Todd Camack @ tumblr.

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Fri, 17 May 2013 00:34:25 -0600

Ghosts In The Machine

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:58:33 -0600

The older you get, the more ghosts you see. You see them everywhere. In crowds. Alone while meandering through a park or while pushing a shopping cart. On television, when watching the news. On the Internet, somewhere. Anywhere. A face appears and you wonder, “Is that…?” And it gets at you because it could be. The world is small-enough. Or – more-convincingly – it belongs. It should be there. For some reason. You’ve begun to rattle it through your head, the reasons why you’re seeing it. The significance of it. That’s when it starts to play with your mind – or when you start to play with your mind. When you start going through scenarios of how this has come to be – and why. Especially the “why” of it. That’s how it begins to thread itself into you. How you thread it into you. And, really, that’s how you see ghosts. Your mind tells you that it’s gone through this process, the one I’ve just described. But it hasn’t. You’ve been threading the scenarios in which you see the ghosts of your life since the people they represent left it – and I’m talking about living people. People who are out there. You’ve been doing this nearly automatically. Dreaming it, daydreaming it. One day, one of these scenarios goes hot and your mind tells you it’s really happening. Runs through all the reasons how and why it’s really happening. And your skin chills and your knees knock and you think to yourself, “It’s really happening.” When it’s just someone going through their daily errands in your path, someone you believe looks like a ghost from your past. Someone who, in reality, may not be anything like the ghost you think you’re seeing. In personality nor appearance. They’re just-enough of- Something. Just enough to push your mind…

Then there are the dreams. When you’re trying to work your life out in your sleep and the ghosts show up. Sometimes fucking you up for days afterward.

I tried to embrace her, but she let go the loudest of shrieks, her face contorting into ugly as she pushed me away.

Days of trying to come up with some kind of answer I can rest easy with. “Easy, easily”… There’s a difference. The colloquial… Writing, for me, not only embraces it but has to accept the fogginess of mind that’s come with more seizures and the larger amounts of medication to prevent them. So I’ll write. Or be in conversation. And I’ll forget what we were talking about. Or what I was writing about. I’ll be onto a word or a phrase and can’t- I’ll be just this close to it, but can’t remember what it was. The word. Or the set of words and how I’d meant to arrange them. At first, frustrating. But now… I incorporate this into writing and speech. I have to. Sooner or later, whatever’s escaped me will come back. I’ll return to it, then. As it’s returned to me.

In many ways, my life – life itself – has become a ghost to me. Everything about it. Anything. The past… Anything existing in my past… Anything that isn’t in front of my face right now is a ghost. And, contrary to what I might’ve- Contrary to what you might think, I don’t long for the ghosts of my life. I don’t not long for them… I guess it would have to depend upon the ghost. And what it means to me. What the object or person it represents means to me. And, yes, there are objects that haunt me. Places. Did I previously allude to my ghosts being only representations of people once but no longer in my life? Sometimes they’re representative of people and things I see every day. They’re shades of how those people and things once were to me. And not necessarily for the better. Sometimes they’re ghosts of the shit something or someone once was, something or someone who’s become- Like a jewel to me. And I’ve got to remember when it wasn’t always like that. Always reminded that it wasn’t always like that.

Then there’s the fact that I’m my own ghost. There’s something that’ll drive a person crazy. Taking every moment of my life I can recall, every change for the better, every slide into the worse, and making it or what came before it- Making that a ghost.

I’m hardly alone in this. As we age, don’t we all look into the mirror and wonder who it is looking back? Don’t we all go through our days with thoughts about people who’ve left us long ago? Or whom we’d left behind, maybe not realizing that we never would? Thinking about some little town or former home or the schools we’d attended and the people there and how that life was for us, good or bad? An old dog or cat. Not always about just it but how we’d could have done better by it? Or, similarly, how – if we’ve got children – how maybe we could’ve done better as a parent. All of these things piled into a corner marked “Us”. We are our own ghosts. And we haunt ourselves worse or, at least, more frequently than any other could. Even when our lives, at present, could be brightest, happiest they’ve ever been. Even then, we’ve gotta look back on the shithole each of our lives maybe used to be. Even if we’ve found people who treat us well, we have to torture ourselves with memories of abuse and neglect. I dunno. Maybe we need ghosts to remind us how good we’ve got it. But, when things aren’t so great, they’re never far away. The older you get, life becomes one big ghost. You can’t get away from it. Your mind is a gad-damned ghost factory. And you’re running the joint. And you’re the worst ghost of all.

The Rolling Stones, “Child Of The Moon” The wind...

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:05:00 -0600

The Rolling Stones, “Child Of The Moon”

The wind blows rain into my face
The sun glows at the end of the highway
Child of the moon, rub your rainy eyes
Oh, child of the moon
Give me a wide-awake crescent-shaped smile

She shivers, by the light she is hidden
She flickers like a lamp lady vision
Child of the moon, rub your rainy eyes
Oh, child of the moon
Give me a wide-awake crescent-shaped smile

The first car on the foggy road riding
The last star for my lady is pining
Oh, child of the moon, bid the sun arise
Oh, child of the moon
Give me a misty day, pearly gray, silver, silky faced,
Wide-awake crescent-shaped smile

— Jagger/Richards

Out Of Time

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:27:18 -0600

The imagery made perfect sense – albeit cruel. There are people in the world to whom I was once important, loved. I was loved by them. They were in love with me. Within some moment in time. If only for a brief moment of time. For that moment, some given moment, each of these people were in love with me or, at least, I’d meant something to them. I’d meant a great deal to them, to each of these people, at some time, some moment in time. For a time. Until I didn’t. At which point – and I no longer did, no longer meant what I had to them – I became less. Something less. Maybe not enough to any longer warrant physical displays of affection. Maybe not enough to care about me as they’d once done. Maybe less-enough for hatred. Or, at least, disgust. For whatever reason. Or reasons. Sometimes, the only reason necessary is the passage of time. Within which, from the beginning of a moment to its end, affection turns to disaffection and lovers become no more. In the same manner as life becomes death.

She was everyone I’ve ever been in love with. At one moment a-

Yes. Yes, I snorted, shaking my head in the pretense of not crying about it, but I was. It was the most shocking thing I’ve experienced in years – and it wasn’t even real. Nor was she. A symbol. A ghost. Of everyone she symbolized, and a ghost symbolically of its ghost. Yet never cold. Warm. As if to symbolize recent life. Present life. For everyone she symbolized (almost everyone, that is) lives and is warm with life. Just not- Not with me. Not for me.

There’s not a moment I don’t think of them. That I don’t love them. Not a moment I don’t recall their love for me. But, if I were to approach them now… If I were to touch them… Any of them…

I’m a stranger to her. An ugly stranger. To whom I was ugly and old and sickly and she was as young as she ever was and even if she was older than that, she remained as young as she’d been – then or ever. Of another time. As I was out of time in her present tense. Trying to put my arms around her, trying to grab at her in some ridiculous display of delusion and need. When- Hadn’t been only minutes before that we’d leaned into each other, foreheads pressed, our fingers intertwined, skin heated, breath steaming?

“I love you,” she’d said. Into my face. Into my ear. As she had in her letters. When people still wrote and mailed letters to each other. When receiving letters was like Christmas.

“Camack!” the corporal shouted.

“Here!” I called, from the second row, a column to his right.

He paused to make a show of sniffing the perfumed envelope. “Jesus,” he winced. Then flung it toward me.

They never made it, our letters, to any of us. That was intended. Added to the spectacle of mail call. To the cadre’s fun, anyway. Mine landed three columns to my left, in the front row. The guy who picked it up mimicked the show of sniffing it as the corporal had done and let out a “Woo!” before passing it back and to the next guy who did the same.

“Give it here!” I bellowed, snatching the envelope from the man as he’d tried to hold it over my head, grinning at him after he’d surrendered it, slapping him in the gut with my free hand.

“Knock it off!” the corporal growled.

I read the envelope. Its sweet fragrance strong-enough that I didn’t have to bring it to my nose – but I did, anyway.

She’s on Facebook, I remind myself. Frequently. So what? Am I supposed to bust in on her after all these years and announce, “Hi – here I am!”?

My time’s long gone. She’s got a family, now. It’s their time. I’m not the guy she thought she knew, all those years ago, anymore, anyway. I don’t know if I ever was. It’s so long ago. So long ago…

retrogirly: Jane Greer

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:12:56 -0600

retrogirly:

Jane Greer

hoodoothatvoodoo: Pearl Frush Sigh…

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:50:06 -0600

hoodoothatvoodoo:

Pearl Frush

Sigh…

"If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:30:12 -0600

““If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever.””

- Dan Millman, Way Of The Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives

Queensbury Rules

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:48:00 -0600

There’s a helluva welt near the top center of my forehead – just off-center, to the left, a quarter of an inch or so below the hairline – that refuses to pop open. Welt, zit… It’s huge. Painful. At least when I’m fucking with it. There’s a lot of pressure to it; I can tell. I can’t see why applying more won’t blast the gad-damned thing all over the bathroom mirror in a spray of pus and blood. And let its insides heal for the lack of shit on hand to prevent it, and the area around it, too. So that each nearby touch doesn’t make me wince and feel the need to squeeze at it, making it worse.

That’s my “pimple” story of the day.

The thing’s been my adversary for days. I’ll not rest until I’ve proven myself its better.

“Don’t mess with them!” I can still hear old Coach Arnold warn, during his duty as the boys’ health instructor in high school. “You’ll push that stuff further down into your skin and infect the area around it, making it worse!”

He was a large, hulking man. With a limp and a crew cut. He’d served in the Marine Corps during World War II, fighting in the battle for Guadalcanal.

Kids these days usually can’t tell you what “Guadalcanal” is. The have a hard time with “World War II”.

I believe the man was a Mormon. Told us stories of how, when he was a young teacher, his colleagues would try to play tricks on him by spiking his soda.

He’d notice. By a sip, maybe. Or the smell. Anyway, he’d quietly set the drink down and not say anything about it, this huge man. Who, when he was a kid, would have to drag his dad home in the wee hours in a toy wagon.

“It was the Depression,” he explained to us. “We didn’t have much. Put cardboard in my shoes to keep the snow out of the holes.”

Nightly, he’d have to trudge through the snow to the bar with his wagon to get his dad, then – after having loaded the drunk man into that toy wagon – he’d pull him home.

“I had a ‘no lenience’ policy for drinking on the team,” he’d tell us. Of his time as the high school’s football coach. “One of our best players came up to me, one day, and said, ‘Coach… I’ve been drinking.’” Coach Arnold quietly told him he was no longer on the team.

He was no longer the P.E. teacher by the time I was a senior in high school – his last year, as well. But he’d sub, from time to time. He was known to have silently walked to the equipment room and return with two pairs of boxing gloves upon having encountered a squabble between two of the male students and quietly – always quietly – he’d escort them to the gym and have ‘em duke out their disagreement by Queensbury rules. This was at a time in which teachers routinely paddled their unruly students; boxing matches conducted by teachers were then looked upon as a good way for fights between students to be safely resolved under supervision rather than something to be gasped-at by today’s sensibilities, I guess. Anyway, we’d try to stage fights between ourselves, just to get old Coach Arnold to let us box a round or two for fun. He’d silently smile, shaking his head.

There weren’t many fights in school during my time, there. We were looked-upon by those we knew who’d graduated a year or two or three or five, ten years before as being kind of- “Soft”, maybe? We were, a good number of us, on our way to a yuppie future. We weren’t the beer-swilling “Rock & Rollers” before us, the hard-charging, hard-partying, hard-fighting souls who’d pass the time trying to knock each other of the roofs of their houses with shovels. Our noses were in books. Even those of us who’d wanted to identify with that older crowd.

I can think of three former schoolmates or younger fellow alumni off the top of my head who are now school principals. I’m always floored by this. For a moment. Before I realize how old I am, how old they are, how many years have gone by and what must’ve gone by with them through those years. With all of us. Some of us are old-enough to be grandparents, now. With enough years behind us to retire if we could. And do those things we’d always wanted to do when responsibility was of prime import.

I woke, this morning, from a nightmare. A “morningmare”, I suppose. I couldn’t quite shake it, even after sitting up. I was still half in the dream, in a heated argument with someone within it. A byproduct of the antiseizure meds I figured, when later finally standing up and out of it and after that, while scooping raisin bran out of a bowl in front of me.

The content of the dream continues to make me uncomfortable. Though I’m slowly forgetting the dream altogether. It, as I’m finding a lot of my dreams are, lately, took place during high school years. Not necessarily my high school years, but during high school. And it’s-

I dunno. Painful. What I experienced in it mostly isn’t- Wasn’t- It was a quiltwork of images and interactions that were the worst. “Is”, “were”. Still processing it as if it was still happening.

The part that gutted me was when this beautiful young girl came up to me in tears. She’d been on my periphery. As being someone with a connection to my past. She had light brown hair. Wavy, bobbed at the shoulder. Brown eyes. And milky-white skin.

She took my arms in her perfect, milky hands and ran them down to my wrists as she moved closer to me, the heat of her body sending steam off mine as she moved closer, tears running down her cheek, tears running down mine. As she wrapped her ghostly-white fingers around my hands and entwined her fingers in my fingers, she placed her forehead onto mine and we remained there like that for a long while, blanketed in a moist, teary warmth. Until a period bell rang and she pulled away – at which point I reached out to embrace her.

She pushed me away with an angry screech, her face contorted into ugliness.

Words were said. But I can’t remember what they were. Only what they represented.

I was out of time. I didn’t belong there. Not the person I’ve become. Someone else, beyond time.

I don’t know who she was. A composite of every girl I’ve ever loved, maybe.

I was a stranger.

I stood up, moved to the bathroom and looked into the mirror and saw an old, fat man staring back. With frightful hair and bags under his eyes. And that huge thing on his forehead. Which I wanted to squeeze the shit out of-

I pulled my hands back as they reached for it. It had stopped hurting. Maybe, if I leave it alone, I thought to myself, it’ll go away. On its own.

I never leave things along. I fuck with them and fuck with them and fuck with them until even their memory hurts. Until the memory equals pain. Until all I want is for them and my memories of them to-

There was once a young girl whose forehead rested upon mine as our fingers played with each other’s. I won’t describe her. The color nor texture of her hair. Nor her skin. I remember the heat of her breath as it hit my lips. The shape of her body. How it felt. We were leaned upon a doorjamb; the world around me had disappeared. All that was happening was this girl.

I know I’ll never enjoy that experience again. But… If I leave it alone… Maybe I’ll get to recall it. As it was. As beautiful as it was. Forever.

If I let her be.

If I don’t poison it.

If I keep her in the past.

If I keep the person I was- If I keep him there with her and the person I’ve become here. And leave her alone.

I bent over the toilet, flipped its seat up, and emptied my guts into it.

Stay In Line

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:00:00 -0600

Personal experience shows me that I can’t very well exist in a state of being that’s all about self-medication. A medicated state of being that may be prescribed, may be legal. It’s not really “self-medication”, that. The self-medicated take it upon themselves to prescribe medicinal treatment though legal or illegal means. Or both. I put the pills into my headhole myself, thus it’s “self-medication”. But the medication’s been prescribed by a licensed physician for a specific reason, as part of a specific treatment of a certain ailment. How I function throughout my given day and night is dependent upon this medication and my ability to take it when I’m supposed to and how I’m supposed to and- Though the success of my treatment – in my case, for epileptic seizures – depends upon my ability to exist in a state of being of perpetual medication, administered by myself, I’m not- I don’t enjoy the- I don’t enjoy it. The state. The process. Being medicated. Any more than I enjoy the affliction it treats. It affects everything I do, is responsible for a large part of everything I don’t do.

I see or hear of someone living under the influence of shit they needn’t be on and I-

Why. Why do you do that, man? Why do that to yourself? When you don’t have to? I ask these questions not knowing the man’s pain, of course. Or woman. It can be a woman. It very likely is a woman. Why are you doing this?

The fact is, you’ve gotta include everything of an intoxicant into the answer to these questions. Anything that fills a hole, fills something that’s missing in someone’s soul. Anything that adds a little more pep when that ass is draggin’. So you come back with not just some kind of drug but alcohol. Sex. Food. The Internet. Books. TV. Work. Coffee. There’s a lot of real estate to cover in the answer. When you include these things with the specific ill that each of these things inflicts upon a person. Any person.

My antiseizure meds kind of fuck me up. But they’ve done no more harm than me than food has when I’ve used it to take the place of love that’s missing or to make up for what I went without in younger times. Passive entertainment has cushioned me against the pain of living through loneliness. Boredom. Caffeinated drinks keep me going when I can’t sleep (and contribute to the next evening’s sleeplessness, contributing to a vicious circle of sleeplessness and pepped beverages and more sleeplessness and more pepped beverages and so on). And the Internet. It’s often a convenient surrogate to life in general. Interpersonal communication, entertainment – anything that can’t be physically pumped into one’s body, the Internet’s got it. And we keep coming back to it. When we’ve become so empty inside that it’s our fun. Our social life. Do we really need chemicals, as well? To get us along?

Sometimes, yes. I think we do. My drug of choice is a nice girly drink. Fruity and fun, with a big garnish on it. I like a beer, too, but they don’t make my favorite, anymore. Tequiza. Remember Tequiza? Anheuser-Busch’s lager with agave nectar? And a hint of lime? For awhile, you could get, from your local distributor, packets of Tequiza-branded lime-flavored salt in case you needed a bigger hint. And it gave the impression of a tequila-themed drink. That was a good-ass beer. “A little girly,” some warned me. Perfect.

When I was a kid in my late teens and early twenties, I was a stick and just hearing the top of a beer pop off sent me into a buzz. Maybe the uncontrollable heaves, even. Usually both. I was a cunt. But, as I aged, I put on a tremendous amount of weight that has not only protected me from not being able to drink without getting sick, it’s allowed me to drink more. And recover quicker. In almost every example of a soaked outing, I had to get up for work within two or three hours of staggering home. And I performed my job wonderfully the next day, as I’d also learned to keep my body full of food and water while out on my boogie.

My current treatment for epilepsy prevents me from “enjoying” nights like those. I rarely – if ever – partake in the dread alcohol. Of any variety, manly or otherwise. I, recall, prefer the otherwise. But there’s always somebody who insists you solidify your bond of friendship with them with a gad-damned shot. A shot of anything. Depends on the company you’re keeping. Shots are usually manly drinks and being that, I loathe them. I did my time in my college years trying to butch myself up with bottles of tequila and vodka and even chugged a bottle of – gag – Scotch; I needn’t prove myself to anyone, now.

“C’mon! Have a shot of Crown with me!”

Jesus Christ.

What you’ll typically find me imbibing is some manner of tea. There are nine-hundred varieties of tea in this house and my favorite is regular-ol’ fucking Lipton in a gad-damned teabag. I make no apologies for it. I also enjoy Bigelow “Plantation Mint”. Keep any other kind of mint-flavored tea away from me. I assure you I’ll hate it. I take either one hot and sweet and sometimes with milk (not the “Plantation Mint”, however, with the milk). They are like liquid candy to me on the one hand and on the other, liquid aspirin. I can have the worst headache and I’ll space the aspirin almost every time in favor of a nice cup of tea. I swear the shit works.

Other guilty pleasures? Milk. Plain-ol’ cow’s milk. Chocolate milk, too. And sometimes buttermilk. For when I’ve got that really deep hole in my soul that needs soothing. And Coca-Cola. In a classic glass bottle. Which means it’s made with real sugar. The Mexicans know how to cater to both my weakness for American nostalgia and the taste of sugar over – gag – corn syrup. Which some fucks are trying to call “corn sugar”, now.

Fuck you.

Oh, man. Remember buying Coke in glass bottles out of vending machines in this fading republic? Sitting on a bench, somewhere, clutching a bottle of Coke, listening to real “Rock & Roll” on a shitty transistor radio while eating a hot dog, the scent of onion rings deep-frying in the shack behind you, neon lights crackling on a vintage sign above your head? That’s America, my friend.

I’ll never get those days back any more than Jay Gatsby can recapture his past. Any more than those kids from “American Graffiti” can stretch one last night of their high school years into forever. Any more than-

Any more than I can look through a list of names on Facebook and make those names be the people I used to know, so many years ago.

I think that some of the people I know who crawl into some easy chair or onto some sofa in some dimly-lit room to spark up or shoot up might be looking for the America they knew or some long-ago love they knew and maybe each time I shove another cheeseburger down my gullet, I’m trying to replace one or the other or both with something tangible, if only temporary. So the burgers have to keep coming and coming and coming. Like the smoke for some. Or the junk.

I was going to write something about that final scene in “American Graffiti”, when Richard Dreyfuss’ plane takes off and he’s looking down, out through the window, and spots that “T”-Bird cruising along a farm road below.

I’m still trying to get at that girl in the “T”-Bird. Among other ghostly things. In spite of everything that went through my head when I was at that radio station, being schooled by Wolfman Jack as he was sucking on Popsicle after Popsicle, trapped in that booth.

“I love you, Curt…” Suzanne Somers coos over the payphone at Mel’s Drive-In.

But she would never tell him her name.

I put her into my system four times a day. Two 200 milligram pills, once every six hours. I stuff her into my mouth, I pipe her into my ears, I spike my mind with her image constantly. I could never get onto that plane.

That’s not fair. I’d have had to have those pills, anyway. But the rest of it. The rest of it. The rest of it is my fault.

I see these people whining about the monkeys on their backs, these monkeys in the darkness of some seedy room in which they do their shit, and I say, “Fuck you. Nobody did this to you. You did it to yourself.”

“To yourself,” I remind me. In queue to board the plane.

“Don’t leave the queue. Stay in line.”

A Question Of Weed

Mon, 13 May 2013 14:43:31 -0600

The subject of marijuana is- It’s one of those things that’s- Damn. I don’t like to get into it. Because I’m of a certain mind that straddles the two main, battling philosophies on it and I’ve got a leg on either side of the line just far-enough to get me in a lot of trouble with the opposition and- I get it. On the one hand. On the other, I don’t see why it should.

I grew up at a time and in an atmosphere that branded pot heads “freaks”. It branded them “pot heads”, actually. Born in 1968, I spent the first seven of my years living with my grandparents. In rural Nevada. “Hee Haw” was on the TV. Country music on the radio. Short haircuts on our heads if we were guys, young or old. In many ways, we still lived in the mid-1950s in 1974 in our little world. But it was a bubble. A bell jar. Irreflective of the world outside. A world that was creeping in. And not honest with itself. Marijuana wasn’t a new thing. It’s been around for centuries. And all those clean-cut people we saw on television and listened to on the radio, they used it. The good boys and girls in town used it. My grandparents used it.

“I tried it,” my Grandpa Sandy admitted, almost twenty years ago. “Didn’t do anything for me,” he shrugged. And there’s the contention that my Grandma Gwen used it when she was dying of cancer. Had it sneaked into the hospital to her by one of our more rascally relatives.

“That’s not true,” my Aunt Suzy has countered.

Maybe it was at home she’d used it. Maybe Suzy isn’t aware of everything. Maybe she’s right but it’s just too good a story to leave alone. In any case, I’ve – throughout my adult years – accepted the story as fact. Because I want it to be fact. That this poor woman suffering a terminal illness – my grandmother – got a little relief from the dread weed. So what? Is that so bad? So wrong?

No. Since coming of age, since discovering the tale (from whom I can’t recall), I’ve been an vocal supporter of medical marijuana. But… I could never shake the philosophy from the little boy in me who went home at lunch, each day, to watch reruns of “Ozzie and Harriet” in black and white on a black and white TV set, that marijuana was the evil pot, attaching it to dirty, hairy ne’er-do-wells who-

I’d think back into my history – as I am now – to all the dirty, hairy ne’er-do-wells I was exposed to in my early-to-mid childhood and, yeah, most were fucking assholes. Dicks. Shit-heads. But weren’t they all that without the weed? Yeah. If anything, the weed made them more docile about their assholery. In truth, I met quite a few people who liked their weed who were sweet, gentle folks and were most-likely that way without the weed as all the assholes I knew were assholes without their weed. If anything, I repeated… If anything, marijuana mellowed them the fuck out. But, as I think on all of this, I realize that marijuana to me, in that era, was- Hmm. An accessory. To a lifestyle. I didn’t like the lifestyle, I didn’t like its accessories. The assholes in my life would’ve found another accessory to their lifestyle if pot was unavailable. Some other kind of medicine for their wounded souls. And they were wounded souls. Most assholes recognize it, that they’re wounded. They medicate. Try every kind of medicine they can. They’ll grab for it all. And there’s always another drug coming along. Right now, these people are on meth. They found methamphetamine. It’s not new, either. Been around a few decades. But it’s the “in” thing, right? Killing people fast. From the inside, out. Turning them into something less than human.

Isn’t that a shitty thing for me to say? “Less than human”? But it does things to a person’s body, mind, that’s irreversible. Takes them away from humanity. Turns them into angry, thieving zombies. Murderous, sometimes. It takes the humanity from their minds, replacing it with one goal: to get more meth.

That’s not the gentle hippies I met in the late ‘70s who tried to get me to unwrap myself from all the negativity I’d experienced by just talking with me. Marijuana certainly had a major role in their lives, but it was one of- An almost reverence. It was holy. It was natural. From the earth. Healthy. Hell, it couldn’t hurt. It didn’t impede one’s humanity but expanded- No. It- Then again, yes. Anyway, it didn’t remove humanity from the human being. It asked me to take a ride with it. When I was angry with my dad, one night. And counseled me – gently, warmly – on remembering not to forget my humanity, myself.

I’ve never used the stuff. But I’ve never forgotten those kindly, gentle hippies – a couple, husband and wife, the wife being the daughter of a minister of some variety – and their message of love to me. I started to think that maybe, in spite of the continued exposure to people just out for a high, that maybe there was something Heaven-sent to this herb. Something holy. Something that doesn’t just ease the pain of the dying but also the pain of the living. How can that be so wrong?

Recently, several people I know have suggested I try it to help ease the effects of my epileptic seizures. I just- I can’t. Because of that old stigma I have – still have – about marijuana. Most of it comes from the idea of smoking it. I’ve never been a tobacco smoker. The thought disgusts me. Switching tobacco for marijuana produces the same disgust.

“You can eat it,” they’ve suggested. “Lots of different ways to take it in. Make brownies.”

“Make me some of those brownies!” another friend told me, her eyes widening, her mouth turning into the widest of grins.

I shrug these ideas off. I just don’t know. I’ve spent so long- Oh. And there’s the influence law enforcement has had on me. I’ve got a lot of cops in my life. Or had. At one time, I’d wanted to be one of them. Makes shedding that stigma all the tougher. But… In all of this… In spite of the stigma, in spite of anything else to the negative toward marijuana… I really don’t see why it must be so vilified. Especially with anything else out there we may legally put into our bodies. With what else is illegal and what those things do to our bodies. Weed is hardly the worst thing to happen to humanity.

That old support I threw out there for medical marijuana – “medical” alone – doesn’t seem to get it with me. I don’t see the problem with decriminalizing it. With taxing its retail sale. For those who don’t care to grow it themselves, for their own use. Decriminalize it, you drive its sales price into the dirt and the criminal element can’t find it worthwhile to continue its involvement in it and that goes away and so does that attraction illegal things have for a certain section of the populace. Soon, you either like it or you don’t and that’s all there is. As with certain types of alcoholic beverages. Or alcohol in and of itself.

I bring it up. The subject. Of marijuana. And its supporters can only see my apprehension and its detractors can only see my support and this person or that attempts to pigeonhole me, my personality, taking either into account. I just want to be left alone to my own opinions on it. While I think others should be afforded theirs. And, in the middle, those who choose to partake, let ‘em.

There’s no shame in that.

Our Coffee Time

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:06:00 -0600

Mothers’ Day isn’t- I drop my head. I never had a good relationship with my mom. I’d spent my early years until my maternal grandmother died with that grandmother and my grandfather. They were my parents until I was seven. Then I went to live with an aunt. How I came to live with my mom after that is a whirlwind of different explanations, the truth of it locked within my own mind. I’d gone through some hell, but life at my aunt’s was far from hellish. I had a lot of issues by the time I’d chosen to live with my mother; the choice was about- Taking care of- I had to bury them. The issues. Many of which weren’t issues but to me. Because we’ll often take something and make it serious in our own minds, regarding it as something that maybe everybody else has their eyes on. When they don’t. There might be the occasional question.

“Why don’t you live with your mom?”

It meant nothing. It was just a question. Never loaded with some kind of negativity. It was innocent. From somebody who’d never not known life with a mother, the kind of mother that could be defined as ideal. The state of being of not living with mine was foreign; they just wanted to know how or why I wasn’t living with mine. There was no malice in it. But I took it as being- I dunno. I hated having to answer it. That question. To explain it. To someone whose face would gradually blank out in- The inability to understand. My situation nor how I-

I would read their perceptions. Of anyone I’d try to explain it to, why I lived with my aunt instead of my mother. I hated having to explain. I hated the looks on their faces. Even though they weren’t looks of disgust. They just couldn’t grasp my explanation, never having had to have lived a similar life.

“I’d wanted,” I told a shrink, years later, “to not have to explain to some kid why I wasn’t going home to my mom. Why it had been my aunt or my grandma or whomever.” Everything we were doing would stop in order for me to go through the story and whatever we were doing would lose importance and even though there was no apparent maliciousness directed toward me, my friend or friends to whom I’d find myself explaining my story to would end up looking gut-punched and the theme of the day, then, became about my living arrangement and their minds were too busy being wrapped-up in trying to wrap themselves around my living arrangement to bother with whatever else we’d been up to and- Fuck. I hated it.

We spent part of the summer of 1977 in Nevada, visiting my mom. She was quiet. Withdrawn. Gentle. The anger and viciousness I remembered from years before weren’t there. I developed a tenderness in my heart for her, then, and began to fantasize a life with her.

In those days, I’d become hard to manage. I fought with my aunt a lot. Mostly out of my refusal to let my grandmother go. I’d become almost uncontrollable because I’d only grant my grandmother a right of authority over me and she was dead. There was a different philosophy of life in my aunt’s house than what I’d been used to in my grandmother’s, too. I couldn’t-

She wasn’t bad to me, my aunt. Unlike my mother, she always expressed affection. But there were rules. Rules for things I’d never had rules for while living with my grandparents. Times for bed. Rules for coming and going. Rules for the dinner table. Rules for interacting with others. These rules were in no way bad for me. I just wasn’t used to rules. Not that my grandparents had none in their house. It was just a different house. And suddenly a different life. I wasn’t ready to be thrust into a different life. I fought back. I was verbally abusive. Incorrigible. My mother had made a couple of visits around this time and it was during the last one that I, while in a fit, declared that I’d wanted to go live with my mom and my wish was granted.

For a few short months, things were probably okay. I saw that with the wag of my leveled palm. It was “iffy”. Life, then – at least for me – was great. I loved being back in Nevada. In the small town of my early youth. With friends I’d made during preschool. And others. For me, it was almost idyllic. My mom, though, never seemed to be very into me.

My Grandma Gwen- We were close. Today’s her birthday. It’s Mothers’ Day, too. Not the first time her birthday fell on Mothers’ Day. I remember believing, when I was just a little guy, that her birthday fell on Mothers’ Day every year. I thought it was appropriate. She took us to get a puppy, one year, as a present to both of us. As my birthday was only three days before and it was hers and Mothers’ Day, too, and- That puppy symbolized our bond. That dog. “Laddie”.

We had to leave him behind when we moved to California. After Gwen passed.

I left everything behind. Everything I knew, everything I was. Everything I loved the most.

I left myself behind.

One day, my mom’s boyfriend told us she’d be going out of town for a couple of weeks. To the hospital in Reno. And we’d be staying with various people during that time – including him.

When she returned, she was like an animal. Snarling. Shrieking at us. At me, mostly.

“It’s all your fault! None of this would’ve happened if not for you!”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything. I remembered when she lived with us – my grandparents and me – a few years before, cordoned-off in another room. She’d not let any of us in. She lived in there, as did my sister Wendi and baby sister Trish, who was all smiles in her white bassinet.

One afternoon, she’d caught me after sneaking inside to see Trish.

She screamed at me to get out, slapping at me as I fled. Shouting, “You wrecked my life!”

The passivity I found in her a few months before going to live with her was artificial. I didn’t know until I’d become an adult. She was heavily-medicated. I don’t know what happened between then and the time she was hospitalized or when she was discharged. Afterward, though… Things began to go worse. It took a lot of time before they got-

I remember a day, years before, at my grandparents’. By then, my mom had moved out. To her own place. She liked to come over, though, now and then, to generally be disruptive, as I recall. She used to whisper into my sisters’ ears to get them to come across the room and pick at me, which they gleefully did. When I’d get upset, my mom would use it as an excuse to barb me. That particular day, though, my grandmother was sitting off to the side. “I saw and heard the whole thing,” she scolded my mother. “Leave him alone!”

I’ve likewise defended my grandmother. Most of my aunts have angrily explained to me that she wasn’t who nor what I like to remember, detailing moments before my time in which her behavior to them was terrible, her judgment something less than stable, maybe. But I can’t vilify her for any of that. I only know what I remember. “Maybe,” I suggested, “she was trying to make up for it through me.”

“Maybe,” one of my aunts snorted, not convinced.

I remember a woman who’d hold me and show love for me. Who’d feed me or see that I was fed when the end of her life came, who’d likewise see that I was dressed. That I had everything I needed and a few things I didn’t need but were nice, too.

I never asked to be brought into this world. I wasn’t the one who was doing the fucking.

I’d hide behind the house in San Diego not long after our arrival, there, following my grandmother’s death. Which was during the summer following her forty-fourth birthday. Thinking back on how, the on the night of her passing – after her passing – my grandpa had returned from the hospital to tell me. How, when he told me, I’d lost my mind, running amok through the house while the adults there tried to catch me and hold me.

He caught me and held me and whispered into my ear that everything was gonna be alright. “It’s gonna be alright, honey,” he assured me. Addressing me as “honey” – something he’d never done before nor since that still seems both weird to me and- Sweet. Like the word itself. Warm.

He took me outside, into the backyard. Under the clear, starry sky. He asked me to crouch as he did, then he – with one arm around me – pointed upward into the heavens and explained to me that my grandmother was up there, looking down upon me from those stars, and would always be there whenever I needed her.

I like being up at night. Through the night. I always have. I’ve always been a night owl. I used to stay up, waiting for my grandpa to get home from work. He’d bring with him a couple of packets of instant coffee, two Styrofoam cups, some sugar and creamer packets, and a couple of plastic spoons, and he’d perform the nightly ritual of fixing us coffee before we’d catch the news or a NASA launch if one was going on or the late night scary movie.

In later years, I’d sneak outside. To be under the stars.

He couldn’t take care of us himself. My sister Amy and I. I think to the day he died he felt guilty about it, but he shouldn’t have and I’d tried to talk with him about it for years, even as we hurried to California in his final hours. We didn’t quite make it. I wanted him to know that I understood. I still do. And that, in his absence, I’d sneak outside as a kid. Or, as an adult, I’d just go out. And stand under the stars for awhile. To be with Gwen. That was our “coffee time”.

45

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:29:00 -0600

“It’s the best 45^th birthday I’ve ever had!”

That’s Thursday’s catchphrase. Already overdone by dinnertime. But, as middle-aged birthdays go, it wasn’t bad. Had bloodwork done, then went to Golden Corral to dine with 500 other large people with mullets and T-shirts without sleeves on them. People fighting over the last chicken quesadilla, then the last egg roll. Even as someone from the kitchen was scrambling to bring more.

I overate. Making up for all the years I endured being a skinny kid without food at home. “‘Elvis’ Syndrome”, I call it. Quick to admit that I don’t even know if that’s a thing. But I’ve grown huge in the second half of my life, slowly approaching the 170s, the 180s, approaching 200, tipping that and into the two-hundred and teens… Into the 220s… And to where I’m at now: teetering between 225 and 235 lbs. A lot of pork products. A lot of gravy. Making up for lost time. Making up for a lot of years in which I’d pine over photographs of meals.

I never went hungry. No matter how grim the worst of times were. I just liked to eat. And you can tell where things would lead if you go back and look at some old photos during times in which there was a little extra. I’d have me a bit of a belly. The belly would come and go with such times, with their coming, their going. You could tell that, if I had the means, I’d become a large, large boy. A huge man. Just because I liked to eat. And still do.

I make no apologies for it. People are turning that sort of thing into a shameful act in this country and it pisses me off. You see it in pop culture and have for some time, the teasing of the fat kid. But, growing up, I never experienced that. I mean, as directed to the truly fat kids.

As I say that, I catch myself in a falsehood. But it was weird. Some of them got it, some didn’t I guess it depended on personality. I think girls got it worse. It wasn’t like on TV or in the movies, though. Where things are often exaggerated. That’s easy to say, not having been on the receiving end of that. Ask somebody who got it every day and- You know. Me? I had my own battles. It wasn’t easy, living out of a suitcase. Rationed showers, baths. Having to go about in filthy clothes. I looked terrible, I stunk. My weight wasn’t on anyone’s radar.

I remember, then, that I’d – out of boredom, mostly – I’d go to the town grocery and just glide through the aisles, fantasizing about everything on its shelves.

“What’s he stealing, now?” I recall one of the clerks – a bitter-looking elderly woman – saying. I hadn’t been stealing anything. Just fantasizing. Imagining the dishes on the sides of those boxes steaming on the table in front of me. Meandering down the frozen foods section with the same thoughts in mind. Taking in the overall scent of the produce department. Jars of jam, The smell of rye bread…

As an adult, I no longer had to do that. I’d started working at an early age and was soon buying my own groceries, my own clothes, knocking out my own rent. Living as I saw fit. For myself. Sometimes, I overcompensated. Though not at first. At first, I was budgeted. Rationed. Portioned. But then, something happened-

I’m not gonna get into all that. Suffice it to say that I filled the hole with something else I loved. Food. Not that I’d not already been eating like a Viking. But I did know some restraint. Suddenly, I knew none. I stopped eating when the refrigerator was empty. When the cupboards were bare. Then I’d go out. At which point I stopped when the cash was gone. My appetite was great. Insatiable. Because I was trying to satisfy a hunger that wasn’t in my belly.

Liking to eat is one thing. But…

I smile. You know. I’m at a moment of fog, again. Losing my place. It’s-

There are so many places to dine in this valley. So many. Quiet little places. Good food. Great atmosphere. Great food. And drink. If I were inclined. Oh, I wish I were…

I’m slowly moving into the realization that I no longer have an emptiness within me that isn’t physical hunger that I must fill by gorging myself. It’s not been easy. Last night, for example, was hours of discomfort, wishing for sleep. I’m a belly-sleeper. Or I’ll curl into a fetal position. When you’re overweight, either is more difficult for- You can’t get comfortable-enough to rest with a big-ass gut. Add to that a state of being over-filled – bloated – with gas, with shit… Praying to shit before dawn…

I weigh the pros and cons. A short period of joy is what I get out of scarfing down so much food at once. Or throughout the day. And night. Compared with the length of time I’m almost in agony. It can be agony. It’s certainly not comfort. It’s surely not restful.

Then – I grin, with shame – I start the day with a piece of yesterday’s birthday cake. Well, I was too full, last night, to have any. Birthday cake. And leftover Tuna Helper. Orange juice. And my antiseizure meds.

I can do better than that.

I think that the first evening of my 45^th year quietly explained to me that life is something to be hungered-for, too. Living. Everything about it. Enjoying life. The ability to do that. And little arrows appeared over my bad habits attached to little word balloons that said, “No. This isn’t gonna get it, anymore.” There’s so much more to my life than- Anything that came before yesterday at 12:14 p.m. Forty-five years to the minute I’d come into this world.

I don’t sit around, regretting choices I’ve made. I’m far-too busy sitting around, lamenting other things. The choices I’ve made were made in the moment in which they were because they had to have been made, then. There was no alternative. I know people call “bullshit” on that, but I’m totally right. You make the choices you make because, in the moment of time in which you make them, there isn’t an alternative to any of them that is as correct as the choice history shows you’ve made. Even if you could go back in time to choose differently, you’d not be able to, because any other possibility would be wrong. So I don’t fret. At least not too much. Instead, I worry about shit like my hair or skin tags or the lack of cash. When there’s a lovely breeze, outside. And a birdhouse populated with a male bird of some kind and a female one, just outside my window. Are there eggs in there? How many? Have they hatched? And the blossoms are blooming on the strawberry plants and why am I not fishing? I could’ve been fishing, this morning… All I need to do is buy a fishing license. And photographs. I haven’t been taking photographs. What I have taken are cloudy and shaky and unoriginal for me and- There’s so much out there. Forty-five gave me a birthday gift itself and it’s the realization that there’s more to life than lukewarm pans of dubious chicken on a steam table.

Dammit. Petered-out before “45”. Cake imitates life. LOL!

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:24:00 -0600

Dammit. Petered-out before “45”. Cake imitates life. LOL!

Fog And Obituaries

Thu, 09 May 2013 02:30:02 -0600

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.

Racism, Bicycles, And Billie

Mon, 06 May 2013 02:17:00 -0600

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.

End Of The Day

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:01:00 -0600

End Of The Day

Peeking Out The Door

Sat, 04 May 2013 19:48:00 -0600

Peeking Out The Door

On My Wall

Sat, 04 May 2013 18:32:00 -0600

On My Wall

Good Humor

Sat, 04 May 2013 03:39:00 -0600

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.

Another Time

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:42:00 -0600

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.