Todd Camack @ tumblr.

Ray Harryhausen died, this week. The great special effects man. And I, though feeling badly about it, first wondered if- Well… I’d- Wasn’t he already dead?

First, I often start sentences with conjunctions and I don’t give a fuck. I try to write in a natural voice rather than in the manner of a fucking grammar robot. Anyway, my brain is fading away. I say that as if falling backward into a divan, my eyes closed, the back of my hand against my forehead. I’m wearing a large, billowy skirt and a corset and have been sucking down Mint Juleps all day, so don’t grief me; I’m suffering through the vapors.

My brain may or may not be fading away. It’s certainly under the influence of prescribed chemistry. What that treats as well as what it does has a side-effect of-

I had to get up to locate my back-scratcher and by the time I returned, I forgot what I was getting at. Which is probably a large part of what I was getting at.

I’m surprisingly okay with this. Being as I’m notoriously stuck in the gad-damned past all the time and have always been. To forget it is something of an odd gift and I’ve accepted it more or less happily. After so long with my face pointed backward rather than ahead. Or especially in the now. Not “pointed” but just there. Enjoying the simple benefits of the present against it. The breeze. The sunlight. Scents of meals being prepared as I walk through a neighborhood around dinnertime and the smell of drying laundry in the air. Clouds. Whatever’s happening. Nothing of import. Simple shit. You never know that it is important until you’re not experiencing it, until you’re remembering it, instead. Or trying to. Instead of trying, I can focus on wandering about and experiencing it and when it’s out of my head, I’ll be experiencing something else. It’s not a tragedy.

Hadn’t he already died?

A friend of mine who’s near my age challenge each other (and too frequently, these days) with obituaries. To see if it’s not just me or her who’s thought that- You know. Already dead.

I hadn’t known George Jones had died.

“Honey, I hadn’t wanted to bring it up. You were going through a lot, that week.”

True.

It’s not like- Often, it’s not as if I’d be torn-up about the passing of some of these people. It’s just that- They’re names who’ve floated through my life from its start. Celebrities, well-known to me. Favorites. Or just names. Little more than names. “I know that guy.” Not really. But I know of him. Of her. I’m familiar. Now they’re- Gone. It’s disturbing. Obviously, it reminds me that life is not a forever thing. Including mine.

One day, I will die and somebody might say to somebody else: “Isn’t he already dead?” If it pauses them at all.

“I don’t know who he is.”

I was shocked when my friend confessed to be ignorant of Ray Harryhausen. The man behind all those cool stop-motion special effects in the movies that populated so many of my childhood weekend afternoons. Those “Sinbad” films.

I could imagine her shrug (she’s in Florida; I’m in Idaho).

She was familiar with his work, she discovered. “But I’d never heard of him.” She added that “on a semi-related note”, she’d read that the rapper Ja Rule was just released from prison after serving two years but hadn’t realized his absence.

I am not familiar with Ja Rule’s work. At least, I’m not aware of familiarity.

I’m old.

So, the other night, I’d planned to get more tightly into the subject of racism, which winds tightly about my life by default of time and place. “Time” being when my life occurred on the timeline of history, and “place” being where it did so. In the U.S. in the mid-‘70s, it had been hushed. Racism. It wasn’t in vogue. But it sure as fuck wasn’t dead. And for those who found it out of fashion, many only fashionably decried it. Behind closed doors, elder Americans often cursed “niggers” for upsetting the status quo as it had existed up until just a few years before. Young people who’d lived in such homes but had socialized with more progressive friends sometimes wanted quite badly, I think, to be enlightened. But I remember their faces, some of these young adults who’d come to student teach at my elementary school, as they choked out phrases such as “we’re all the same” and I knew they wanted to buy it but somehow couldn’t and I wonder, now, where they are today and how their philosophies evolved or devolved  Because I know a lot of people of that age group who went kind of- Wow. Off the charts with the right wing outlook and rhetoric and, like their parents had, behind their doors or even in public among those they believed of like mind, the word “nigger” shot out of their mouths regularly. And derogatory remarks about Mexicans. And Asians. And whomever. Anyone not like them. And to me, to my ear, to my site and mind, this shit’s exploded since I’ve become an adult. At a time I’d hoped we – as a culture – would’ve moved beyond it. Over the past weeks, Americans of Middle Eastern descent have been white-knuckled, afraid of their neighbors because so many of them equate them with terrorists and terrorism. Some have resorted to violence against these Americans: Arab-Americans, Persian-Americans, various other Americans of the Muslim faith. Some of those of Middle Eastern extraction aren’t even Muslim, themselves but of some Christian sect or perhaps even Jewish. All targets of racist remarks, threats, and beatings.

I recall too well how, as a kid, we’d be eating out and a black dude would come through the door as if he expected a meal in exchange for money or something and to eat in peace but instead would get a wall of shock from the white diners inside. It hadn’t been too long since maybe that action would’ve gotten him thrown back out into the street by many or most of the patrons within. Maybe he was intentionally pushing the envelope. Testing his rights as a human being to live as God had created him and without fear of persecution for it. Maybe he was naïve, perhaps used to dining in a more familiar diner without hassle. The whites inside might not have liked it either way. But they knew that times had changed and, like it or not, that man was eating with them. Not in the alley, not elsewhere. Inside. With them. It hadn’t been too long before then that things- Things were different. And I was born into a period of transition. I never knew a time when someone couldn’t enter the same establishment as I could because of the color of their skin. But I sure as Hell experienced the wrath of whites who had to share. That chill of being unwelcome with a good amount of fear added to it. It wasn’t even directed at me and I could feel it.

Now, a big secret I harbor is that, up until I was 7, I’d never known a single black soul. There were no blacks where I was from in rural Nevada. I was familiar with them only through my grandparents’ television set. I remember the first time I saw a black man. I was- I can’t describe the feeling. It was elation, intense interest. I’d wanted to go speak to him.

The relative I was with pulled me back. Explained to me that black people would harm me if I got too close. Can you believe that shit? It’s a head-shaker to me, though, as well that I’d had to see that individual as a curiosity rather than a human being because of people like this nit-wit relative. Because I’m sure that this young black man had plenty of relatives warning him to stay clear of us white folk in fear that we might harm him if he got too close. So he didn’t. He kept a distance away. And I was taken by the hand and led away. To “safety”.

I consider this little occurrence to be one of the most shameful things I’ve ever been a part of. I always have. If even I was guiltless of wrongdoing. I was a tool for its manipulation. I’ll never forget the man’s face. I just wanted to talk to the man. I wanted to know something about him. To understand his reality. Rather than the one others were forced into believing because our culture was only then trying to undo hundreds of years of crimes against folks like him. I wanted to know.

It was my great-uncle’s wife who’d pulled me away. It was and remains the most hateful thing I’ve ever experienced and to have been used to make that man feel like less of a man… I can’t forgive that. Not without some kind of admission of guilt and of being wrong. I haven’t seen her since that summer, though, and I- She’s not in my great-uncle’s life, anymore, I don’t think. So she lives on in my memory and will only live on, there, being an ass. As for the young man… God only knows.

My writing’s all over the place, these days. I’m so full of meds that it’s a wonder I’ve written this much. As for its quality, hey. I throw my hands up into the air. You get what you get. It’s just turned 1 a.m. and I’m beginning to drag. A cousin asked how the writing was going and we got into a discussion about the epilepsy and- That kind of thing wears on me. That’s not meant as anything negative to my cousin. I’m grateful for his interest, that he cared enough to ask how things were going. I just get detached easily. Foggy. Tired. Too many questions makes me want to withdraw. Quickly.

The same is true of reading. Of going over news and studying current events. I like to know what’s going on. It’s always been an interest of mine – even as a child. Nowadays, I’m pretty fast to come to a point at which I’m done. Where I can’t do it, anymore.

I tell myself not to worry about it, that I’ll figure out a way around it. I believe I will. I just wish it was sooner. That it would come sooner.

My next appointment with my neurologist is Thursday afternoon. My birthday. I’ll be 45. Fuck. I don’t feel it, 45. I still feel like a kid. But sometimes I feel a lot older than 45. Was it that long ago that I was that 7-year-old I mentioned earlier? The little kid who idolized Evel Knievel? I had a bike that looked like a motorcycle my Grandpa Sandy picked up at the Western Auto store in Elko, Nevada, during a summer visit – the summer of 1976. It was the Bicentennial; everything was in red, white, and blue. Even the trains that went through Northern Nevada. White, with red and blue trim. As was my bike. Had a fake gas tank and shock absorbers. Knobby tires. Looked like Evel Knievel’s motorcycle, I thought, and- I never once tried to jump it. Because it was kind of beefy. And I was a little guy. The neighborhood kids tried to get me to lend it to them so they could take it out and treat it cruelly.

“Can I tear the plastic junk off it?” one asked, suggesting it’d make it lighter and better at whatever it was he’d had in mind.

I refused. It was my baby. I took it back to San Diego with me in one piece. Pristine. I waxed it. Put Armor-All on its seat and tires and the pad across the handlebars. Kept its chrome shiny. Avoided anywhere that could’ve been hiding thorns, nails, and anything else that might harm its inner tubes.

I was 8. I rode that thing around San Diego like an adult on a motorcycle.

I liked to park it just inside the entrance to our naval housing apartment unit in the daytime while making quick trips upstairs to our place to eat or whatever. The lady downstairs warned me about this more than once.

One evening, I went upstairs for dinner and left the bike unsecured overnight. The next morning, it was gone.

I guess we all have that one beautiful thing that we lose sometime in our childhood. I had several.

The lady downstairs was named Billie. She was a tall, beautiful ebony woman with glistening hair; I had a crush on her. While her husband was deployed, she retreated to the room just below mine (which wasn’t just mine; I shared it with my cousin Jimmy)- She retreated to the room just below to relax while expecting.

I didn’t like making Billie mad at me, but I easily made any adult mad at me, as I wasn’t the best-behaved kid in the world. After my Grandma Gwen passed away, I decided that no adult had the authority to tell me what to do unless I gave them that authority. I constantly fought with my aunt and uncle. I fought with Jimmy. Sometimes I’d piss Billie off, too. Like the time we all went to a naval barbecue and I, for some now-unknown reason, leaped out of Billie’s car and told her and my aunt that I would walk back home.

Billie said “fine”, that she didn’t play games with little assholes like me. She didn’t say “asshole”, but the idea came across clearly.

After I’d walked about half a block, she’d come up from behind and ordered me into the car. Not in a rough way but in a gently firm one. “Gently firm” is an oxymoron that most mothers probably easily get.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t say a word. I did as I was told.

A few days later, I was upstairs making some kind of racket when my cousin ran in and told me Billie needed to see me. “Like, now!”

She’d asked me to keep it down several times by then because she was resting. By that time, her baby bump had become enormous and she tired easily. And I don’t think I’d mentioned it before now, but she had a little girl to take care of, too, and it was really bothering her that her husband wasn’t there to be with them.

I refused to go downstairs. As much as I loved her, I didn’t want any part of being on her bad side.

I went downstairs to go play and as I hit the last step, her door opened.

It was her little girl.

“My mom wants to talk to you,” she reported.

Great.

I shuffled inside, to where she sat in a rocking chair, looking beautiful but worn out.

“Sit down, Todd,” she ordered. Firmly. Yet gently.

I did as she told me.

She didn’t say anything at first. She just smiled. It was a weak, tired smile. Then she began to speak.

“While my husband’s at sea, I need someone to look after us. Can you look after us, Todd?”

I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! What do I do?”

Billie smiled. In the way an exhausted person might. “I might need you to run an errand for me, now and then. And I need you to make sure that I get plenty of rest because the baby’s coming, soon. Do you think you can do all that?”

I nodded. “I can!”

“Okay.” With difficulty, she reached behind the chair and pulled out a purple box. “I have something for you.”

She handed it to me.

“Go ahead,” she implored, smiling. “Open it!”

I did. It was filled with chocolates.

“They’re ‘bon-bons’,” she explained.

I asked her what she needed me to do first.

“I just need to rest for now,” she replied.

I promised her I’d see to it that nobody disturbed her.

“I know I can depend on you,” she smiled, her eyes falling shut.

I don’t know why, when I turn to my blog, things get dark. I guess it’s my outlet for such things when there’s no other ear. It’s a captive audience. It’s readily-available therapy. It’s the nearest, most-convenient toilet for the contents of my head. It should be filled with humor but instead there’s-

Yeah.

Let’s get away from that for awhile.

I discovered that I could make people laugh about halfway through elementary school. In a predominantly naval neighborhood in the San Diego area that is now probably a huge shithole. Back then — in the mid-’70s — it was- The perfect time to be a kid in Southern California. For me, anyway. I think there were probably a lot of “perfect times” for it, dependent upon who you where and where you were located in SoCal, exactly. I lived there at a time when my age group was probably going through the death throes of that period most people attribute to the ’50s. I’ve said similar of other locales I’d resided in throughout my pre-pubescent youth. It was an attitude. It was a look. It was audible, in the forefront and the background. It was Cub Scouts and Brownies and dime stores with Mantovani piped in through speakers over sections that have no equivalent in today’s retail. Roasted nut-scented and we could still make a candy killing in those days with pocket change as the international oil scene had only begun to squeeze at the American dollar and- It was such a divided time. Short hair. Long hair. I’d never met a black kid until I’d moved to California and into a part of the San Diego area that was known to be rough and without many whites and this was in 2nd Grade. I was one of only two white kids in my class and my non-white classmates would gather around me almost fascinated because they’d never really had much contact with whites and if the world had a recording of our minds, then, and the things going through them and the discoveries we’d made about each other and ourselves. It was beautiful. Little human beings. Tarnished by the one bit of ugliness I’d come across at that school and it was from that one other white kid, who’d leaned in to me, one morning, to confess to me that he was glad that he was born white and wasn’t I glad, too? Wasn’t I, he wanted to know.

In fact, he was one of the few I couldn’t-

And then it becomes clearer in my memory. That the school sat at about the line the separated the black neighborhood to the north of where we lived with the Hispanic neighborhood to the south, in which we lived, and the Hispanics hated us for the most part and it wasn’t being at school that was a problem but getting to school and getting home could be. We were “mugged” our first morning. By a little boy and a little girl who just assumed that white kids would collapse under their Hispanitude — and they were shocked when I refused to hand over my pocket change. I’d never experienced such a thing and I don’t think they had, either. My cousins implored me not to put up a hassle. But I- I refused to- It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. And I remember the faces on those kids. I don’t think they believed it was happening, either. They shuffled about nervously, seemingly unable to comprehend the situation. Then they left. And we left. I don’t recall ever seeing them again. But other neighborhood kids crossed our lives and not usually well. Our neighbors didn’t seem very keen on our presence, there. I wished we’d found a place north of the school, in a black neighborhood. Where I felt we’d have been- Safer. Because the things I saw in our neighbor’s faces worried me. All because, I believed, we were white.

Such things- Well. It’s the world, trying to be figured-out by a 7-year-old. In changing times. Popular culture, then, was filled with white people. Non-whites were just beginning to come into view and not without a fight. Often, not in flattering ways. “Officially”, there were no gays. America was Suburbia. Middle class. With a laugh track.

That house we’d moved into was a rental. The only one big-enough for us that my uncle could afford. My sister Amy and I had lived with our maternal grandparents until that past summer, when my grandmother had died of cancer at the same age as I am now. 44. I’ll actually be 45 in a week, so I’ve already lived longer than she did. I’ve survived a football-sized tumor in my chest. I’m not nor have I ever been a smoker — but I was, until two years ago at the end of this coming summer, a resident of Nevada and that’s often hazardous to one’s health in and of itself. Anyhow, my grandmother passed and my sister Amy and I went to live with an aunt and uncle in the San Diego area and that was probably beyond their means. A naval man, my uncle — my aunt’s husband — signed up for naval housing and eventually got us an apartment further north and more to the center of town, in the more-peaceful neighborhood of Cabrillo Mesa. Where — upon arriving — I met a black girl I’d thought I’d make friends with, and was beaten the fuck up. Because, white people had been assholes to minorities, it seems, for centuries. And the effects of this treatment trickled down to the personal level, even to that afternoon in early 1976.

I couldn’t understand it. I was 7. I was still processing a wicked amount of bad shit that was laid on me that past summer. Death. Loss. Relocation. A new way of life. A new culture, really. And subcultures I’d never known before.

That girl got hold of my hair and twirled me around like a fucking tetherball. I can still feel the follicles being separated from my scalp. And the look on her face, which was somewhere between hatred and joy.

She was mean. Angry. I’ll never know her story. But she was full of viciousness. Not just toward me, but toward almost anyone who neared her.

I learned to stay away and was relieved to find out that she was moving out of the housing complex into the spring.

I’m smiling an odd smile, right now. Thinking about- Where this post is taking me. It’s become a lot longer and traipsed into places I’d not intended it to. I’d wanted to get into how I’d discovered the joys of being able to make people laugh. That I could. To do so gave me a bit of “celebrity” status at school and opened social doors for me. But I was fast becoming not- Not all that social.

It wasn’t sudden. It began soon after we’d moved into that bad neighborhood to the south. And it had little to do with that neighborhood, really. It was the loss I was trying to navigate through. My grandmother had been the only real mother I’d ever had. My mother came and went and was less a presence in my life than my aunts were and two of my sister who she’d kept with her were less close to me than any of my cousins. My dad was off living his life. I’d only recalled meeting him once in my seven years and that was a few months before. In a fleeting way. For an afternoon. He’d come to town, taken me to the drugstore, bought me a watch, and was gone. I still have the watch, actually. I’ve never been able to misplace that watch for long; it always turns up. Even after my move from Nevada to Idaho. At the bottom of a dozen boxes, there it was. It still works. Needs a new band. It’s too small for an adult. But that old Timex still works. And it’s been through a helluva lot since 1975.

I’d separate myself from everyone. Spend time at the side of the house. Up the mango tree in the backyard. In my bedroom. Alone. Listening to the radio. My grandmother’s radio. With its cassette player. I’d listen to her cassettes, too. Country music. Then-contemporary stuff. Some “oldies”.

I was combative with everyone around me. My aunt and uncle, my cousins, my sister. Anyone who came around. In a slightly toned-down manner from the night I was told my grandmother died, but pretty much constantly since. I had my good days. I was better at school. But there were times I’d withdraw from others — even from friends.

One afternoon, a bigger kid found me moping around and invited me over to his place. He had this toy or that toy and I wanted to check that shit out. Before I knew it, he was on me. I couldn’t stop him. I was able to get free and get to the door, but he beat me to it and held it shut. His mother heard the commotion and forced the door open and I shot out and ran and I ran through the housing and across streets and through parking lots and over lawns and I didn’t stop running until I ran into our building and up the stairs and into our house and into my room and if I could’ve ran after I’d made it into there and bed, beneath my blanket and through my tears, I would’ve.

I was probably a month away from my eighth birthday. To this day, I can’t easily let another person touch me in an intimate manner. And I remain single.

Within the next year and a half, I’d started to withdraw from schoolwork. And from dreams. The dreams I had for my life were fading. I’d sit in class, ignoring my studies, feeling- Empty. The further I’d get behind, the more lost I became. The emptier I became.

Two things saved me. First was the discovery that I could joke my way through pain. With the side-effect that my fellow students — and at least one of my teachers — found me gad-damned hilarious. While under its anesthetic, I was almost passively soaking up information. Sometimes beyond the level of my classmates. Sometimes approaching an understanding of things indicative of an adult. But I’d become violent, too. Since being raped. Defensively so. I was a little guy and well-aware that my size contributed to my not having been able to protect myself from harm in the past. One afternoon as school was getting out, a kid a grade ahead of me began to make threats against me. I mouthed-off at him, gambling that he was a shit-talker. He wasn’t. He and some of his buddies followed me off school grounds and across the street into naval housing but most of a block away from my place and he threw. His friends got behind me and tripped me while I tried frantically to fight back. A short time later, an elderly woman interceded and sent the kid and his friends away. I ran off down the alley behind the housing units toward my place so no one would see me crying. My lip was busted open. By the time I got home, I was in hysterics. I closed myself inside my room and refused to come out.

The next afternoon, the same thing. Only this time, a group of kids followed us from the school, chanting “Fight! Fight!” and when we got to the same spot of naval housing yard as we’d found ourselves the afternoon before, I didn’t wait; I hit him first. “Dennis” was his name. His friends tried to trip me, but other kids shouted at them to stay out of it. Older kids came out of the housing units to watch. We fought until it was broken up again. I can’t recall by whom. All I know is that I again hurried home via the alley and locked myself in my room. As if Dennis was after me.

Then came the third day. The group of chanting kids following us had grown. And just so we’re clear, I’d really hoped to avoid a fight on each of the three instances. It just somehow came to be that I was stopped at the same spot each time — presumably by Dennis, who’d decided on that first afternoon that he’d hated me because of the shirt I was wearing. A generic maroon sports jersey with the number “88” silk-screened onto it in yellow. Before that afternoon, I don’t remember him. Suddenly, I’m his worst enemy. But that afternoon — the third afternoon — it was different. There was another vibe in the air. By this time, there was a certain underlying desire to see me — a much littler kid — beat the fuck out of this bully, who was now coming across as somewhat nervous. Kids chanting my name as well as desires to “Kick his ass!” filled the air, while it was like- Like Dennis was starting to want to back out of it but determined to go on out of pride. But his aura wasn’t what it was. There was unease about him. And when we stopped, it was more like him suggesting that this is where we should go ahead and get it over with.

His buddies again attempted to interfere. On that day, however, they were promptly checked by the older boys from the naval housing behind us who’d looked on the day before. A friend of mine would later say that they’d actually cheered me on the day before after asking what my name was, cheering me on to stand up to the bully. I hadn’t heard this. On this day — the third day — however, I heard. They were right there, threatening to beat the shit out of his buddies if they messed with me, then cheering me on in the fight.

I punched Dennis. He began to cry.

I don’t remember how it went after that. It ended quickly. Dennis left. The older kids came up to me and congratulated me, saying I’d “won”.

“You made him cry!”

I smiled. Yet, after it was all over, I again sneaked down the alley and to my place and into my room to sob.

There became a- A- I dunno. A “thing”. Something about me at the school. A legend? A myth. About me being “tough”. Because I’d survived Dennis for a week. Less than a week. He never bothered me again. But neither did anyone else. Until, at the beginning of 4th Grade, I got angry at my best friend — a truly fabled kid around the school named “Yogi” — who was known to be a “rough and tumble” guy, and I busted his mouth open. It shattered Yogi’s persona of being tough and, thinking back, I never knew him to have ever been in a fight. But after I’d hit him, every asshole for five square miles was coming for me and life for me became a whole lot of scared.

I eschewed violence after that. Two weeks later, my mom came from Nevada and took my sister Amy and I back with her, her boyfriend, and my sister Trish. My sister Wendi had been sent to live with her father. And life began anew. There was no more punching on my part — but I would let others, including kids younger and smaller than I, punch me. Quite badly. But I continued to hide behind laughter. I began to hide behind books, too. Documentary films. Knowledge. Although certain subjects at school suffered due to lack of interest. And old-fashioned laziness. I just didn’t feel it, sometimes, and couldn’t be bothered. But my grades were better than I feared. Even in spite of very stupid errors and occasional bad behavior in class in the form of clowning about.

I suppose I hid behind books before I left San Diego. By the time I got into junior high, books were where I went to escape bad situations at school, in my social life, and at home. The county library was a second home. But I’d still attempt humor. By then, I’d almost completely withdrawn. From everything, everyone. I’d wonder where I’d be if I hadn’t left California. If I’d have fallen through some crack. In spite of anything, I did better in school in Nevada. And, after some intense soul-searching one summer, I returned to school with a desire to focus on leaping out of my shell. Which I did. Using humor as a major tool in doing so. And it worked. I graduated high school among the top students of my class while- While being among friends.

I left high school happy and with the feeling that I’d accomplished something. That I’d beaten something that had been out to destroy me for no particular reason other than a shrug and a “why not”.

I- Uh… I probably didn’t manage to be true — ever — to what I’d originally meant to discuss, tonight. But I think it’s probably a good story for me to read to myself. To remind myself, in times of strife, that I’ve beaten far worse before now. If I’m battling whatever. Something good to remember. When I lose faith. When I retreat. From battle.

Not a masterpiece. But- I can rest well, having written it.

I shut out the lights at just after 5 a.m., this morning, after struggling to recapture the writing bug that I set aside months ago, at which time I thought, “I can pick this up in a few days. I just need a break.” And maybe I had needed a break. Because I was putting a lot of myself into it. Not just time and effort but me. Personality. Wounds. Hope. Anything I can think of that can be labeled somehow about me, I put into writing. Especially into those parts of that anthology I was working on. I haven’t given it up – but I haven’t picked it back up. Antiseizure medication wrapped itself around mind and body and my thoughts became- I dunno. I blank out in a minor way while trying to find the right words and- I sigh. And smile a little. I’ve become accustomed to it, even incorporating it into my writing. If I can. Remember that film “I.Q.”? With Meg Ryan as Einstein’s niece? How she’d be into a statement and the point would escape her until a bit later, when she’d triumphantly announce it while in the middle of something else? Those lost words come to me like that. Or memories. Memories have sometimes become like that for me, too. I haven’t let it bother me much. It doesn’t bother me much. I can’t recall if it had when it started becoming a problem. I’m not sure if it is a problem. As I said, I’ve just incorporated it into my writing. Or communication in general. Because I do the same thing in speech. Have I already said that? Sometimes I repeat myself, having forgotten what I’ve already said. Or what I’ve already written. It’s what I do.

The meds tire me. Physically. All I want to do is sleep. Certain other things about me tend to counter this. I’m an insomniac. I’ve got sore ribs that make getting to sleep difficult. Those come as a result of a tumor excision that took place almost a year and a month ago. And I’ve got one of those brains that doesn’t like to turn off unless it’s completely exhausted – even when drugged. Emotionally, they- I shrug. I don’t- Together, the meds and the epileptic seizures they treat have me pretty dysfunctional. Considering that will get me pretty depressed at times. Enough to have attempted suicide last year. I felt useless. A burden on my family. I obviously survived. After a few days in a coma. During which time a football-sized tumor was accidentally located in my chest, crushing my right lung and leaning into my heart, diaphragm, and pressing against my chest cavity’s wall. It was attached to all that shit. As soon as I was discharged, I spent a couple of days in a local mental hospital for observation, then released for surgery to remove the tumor, which was a success. Incidentally, I have 12-month follow-ups to check for tumor regrowth. I had my annual CT scan at the end of last week and got the results Monday; no regrowth!

I haven’t been writing because I haven’t been able to think creatively through the mental cloud I’m suffering through. “Suffering” isn’t the correct term. I can’t think of a better one at the moment. “Suffering” brings up images of me, weeping in a corner. In pain. Hardly. At worst, I’m drawing blanks left and right. Everything comes up blank. There’s no creative spark happening in this void. I suffer through that. Or have been. There are headaches. But there always are and I’ve almost come to ignore them. Sometimes, however… Sometimes, they’re- They overwhelm me. “Sometimes” meaning frequently. I can’t think through that. Not conventionally. Or “conventionally” for me. Which maybe isn’t very conventional. In recent weeks, though, the desire to do something has begun – or attempted – to trump all this and, like how I’ve come to incorporate missing things into my thoughts and actions, I’ve come to wonder if I can’t do similar with creativity, somehow. Just the hope of it inspiring bits of creativity. Until I sat down to force it. Then it faded. And left me at my keyboard, skimming Pinterest for hours for interesting-looking photos of edibles and tattooed ladies.

Sometime shortly before I ended up in bed, last night, I began a blog entry on a subject that was just there. You know? And I wrote. I just wrote. It wasn’t a masterpiece. And it tasted of- The tear salt of the melodramatic, maybe. I don’t like to write about the negativity of my life, actually. I do, however, feel compelled to explain things. Always have. Maybe I was trying to explain something to myself. Maybe-maybe-maybe. I detect a lot of “maybes” in this post. Indicates questions to which there are answers I’m searching for. Things I’m trying to figure out. Things about myself. I’m no longer outwardly suicidal, but there’s a lot of darkness there, yet. I guess I- I know. I know that if I get it out, I can see it and study it and play with it and understand it and- Maybe… Maybe I’ll be able to put it away and call it “dealt-with” and I can get on with my life and no longer be kept up late with thoughts of it.

Yeah. A lot of that brain activity at night when I should be sleeping is- It’s this stuff.

If I can figure it out, maybe I can sleep at night.

Maybe.

I posted the entry to my blog, then began to shut everything down before I crawled into bed when all of these ideas started coming to me for a follow-up post. And there were the “I shoulda wrote this,” and “I coulda included that.” But I couldn’t go on any longer and there would be another blog post. And another. And I could follow-up from the last and from that one and so forth.

Just as there will be another entry after this one.

I smile. A headache will trump creativity. Or mindless journaling, yet. Besides – I’ve lost my groove. Little children call for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the laundry will needed folding and there will be domestic human interaction of the utmost importance (read “locating lost toy fish”) and messes to clean up and when I get back to the keyboard, whatever I’d had in my head will be gone and I can read and reread this and never get back into whatever frame I’d been in previously and- As I type this, I forget what I write. Almost as quickly as it goes down. It’s fatigue. The meds. “Dora The Explorer” wishing me “Buenos Dias!” from the next room. All of it. And other things. Other ideas. A soup of it. There’ll be another time.

When I was a kid and living in Tonopah, Nevada, I’d climb this hill or small mountain we had in the middle of town we called “Green Mountain” (I think it had a proper name, but I’m not sure what it is and I’m not gonna hunt after it just now because it’s not relevant to the story). We called it that because it was covered with lichen of green, red, and gold, but mostly green and it gave it kind of a mossy-covered look from a distance but lichen is- I want to say it’s hard, almost like the rock it covered, but maybe it wasn’t. It was like a hardened moss, I think. With bulbous ends. I’m probably wrong. I’m pulling it from memory, the sensation of pulling it off the stone – and it was stone, that mountain. Entirely stone but for the southwest side, which was mostly stone but with some softer earth to it that ramped up toward its peak. But the other side was a cliff and craggy and hard and people would go there to practice rappelling and at the peak – at the very top – was a bent iron girder, rusted, stuck into the rock vertically but bent to the horizontal and just above the surface of the rock so you could sit on it like a bench and look out over the town and it was often windy up there. And chilly. And not always the best place to go to collect your thoughts because somebody else was bound to come along. Always. So I’d hide in the cracks in the rock, leaning my back against the rock for comfort or something as close to comfort as I could get, there, until I was sure I could get a little privacy – if that’s what I was looking for – and I’d climb further up to the top and sit on the girder and look out over the town in the briskness that nipped at my face and it was good.

I wonder how much I’m getting right when I go back in time and chronicle it from this distance. It’s a long time ago. And I suppose that if I were to go back now, back physically, and detail shit, I’d note how much I was getting wrong. I guess that’s true of anything. Especially of me, as my memory has begun to fade. Which is okay with me. It really is. I’m at peace with it. I’d lived for so long in the past, ignoring the present, that I didn’t really have a present and kind of screwed my future. Although I don’t quite believe that last bit. It’s just a different future. One I hadn’t bargained on. It might be better than anything I could’ve bargained on. I believe that. So I’m not particularly broken-up over it.

The lichen, if you pulled it off the rock, seems “lacy” in memory. There were lizards all over the place, and on that southwestern slope – down it – ran dozens of chukkar birds. They seemed to only hang out around that slope and across the road from there – Air Force Road. And there were jackrabbits. And at the southern foot of the mountain was the U.S. Government motor pool. Just a simple fenced-off area with an old wood-and-sheet metal building where various federal agencies kept their odd vehicles. Pickup trucks, vans. I think there was a gas tank there, too. My stepdad used to keep his pickup at the house, which wasn’t far away. Down the road, between the high school football field and the old air force headquarters facility and its tennis court it gave to the town. And next to it, the old officers’ housing, where we lived. Up a dirt road and the first house to the left. The only house in the loop (the houses were arranged in a loop) with a backyard lawn. They all had front lawns, I think. Some maintained better than others. But ours had both and I was proud of that.

I could see my house from up there. Most of the town. My long blonde hair – already messy – whipped about in the wind. And I’d look down the sheer side and, as I’d normally climb up there after school, that side was often in shade, then. Dark. And I would think to myself about what it must be like- What it would be like to fall and hit the hard, jagged rock at the base. And- It occurs to me now that I was always climbing up there and looking down and wondering that. Trance-like. Staring down. Onto those cold, sharp rocks.

The pain I imagined was what snapped me out of it.

I was 11. Right? Yeah. In those days, 11. I always claim looking back upon that time in my life as being part of the best years of that life, but they weren’t. I’ve lived through worse. Then, however, I was tearing away from life. I look back and see it happening as- Preventable? Or something else that I’m not articulating. Sure, we had problems at home. But mine were mostly happening within. I felt myself slipping away from friends. Everyone. They weren’t moving away from me. I was slipping away. I spent an increasing amount of time alone or trying to be alone. Getting alone.

At present, I recognize what I was doing up on that mountain and how close I was to flinging myself from it. At 11. That’s staggering. I’d lost my grandmother four years before. A year after she died, I was raped. But I don’t think I- I hadn’t consciously believed those things were affecting me to the point of suicide. I was well-liked at school. As much as I thought anyone should be. I had people who didn’t like me, I had people who liked me more than I understood they should… I had people in between. In those days, I could walk up to people and strike a conversation and a friendship. I can’t do that, now. I’m too withdrawn, now. But then… I dunno.

Some things I guess you can’t explain. Not just to others but to yourself.