delivered. Tenderness void, their last days were crude, raw, and ugly.
We called her Rose. She was of no relation. Five feet, eleven, withered, but still lanky despite her age. Long fingers and large feet, she was a sea of peach colored limbs, bone thin. When I knew her, she would sit, always in an orange chair, reading Reader’s Digest and watching Soaps. She thought I was her husband’s sister. I was her son’s stepdaughter. We loved to paint small ceramic-gnome figurines. Our paint was in tiny plastic vestibules attached much like the plastic rings keeping a six-pack of soda together. Always our talk was of her dead husband, of the after-life, and of her visitations from the otherside. I would catch her talking to it, to him, or to them. She knew when she was going to die. She told us all. She did. She left the known and drifted away, into somewhere; a void it is felt to us, here, still apart of the known, the side of birth and life.
My mother’s grandmother, we called her Georgene, lived in Alaska most of her life. Born on a reservation, she was a French Sioux, birthing three children before the age of twenty-one. Her skin was dark, her hair red; she was short and thick, with a passion for bickering and cooking. She lived to cause ruckus, and when I lived with her, I hated her, and it wasn’t until she developed dependency due to age that I learned to love her and all of her hardness. In her last moments, she screamed in denial. She didn’t want to go. She refused. Arthritis pained her joints, bloating her entire body. I visited her in the dank dark beige of a shared hospital room. Georgene was frightened. Don’t leave me, she begged, stay with me. I’ll haunt you, she said, if you don’t play the piano at the funeral. So you are dying? I asked. No, absolutely not, it’s not time yet, she said. But, she died anyways. I had believed that she wouldn’t. There was no resolve, a lack of acceptance. We mourned her ashes into the river.
Rose kept her body. She wanted a place in the earth for it. So next to the grave of her late- husband, Rose was buried. I watched as they lowered her. Stubborn roots poked through the sides of the red-brown dirt, scratching against the shined cedar of the casket. A crimson bouquet of roses, elaborate, almost ridiculous, was still atop. I don’t know if they ever removed it. It seemed as if they should. My stepfather dropped the first handful of dirt. We followed, dropping moist clumps of earth into the crease of petals. It was strange, her being put into that hole and covered with dirt. Her long thin arms crossed across her abdomen, limp, awaiting decay. Into the hole went the casket, topped with a swollen belly of dirt. In time, the brown mound turned green with grass, and eventually yellowed from draught.
Georgene’s body was burned to ashes. We took a tiny boat out into the Chesapeake and with rose petals, ash, and memory showered the waters. She showed up, clouded with ruckus, delivering a hailstorm and a broken boat to her family. We were helpless, stranded beneath her fury. We swam to shore. But, there in the sky, was a hole. Not into the earth had she dropped, but into the sky through fresh-water veins.
The hole is an ending, a break in life, perhaps, of something or for something else. The hole is the unknown for the before and after, the middle circumstance or indeterminable ground, a vacuous vacuum of time and space. In which do we resume, within or without? Is it coming or going? Are we traveling through it, always, in a systematic notion of presumption of what is and as it should be, or as we would like it to be? But it is a hole, and it may after all be then, void of meaning; unless, meaning is only what is prescribed, the individual’s associations. In art, the debate is often whether or not art should be left to the viewer’s discretion, or should art exist entirely within the artist’s intention. But, does it matter? In the end, in the vacuum of a whole of holes, does it truly matter? Is life fulfilling, or is it the before or the after? Why is it that “hole” is apart of the word “whole”. There may or may not be a grand master plan, but, indeed, there is a question.
“Coming home, an intersection,crossing of one and many,having all, having nothing-…this must be the edgeof being before the thought of itblurs it, can only try to recall it.”-Creeley
10/18/05
Ceramic Heaven
I love my new bathtub. It is a haven, a ceramic utopia, a bowl of rest, of steamy hot water rushing against my naked skin and stiffened muscles. I clean it often. I scour the yellow tile walls and the browned white of its bottom almost daily. In the morning, in the midst of my morning pee, I will dream of it, of the time, of when I am able to basque in its potential for glorious satisfaction.
In the warmth of a bubbly bath I am silent; I am aware; Iam naked, at rest, in the deep of thought and feeling; I am clean, whole, stark in the truth of the day.
Drama aside, I have a deep fondness for the bath, as I have lived for four years without one. I remember in the aftermath of birthing my daughter, I wanted nothing more than the relief of a hot bath or a massage. I had neither. I had a 4’x4’ shower, with minimal water pressure and no companion. I lived completely alone. My back burned from the heaviness of breasts like stone boulders, my legs ached, my arms numb from the minimal, but unusual weight of carrying about a small child; my vaginal area torn, cut and swollen. I craved a bath. I visited relatives with baths, and stayed the evenings, just for the exscuse.
I work in restaurants. I am always in bodily pain. I require consistant back rubs, and above all else, a tub. Recently, I moved into a larger apartment, with not one, but two baths. It was very important to me, that my new space, above all else, contain this entity.
Loves in my life, have in the past, found humor in my obsession with their tubs. In fact, I have often been wooed by use of the bathtub as a place of romantic inspiration with rose petals, lighted candles, sensual music and so forth. It works. It most likely, always will. I guess my fondness stems from my hours I spent as a child playing in the bath, sharking my way about the edges and fishing for naked barbies from the depths of the lego covered bottoms.
I will never take a bathtub for granted. It is a source of simplistic, but relative and required comfort and joy. And, I believe, that anyone who has one, should take the time and thought to enjoy theirs, because, perhaps, one day, you will no longer have one. Go forth, and bathe.
In the warmth of a bubbly bath I am silent; I am aware; Iam naked, at rest, in the deep of thought and feeling; I am clean, whole, stark in the truth of the day.
Drama aside, I have a deep fondness for the bath, as I have lived for four years without one. I remember in the aftermath of birthing my daughter, I wanted nothing more than the relief of a hot bath or a massage. I had neither. I had a 4’x4’ shower, with minimal water pressure and no companion. I lived completely alone. My back burned from the heaviness of breasts like stone boulders, my legs ached, my arms numb from the minimal, but unusual weight of carrying about a small child; my vaginal area torn, cut and swollen. I craved a bath. I visited relatives with baths, and stayed the evenings, just for the exscuse.
I work in restaurants. I am always in bodily pain. I require consistant back rubs, and above all else, a tub. Recently, I moved into a larger apartment, with not one, but two baths. It was very important to me, that my new space, above all else, contain this entity.
Loves in my life, have in the past, found humor in my obsession with their tubs. In fact, I have often been wooed by use of the bathtub as a place of romantic inspiration with rose petals, lighted candles, sensual music and so forth. It works. It most likely, always will. I guess my fondness stems from my hours I spent as a child playing in the bath, sharking my way about the edges and fishing for naked barbies from the depths of the lego covered bottoms.
I will never take a bathtub for granted. It is a source of simplistic, but relative and required comfort and joy. And, I believe, that anyone who has one, should take the time and thought to enjoy theirs, because, perhaps, one day, you will no longer have one. Go forth, and bathe.
10/17/05
Bag it (week 6)
From large kiddie-printed plastic, spill-proof duffles to a mini-bright red leather pit-purse, I have found one consistency: I carry junk. Old receipts, unopened bills, notes, gum wrappers, emptied old plastic baggies, and business cards stuff my bags to the brim, hiding anything of importance.
I once felt that the bigger the purse, the more potential I had of bringing with me everything I could and would possibly need. This is not true. The bigger the purse, the more junk I would acquire and carry. If I saw an unwanted grocery store add floating through a parking lot- I would snag it and stuff it, knowing my larger bag would allow for it. If I saw an excessive amount of litter at the playground, (an old Styrofoam cup, a plastic wrapped potato bun, mowed chew toy), I would bag it. If I found old cigarette butts floating on my basement apartment patio from an upstairs neighbor, I would bag them, and usually in the old plastic of another garbage item I had acquired. As a result, the larger bags became a problem. I understand that I had the opportunity to discard these items when presented with a trashcan. The problem was that I never did. I don’t know why. It’s embarrassing.
But amid the trash, I have some essentials: my wallet, my keys, a cell phone, a Swiss army knife, and a pen. I lose everything. I lock myself outside of my apartment at least once a week. And, I used to lock my keys inside my car regularly, until my brothers bought me a keypad for my door. I have lost my cell phone a ridiculous amount of times, not to mention left it on the roof of my car only to run over it. I have also lost sets of keys to the Grand Canyon, the Appalachians and a department store. I also enjoy leaving my purse, especially when it is full with a week’s worth of tips, in random locations. This week it was Q’doba.
Unfortunately, what I carry is also pertinent to the survival and comfort of my daughter. So, at all times, I must have an extra set of panties, pants, socks and shoes; a sippy-cup, baby-wipes, and hand sanitizer. These, being the most important items on my person, I usually never forget, or misplace.
I have always been disorganized. I use a one-section spiral notebook for up to six classes at times. I jam everything I ever receive from any professor in books and nooks and sometimes the very spiral notebook that is essential to my functionality. I lose papers, notes. Two years ago I started a planner. To this day I religiously keep up with what I need to get done, only I rarely ever look back, and usually resort to relying entirely on my memory. This can be a problem.
What I know of what I carry, or don’t, is that I am continuously scatter-brained, yet somehow consistantly conscious of my surroudings. I am often caught in contradiction, the butt of a joke when its about someone disorganized and spacy, or the provider of clean underpants to a freshly wetted child. I have it together, sometimes, but a lot of the time I don’t. I am in control, but there is much that I am not in control of. I have learned that frustration gets me nowhere, and that acceptance is key. I don’t always understand myself or why I do what I do, or why I have a tendency to make things ten times harder than they need to be. But, I do, and I learn, continuously.
I once felt that the bigger the purse, the more potential I had of bringing with me everything I could and would possibly need. This is not true. The bigger the purse, the more junk I would acquire and carry. If I saw an unwanted grocery store add floating through a parking lot- I would snag it and stuff it, knowing my larger bag would allow for it. If I saw an excessive amount of litter at the playground, (an old Styrofoam cup, a plastic wrapped potato bun, mowed chew toy), I would bag it. If I found old cigarette butts floating on my basement apartment patio from an upstairs neighbor, I would bag them, and usually in the old plastic of another garbage item I had acquired. As a result, the larger bags became a problem. I understand that I had the opportunity to discard these items when presented with a trashcan. The problem was that I never did. I don’t know why. It’s embarrassing.
But amid the trash, I have some essentials: my wallet, my keys, a cell phone, a Swiss army knife, and a pen. I lose everything. I lock myself outside of my apartment at least once a week. And, I used to lock my keys inside my car regularly, until my brothers bought me a keypad for my door. I have lost my cell phone a ridiculous amount of times, not to mention left it on the roof of my car only to run over it. I have also lost sets of keys to the Grand Canyon, the Appalachians and a department store. I also enjoy leaving my purse, especially when it is full with a week’s worth of tips, in random locations. This week it was Q’doba.
Unfortunately, what I carry is also pertinent to the survival and comfort of my daughter. So, at all times, I must have an extra set of panties, pants, socks and shoes; a sippy-cup, baby-wipes, and hand sanitizer. These, being the most important items on my person, I usually never forget, or misplace.
I have always been disorganized. I use a one-section spiral notebook for up to six classes at times. I jam everything I ever receive from any professor in books and nooks and sometimes the very spiral notebook that is essential to my functionality. I lose papers, notes. Two years ago I started a planner. To this day I religiously keep up with what I need to get done, only I rarely ever look back, and usually resort to relying entirely on my memory. This can be a problem.
What I know of what I carry, or don’t, is that I am continuously scatter-brained, yet somehow consistantly conscious of my surroudings. I am often caught in contradiction, the butt of a joke when its about someone disorganized and spacy, or the provider of clean underpants to a freshly wetted child. I have it together, sometimes, but a lot of the time I don’t. I am in control, but there is much that I am not in control of. I have learned that frustration gets me nowhere, and that acceptance is key. I don’t always understand myself or why I do what I do, or why I have a tendency to make things ten times harder than they need to be. But, I do, and I learn, continuously.
10/3/05
Lets Play Ball (Week 5)
I once was a criminal. That’s what they said. Cuffed, arms twisted, metal tight, cold, pressed, digging into my wrists.
Life was moving at a rate I couldn’t comprehend. I was good in my bones, I could feel it, I knew it, but raw in my skin. Morality? What a question. Criminals may be moral, and often more than not, they are. I was moral at the core; three crimes within four years; three different jail cells, jail mates, good cops, bad cops.
I’m a lady I’d think. Treat me like one. They never did. Seven escorts the last time. Who did they think I was? A mass murderer? They always blow it out of proportion. That’s what I told myself. The criminal justice system is faulted, it’s a fraud. I am not a criminal, I would tell myself. I would tell them. I would tell the system. Nobody believed me. I was nothing, a delinquent, a hassle.
Criminals feel sorry for themselves, that’s what they told me in rehab. Was I? Self pity, was that what it was all about? Fuck the system I thought. Age made me wiser to the law, the games. I played, skipped through the boundaries. I'd been hit hard, twice, it couldn't happen again; I thought. Morality? It was there in the recesses of my mind. Its cat and mouse. I was Robin Hood, Joan of Arc. Crimes validated by the system, not without cause or justification in the back of my mind.
It was the last time, the fluke, the near death, and a conversation that finally brought me to a halt. There was a good cop. He wrote me a letter. I would like to talk to you, he said. He was not my arresting officer, just a jolly old sideliner in the passenger seat of the car. What are you doing? He said. You are young and beautiful and intelligent, don’t you know that? He said. Why do you put yourself here? He said.
You put yourself here. I did. I did. I did. Ithought. I put myself here. I put myself here, and I am not a victim of the system. I am a criminal; a girl, still, but a criminal. Who was I? Where was I?
I had to work hard. I had to grow hard. I had to take responsibility for my actions. I had to claim choice. I had to love outside of myself. I had to exchange self-destruction and chaos for morality and social consciousness. It was life or death, and it took three strikes for me to finally get a home run.
Set my elbows straight, I asked.
No one answered.
No one answered.
They’re too tight, I said.
No one heard me. One cop looked, rolled his eyes. You should’ve thought of that, he said. I should of thought of that. That’s what they always said. I wasn’t a criminal, just a girl. They didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know.
No one heard me. One cop looked, rolled his eyes. You should’ve thought of that, he said. I should of thought of that. That’s what they always said. I wasn’t a criminal, just a girl. They didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know.
Life was moving at a rate I couldn’t comprehend. I was good in my bones, I could feel it, I knew it, but raw in my skin. Morality? What a question. Criminals may be moral, and often more than not, they are. I was moral at the core; three crimes within four years; three different jail cells, jail mates, good cops, bad cops.
I’m a lady I’d think. Treat me like one. They never did. Seven escorts the last time. Who did they think I was? A mass murderer? They always blow it out of proportion. That’s what I told myself. The criminal justice system is faulted, it’s a fraud. I am not a criminal, I would tell myself. I would tell them. I would tell the system. Nobody believed me. I was nothing, a delinquent, a hassle.
Can I get some respect? No.
Will anybody listen? No.
I couldn’t handle the lectures. At fifteen, a bad cop fucked with me, told me I was going to die. He was chewing tobacco with his mouth gaping, grinning through blackened teeth. My eyes were heavy, dry. He spit in a Folgers can inches from my foot. I despised him. I despised the law.
Will anybody listen? No.
I couldn’t handle the lectures. At fifteen, a bad cop fucked with me, told me I was going to die. He was chewing tobacco with his mouth gaping, grinning through blackened teeth. My eyes were heavy, dry. He spit in a Folgers can inches from my foot. I despised him. I despised the law.
Criminals feel sorry for themselves, that’s what they told me in rehab. Was I? Self pity, was that what it was all about? Fuck the system I thought. Age made me wiser to the law, the games. I played, skipped through the boundaries. I'd been hit hard, twice, it couldn't happen again; I thought. Morality? It was there in the recesses of my mind. Its cat and mouse. I was Robin Hood, Joan of Arc. Crimes validated by the system, not without cause or justification in the back of my mind.
It was the last time, the fluke, the near death, and a conversation that finally brought me to a halt. There was a good cop. He wrote me a letter. I would like to talk to you, he said. He was not my arresting officer, just a jolly old sideliner in the passenger seat of the car. What are you doing? He said. You are young and beautiful and intelligent, don’t you know that? He said. Why do you put yourself here? He said.
I didn’t put myself here, I said.
Yes, you did, he said. Never argue with a cop, I knew. He had the last words. They stuck. They marinated, stewed.You put yourself here. I did. I did. I did. Ithought. I put myself here. I put myself here, and I am not a victim of the system. I am a criminal; a girl, still, but a criminal. Who was I? Where was I?
I had to work hard. I had to grow hard. I had to take responsibility for my actions. I had to claim choice. I had to love outside of myself. I had to exchange self-destruction and chaos for morality and social consciousness. It was life or death, and it took three strikes for me to finally get a home run.
9/26/05
Escaping Ground Zero
There was a tunnel, deep and long and gray in the peripheral. The exit was black not white. Black ghosts swam in out, melting, peeling, cracking, and swirling through her, pulling at her wrists, her fingers, her toes. No she cried, I don’t want to go. There was no light, just darkness. It was black. She fought, they pulled. The beings whispered and sneered. She opened her eyes. It was all still there, the struggle. She was dying. They were laughing. She wanted white noise, her bed, silence and peace. Their whispers grew louder, they pulled harder. Her body grew weary, she ached, her wrists tender, sprained. The tunnel dispersed into particles fading into the shadows of her room. The whispers stopped. She sat up right in the pink of her bed, gasping deeply for air. She choked and sobbed and popped some pills. She would not sleep for days. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready to go.
There was a party, a bonfire; a hole in the ground and stones and dirt and drums and white rabbits. The air was crisp, a tingle to the skin. Sweaters and caps and boots covered in mud. She was walking to the end of the world. There was an end. She could hear it, smell it. She knew where it was and she searched, for hours. A train track began. She followed. She tripped over the slabs of uneven wood. It was an old track, rotting it appeared. The track ended and she wandered until she found it again, this time in another direction. She followed, she knew she would come to the end of the world. Was it a cliff, an empty abyss, a tunnel? She didn’t know, only that it was calling her name, waiting, expecting her discovery. Time passed. She became lost. The night grew colder the snow began to fall. White flecks everywhere. White noise. White tracks. Footprints amiss. She looked back. They say don’t look back. She did. Tracks descended behind in every direction. Her tracks looked askew. They made no sense. She grew weary, frightened, confused. It wouldn’t end. Hours before she would come to wake in the field, in the snow, shaking from her bones. Wetness beneath her spine.
There was a dream, a belly, swollen. She stood before a double window, naked, bulging breast and stomach. There was a dagger in her hand. She gripped. She stabbed. Upon her head and arms and legs and in the center of her rounded abdomen she cut X’s. Her chin to the ceiling she screamed. There was no pain, only astro-turf digging into her knees. She slipped somewhere in between and fell onto a pad of lawn that padded her into sleep and wrapped her wounds and erased the Xs from her body.
There was a street, on which beggars and prophets roamed. There were speeches in graveyards, idealism, heroism, rank unshowered beings enveloped in the stank of stale cigarette smoke and boozed body odor. They blamed society, claimed society, wanted to change society. They were all crazy, insane hypocrites. It was a joke. She laughed. He had a knife. He put it to her neck. I could kill you. She knew he could, she knew he wouldn’t. She choked on her stomach. She ran. Escaped. Escaped from it all. Made it out. Into the light, into the day, the reason, the right.
There was a party, a bonfire; a hole in the ground and stones and dirt and drums and white rabbits. The air was crisp, a tingle to the skin. Sweaters and caps and boots covered in mud. She was walking to the end of the world. There was an end. She could hear it, smell it. She knew where it was and she searched, for hours. A train track began. She followed. She tripped over the slabs of uneven wood. It was an old track, rotting it appeared. The track ended and she wandered until she found it again, this time in another direction. She followed, she knew she would come to the end of the world. Was it a cliff, an empty abyss, a tunnel? She didn’t know, only that it was calling her name, waiting, expecting her discovery. Time passed. She became lost. The night grew colder the snow began to fall. White flecks everywhere. White noise. White tracks. Footprints amiss. She looked back. They say don’t look back. She did. Tracks descended behind in every direction. Her tracks looked askew. They made no sense. She grew weary, frightened, confused. It wouldn’t end. Hours before she would come to wake in the field, in the snow, shaking from her bones. Wetness beneath her spine.
There was a dream, a belly, swollen. She stood before a double window, naked, bulging breast and stomach. There was a dagger in her hand. She gripped. She stabbed. Upon her head and arms and legs and in the center of her rounded abdomen she cut X’s. Her chin to the ceiling she screamed. There was no pain, only astro-turf digging into her knees. She slipped somewhere in between and fell onto a pad of lawn that padded her into sleep and wrapped her wounds and erased the Xs from her body.
There was a street, on which beggars and prophets roamed. There were speeches in graveyards, idealism, heroism, rank unshowered beings enveloped in the stank of stale cigarette smoke and boozed body odor. They blamed society, claimed society, wanted to change society. They were all crazy, insane hypocrites. It was a joke. She laughed. He had a knife. He put it to her neck. I could kill you. She knew he could, she knew he wouldn’t. She choked on her stomach. She ran. Escaped. Escaped from it all. Made it out. Into the light, into the day, the reason, the right.
9/19/05
Funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter
At the tip of my tongue I feel a terribly romantic notion that life as I want it would be some sort of reveling: to wake up in the morning guiltless, with no conclusions, pretexts, misconceptions, prejudices, and a glass of orange juice instead of coffee.
Life, as I’d want it, would exist within the perimeters of bliss: to revel in my lust and love, to never have to make excuses or pay a bill, eat fennel or comb my hair after I’ve been driving with the windows down. I’d never have to laugh because I am supposed to. My daughter would never shit on the floor and paint the walls with it. I would never work in a bar or a restaurant or around food and drink, unless my job was to participate in the eating and drinking of it all. I would be open-minded. I would love back hair, egos, bad sex, vanity, and rich fuckers.
Life, as I’d want it, would be simple and glorious. I would sleep for days.
Relationships are fickle and I am always edgy, but no one knows. I once dated a guy that told me reading reduced people to assholes and that my nail polish would come off when I took a shower. Sometimes.
I once dated a guy that told me I look like Iggy Pop naked. Perhaps.
My family has been referred to as white trash, as porch monkeys. My older sister once ran away with a butcher knife. People thought she was crazy. She is. But that’s not the point.
We used to always live in trailer-parks. We once lived in a trailer-park in Jacksonville, Florida. Hurricanes happened often. Folk in Maryland have a hard time understanding the logic of this. Understand.
Life, as it is, makes me out to be a hypocrite. I want to be something I am not. I want to love people in spite of themselves. I want to wear my heart on my sleeve. Nina Simone has a song, “Funkier than a Mosquito’s Tweeter.” That is my life. That is our lives. It is a rat race. A place where fuckers hate to get fucked and lovers hate to be loved.
I hate to hate. I love to fuck. I love to love and be loved. But sometimes life isn’t that simple. Simple and glorious?
Life as I’d want it would be without demons in everyone’s closet. There would be action without war. Guinivere wouldn’t dream about sharks.
War? You don’t even know, said Rory on Christmas Eve. He was stuck in Faluga, while Carl was getting court marshaled for shooting some guy in the face. Happy Holidays.
9/12/05
Purple muumuus and a Pruny thumb
Purple silky shine pressed between the index and thumb of my right hand. Soft soggy left thumb pruned by intense salivation. Suck and rub, suck and rub. There was nothing better.
My mother hated that I sucked my thumb. She hated that I carried around a muumuu. And she especially hated when my muumuu would consist of one of her lingerie, ribbon and bowed undergarments.
One morning, at church, after a good long lecture about the “noise-factor” of my thumb-sucking, I produced from my cabbage patch-head purse, a perfectly sized, purple silk thong with a large eighties styled silk, purple bow located on the back, at the top of the crack area of the thong. I was semi-discreet. Sitting four siblings away from her, I held my prized muumuu between my fingers and rubbed. I thought it was beautiful in every sense. It was after all purple, my favorite color.
I restrained with much difficulty, however, my thumb sucking. I did not want to go to hell. Children’s Time came, and my four siblings and I shimmied out of the pew and up front to sit on the gray carpeted ledge with our classically robed minister. I gripped my purple muumuu tightly, fiercely with my right hand. It was slightly balled-up. The minister was an odd looking fellow with thick blue-tinted glasses, and a perfectly round bald spot on the back of his head, the size of a softball. He had a nasal-like voice and would always rub his hands together quickly, like he was cold. It was usually cold in the church. My eldest brother always had the most to say and as a result always sat fairly close to the man clad in pale cream. We would follow our brother. During this particularly long Children’s Time, however, I began to get an itch to rub my secretly palmed muumuu. So I un-balled my hand, shook out the crinkles, held it up high and then brought it down to my lap in order to rub. There was a gasp from the congregation. It was my mother. What are you doing with that? Shrieked my brother. Ew, gross, shrieked my other brother. The minister said nothing. He appeared entertained, perhaps even turned on. My mother had been a hottie. Who knows?
Children’s Time soon ended. My mother marched me out of the church and I received a thrashing in the name of embarrassment. I also received a life-long tormenting by my siblings, who all through the awkward years of elementary school, middle school, high school, and even college will remind me, along with any new outsiders I have with me, of my awkward childhood moment.
I do not feel dirty or ashamed. Instead, I feel a slight heat in my neck and a fond fuzziness in the back of my mind when reminded, for the comfort of a good thumb and a purple muumuu.9/6/05
Crispy Leg-Pulling
I’ve always found something comforting in the crackle of tobacco and the hiss of burning rolling paper. With the springboard of a striking match or a clicking lighter, the sound is practically music. Breathing adds originality to the composition, with short, quick inhalations and exhalations sounding a bit like a series of staccatos, and those with long deep expresses reminiscent of a fortissimo.
My dad, or papa, as we called him, would always roll his own cigarettes. He claimed the rolling was therapeutic. He’d come home, weary from work, grab a Bud, and sit to the right of our thick-threaded tan plaid couch. There was a coffee table on the right and on it a reddish tobacco can, a small book of rolling papers, a ceramic blue ashtray, and a wooden pipe-set. My younger sister and I would climb up on his lap and watch him as he placed the tobacco in the paper, lick the edge, secure the tips, and light.
As he smoked he’d tell us stories. He’d always begin the story with something familiar: people we knew of or his childhood home. The stories were always in first person with him being the explorer or the troublemaker or the miracle worker. He’d blow smoke rings and French inhale while he spoke, and we would hang on every word he said. I wanted his stories to be real, and they were, as long as they continued. But, more often than not, he'd finish his stories with a line about how he was pulling somebody's leg, which of course was usually ours.
When we got older, we realized that most of his life was a bit like fiction, but also that most of what we had thought was his real- life was truly fiction. Papa had always been a bit of a fibber and an extremist. He still tells stories these days, but with the presidence that they are real. We know that they are not, but we also know that he just wants more than anything to still be able to sit on that old couch, that has since burned away, and tell his two youngest daughters a tale or two.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
