Inappropriate Knife Usage

While a youth, I witnessed many an incident involving my step-mother chiding my father for using her kitchen knives in place of some tool he had misplaced. They would have bent tips from screwdriver duty, or blunt edges from god only knows what. They were dirty and could no longer be used for food. They had wooden handles and each pore was filled with some oil and grime mixture. They were sometimes found in the yard, where he had worked on a car, by a lawnmower, THRACK and then out the end with the grass. My father’s non-chalant disrespect for their intended usage has become, without his knowing or prompting, a family tradition. Here are a few of the creative ways I’ve used knives, in list form. Most are still being used for food.

1. Drugs- Is there nothing more decadent AND tough than knifing out white power out of a bag and holding to your nose? Also, when retrieving small amounts of power from little plastic bags the fine tip of a steak knife makes for easier measuring the more precise chemicals that require mg levels. “How much did you take?” “A tip’s worth.” Hot knifing hash with the butter knives is a great throw-back to those parties that always “went too far”.

2. Back Scratching- It’s the desert, I’m white and this shit makes my skin dry out all kinds. I can’t possibly drink enough water to moisturize. The knives reach that middle, hairy part of the back that needs the most work. Knives are good for fast skin removal, for itching and perhaps for surgery.

3. Tools- Like my father before me, I’ve found these babies make great screwdrivers, scratch awls, dry wall cutters, wire strippers, patching trowels (really, any trowel) testers for electrical continuity, chisel, planing tools… the list could keep going. Oddly, these things never make it into the tool box, because they are not tools, but back in the kitchen, where they belong.

4. Drum sticks- Not ideal, but they”ll do in a pinch.

5. Threats and Intimidation- Who’s never grabbed a knife in anger and issued a few threats? If you haven’t, you’ll have to tell me how you keep it all under control. Knives are great, much better than guns. They get the point across while having a very low chance of really hurting someone. It takes a lot of work with a knife to seriously hurt anyone and I hate work.

6. Games and Recreation- Ever played that game where you trow a knife between the legs of someone standing a few feet from you? Me too! Knives also can replace the pinchers in Operation, or the spinning pointer for Twister. I’ll leave out all the sexy, kinky games with knives, I don’t swing that way.

7. In Place of Other Utensils- I have more forks and spoons than knives, but I hate washing dishes so I consequently find myself with no other utensil option other than a knife for eating food. Rice, ice-cream, cereal- I have eaten all these things with a butter knife. Sometimes it will go on for days until I finally break down and wash the dishes, usually when I run out of knives to use. I then stand in front of the sink, shamefully looking at the dishes and wondering how it ever got this far. However, I never utter promises to be better, I’m comfortable enough with this cycle.

8. Cutting Hair- I’ve only done this once, but thought I would mention it for full disclosure.

There are many things I have not used my knives for, but have thought about, like: juggling, knife fight with the wrists tied, removing plaque from my dog’s teeth, removing plaque from my teeth, in place of the stick that comes out of the steering column to change the gears for a car’s transmission, performing with a post-apocalyptic circus throwing them between my beautiful assistant’s limbs whilst tied to a large wooden spinning wheel, surgery (see #2) and hunting the world’s most deadly game.

Kinves.

Wind whistling smoothly across Grand Abyss fell short, a near miss, not landing, but dissolving back.  “Wells theys gosts  the three egg and four egg and there’s one with just whites, or theys got those kreps with fruit,” and below the bubbling of all that happened and through the vague, thick and opaque well of memory and habit and instinct rests a placid pool of cool and rare and the birthplace of Home and Being and God and Understanding.  “I went up to the Smokies, they ran a gun shop and I helped em on the weekends.  Theys got a room with a shark tank.”  When it almost became too much that pool would allow but a trickle.  Now, it had seemed to run dry.  All comfort and any faculty left to administer disappeared, leaving but a silence.  Not a hole or some emptiness, but as if there had never been a hole or dirt, no emptiness or fullness, simply non-existent, a false memory.  “I got my foot suck in one a them, ihh, i’s scared it’d eat me.”  “Is there any sugar?”  Wonder is perhaps the lover of Impetus, and upon such flesh vows rests some certainty.  “We ran into sum truble…” and the plan was for the goats to eat the kudzu on the hillside. The goats would give us milk, work the land with us. The plan was to keep on going, the same way, somehow.

When contemplating, as I do, in the succession of usual thought patters of a day, rocks appearing over the course of billions of years, all seems less perfunctory and more casual.  Casual was a word that has obsessed me lately.  Words usually fall from the brain or hair, but Casual manifests without causation.  One of its main charms is its pairing with events of seriousness.  Casual Surgery.  Casual Bombing.  Casual Catastrophe.  “There she lie, beautiful as ever, well, I did not want to lord over her, nay, frighten this grace, my accidental fumblings and bulkiness betraying my purest of intentions.  With held breath, I reached out for the clarion and as I am here talking, she stood, then fell down into my palm.  Hot and pulsing, she weighed near nothing.  Oh, was there some chance of catching something, No.  Gathering thresh berries and I become more soiled than she had ever been.  The clean wind rushing across her form had cleared all, leaving only a slick and taught shell.”  When rocks had  been given due consideration amongst the learned class, we then begin to see a shift in the dynamic of the entire argument of Essence.  Downers might call into question the necessity of the question or of its relevance or of its logical nature, but such protests can quickly be dashed aside when applying Occam’s razor.  Everyone than began a discussion that wouldn’t have been able to take place years ago, with the elderly still cringing and producing unpleasant scowls at even the mention of such dubious affairs, much less its inevitable necessity.  Essence then began a slow decline, not as its need or even its influence waned, but as it began to spill into all else, the eroding mountain becoming beach on a sand.  “When ever did I dive so deep, I always forget myself, I ask for forgiveness.  One can forget one’s self from time to time, all thought becomes tangled and you don’t know if it’s a dream or real, or if the thought you had was happening and what is happening is a projection of a play.  We learn it as children, and least we forget it as adults, to know what is proper and not.  Were there figs today, I must have forgotten them if I did, there simply aren’t any here.  Figs have to be around, Peters might get upset, but they can break Pepperson’s heart, he gets so set on something sweet, he just forgets himself.”  Turning out from night to daybreak a fog appears and holds steady for days.  No one knows why, and few are now talking about it.  At first it landed upon our minds much like it did the land, slow and effortlessly, and you just breathed it in and did what you had to do, it was early.  By mid-day we were all talking about it.  By the second day it was a wonder, jokes were made, awe had been inspired and even the melancholy were pulled out of themselves to find our town so different.  By the third day, unease set in.  Some of us missed the sun, others tried to forget by staying indoors, in fact, the third day I recall few on the streets.  The fog had become a stranger standing too close.  “‘Pass the rhino spear, pass the Rhino Spear,’ they think I don’t know, think it’s stupid.  Cold, stupid, cold.  If I had a car, or a horse, or a chancellor for a husband, stupid husbands.  There isn’t a dress for me, there isn’t a home for me, there isn’t a caller, ever, Nothing for me.  My room is full of handed down knackery.  I’ve got to call my aunt and tell her what is happening.”

Of Green and Blue, or What We Caught At Bluewater Lake

My fish have been dying.  I noticed fewer fins at feedings.  My daughter doesn’t suspect yet, she still sees the two that are left and that’s fish, plural.  I haven’t seen the bodies, as they are quickly devoured by the snails.  I also have a snail problem.  I suspect they are involved in this trend of disappearance.  They look disgusting and I’m sure can’t be trusted. They are either creating imbalance in the ecosystem or using their stupid snail brains to take out the fish one by one.  pH- good.  temperature- good.  fake skull- still funny.  Maybe more water changes are needed, or maybe I should somehow break up the monotony of doing nothing but swimming and eating and fucking all day.  Fish fuck, trust me.  All of this served with a frozen strawberry fruit bar garnished with guilt. Maybe I should get a fish that eats snails.  And a frog.

I opened the box, where my newspaper usually appears sometime after 8:37 a.m., and found two small creatures nestled together on top the news print.  Nearly two minutes passed in confused contemplation, attempting to gather a thought that would provoke an action.  I decided to take out a pen out of my pocket and poke one of them.  Assuredly had I thought of anything remotely better I would have done it, including closing the box and walking away, pretending the papers simply didn’t come.  Past my blue corduroy pants and into the box my pen pushed slightly, even gently, into a haunch.  A sort of pitiful, whiny sound emitted.  The animal I know the best, though in no way completely or with any certainty, the human, makes that sound when hurt or sad.  I surmised the only option was to lift them both and place them together in my coat pocket, on the right side.  When my fingers just began to wrap around the bottom of the furry pile, exerting a bit of pressure into soft parts, a thrashing, hissing, biting of the most horrible sort sent blood onto my clothes, lining the inside of the box and even onto the sidewalk.  In the seconds it took to pull my hands out and close the lid what looked like a lot of blood was splattered everywhere.  My hands were cut viciously, but no bone seemed to be exposed.  Suddenly the thought of having just contracted rabies entered, was taken note in my mind, and placed aside for another moment’s focus while I  began to wonder how I would stop my current rate of bleeding.  The box was dripping blood from the bottom and movement inside could still be heard.  Again, for the second time in so few moments I stood wondering what to do, and again it took minutes until I started to move.  Taking care of this myself would be best, I thought, and casually began to step back with a throbbing from wrists to tips.  By then, however people had been gathering and some were looking concerned, and some were so concerned they asked me if I was OK and talking in such an unsettlingly panicked way.  This, more than anything else, made my heart race and my face become cold.  Home was not an option, nor was a hospital.  At that moment, of all moments, I remembered my house in Missouri, the house I grew up in.  I used to sit by the small creek that ran just beyond a hill behind our house.  I used to sing songs to myself, mostly stupid rhymes about what I did and saw, in some melody that was in no key or relatively in tune.  There, with all those eyes before me and my old home in my mind, one of the few songs whose words I still knew became loud, louder than the questions and the cars passing slowly and the movement inside the box.  My disjointed melody started to seem like it was being sung by those around me, their mouths moving along with my stupid words.  If it was coincidence that was fine with me, but that they seemed to know the words irritated me.  I blinked, coughed, inhaled and then ran.  It wasn’t that I thought a running bloody man could get help faster than a standing bloody  man, especially if he, like me, had no destination in mind.  It seemed, rather, that it was time to leave.  As I got further away, I wondered if  that particular incident of mauling wouldn’t be the first thing I thought of when turning the corner and facing the box sometime after 8:37 a.m.  One day there would be other neighbors, other shops opening in some different season and I would walk past, maybe no longer living there myself and thinking nothing of the running I had done through the street, bleeding and throbbing.  If there were only a creek nearby, I thought, my hands would have found their way there, submerged then healed by the magic healing powers of mud, rocks, water and aquatic waste.  The nearest house seemed respectable and perhaps housed someone with snese, with it’s tasteful trim and elegant landscaping, and I ran onto the porch and kicked the door a few times.  An elderly woman with thin orange hair who seemed no taller than 4′ 5″ opened the door and blurted, “what the hell?” as soon as she saw my hands, but maybe her question was rhetorical, because she didn’t wait for my reply and quickly asked, “are you on drugs?” to which I said with certainty, “no”, though certainly I was a bit hungover, and high, on coffee and weed.  “Come in!” and she grabbed the elbow of my coat and tugged me inside.  The house was warm and sweet, much in the way of old people’s style.  Everything seemed made out of cake, including, I swear to God, a painting of a cake that I later saw hanging in her hallway.  She seemed prepared for such an incident and was in no time had my hands clean and being wrapped.  Perhaps she was a red cross nurse in the second World War, but I didn’t ask.  Within minutes I was eating a cookie and drinking Ginger Ale.  “What happened to you?”  she seemed to demand, not out of curiosity but out of obligation for my repairs.  “Some porcupines bit me.”  I wondered if the lie would float or sink.  “You were bit, or were you scratched by their spines?  What, were you trying to grab ’em?”  “No no, they bit me with their teeth, not the needles.  They only use those for backup defense.  This was a full on assault.  They were purposeful, vindictive.  There was a plotting on their part, to be sure.”  Within seconds I felt less welcome and uncomfortable, so I said thanks and made to leave.  She reached for me as I stood, a grasping that was desperate and strange.  I managed a quick manuever and jumped through the doorway and into the street and broke into a run.  Slowing after turning left onto another street, I realized I’d yet to get a paper, and it was already after 11:34 a.m.  If one is to get a job one must beat the pavement early and  I might have ruined the whole day’s search.  The one good thing would be avoiding the churning of the days maladies, whose culmination into a dissonant chord accompanied most of my days.  Recently any movement or thought was the background of a single nausea.  I wondered if Jackson Pollock ever said to himself, “damn, that was one too many splatters, I’ll have to re-do this whole corner.”  I pretended I was made of wood and wondered why I couldn’t get a job.  Something was surely conspiring against me, making me unable to gather applications, making me late for interviews, causing companies to send their most inept employee to interview me, keeping me in a hotel room watching TV and rubbing curtains on my face.  Funds were running low and friends had long ago gone from politely refusing to give me money to ignoring me completely.  I thought back to a few days before.  Walgreens was advertising some food on sale and I thought I would be able to eat for less than a dollar.  I walked in and went to the office/school supply section for some browsing before breakfast.   I was drawn towards a box of crayons, when the smell and their promise of vivid colors sent me back to when I was young and in school, and chants and taunts, reprimands and refusals filled my mind and I began to cry, in isle 4.  I was paralyzed, enraptured with sobs and regrets.  The next thing I remember was thinking that biting into a crayon would surely break the spell.  The crunching brought me back to reality and made me aware of being approached by two employees who escorted me to the street, the while asking me, “what the fuck?” and threatening to call the police.  I told them, “if you ever want help, don’t call them!” but my advice perhaps went unheeded.  It’s hard to trust a guy you just saw eating a crayon, I understand that plainly enough, but hopefully they will think about what I said, once they had calmed down.  Days later, with moderate wounds thinking about an aborted Lunchables breakfast, I began craving cheese and ham on crackers.  I entered a store close to my hotel, bought some malt liquor, job hunting relegated to another day, and a Lunchable.  I took them to my room and consumed them during The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  “The worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens, not half as bad as you figure it’ll be before it’s happened” made me laugh and laugh.  It sure ain’t, I said in my best Curtin impression, sure it ain’t.  Later I fell asleep on the floor, thinking about piles of good, too.

Bits from a Stupid Notebook, or Why do I even Try?

“Are you OK to drive?”  Her question managed to get through the haze of alcohol and confusion born of earlier events.  “Yeah, I’m fine,” though I really wasn’t.  The question then had little effect on me, but later I began to analyze the question asked towards that version of myself.  There was, now after a bit of reflection, serious concern in her voice but more perturbingly my mind twisted some unknown intent towards a character judgement, and perhaps her words were even spoken with a bit of disgust.  I wondered what she might have thought of me, as a person, as a musician, as some dude that just happens to be around.  Earlier I had told her everything, at least everything that I hadn’t told anyone heretofore.  It seemed, at that time, quite an appropriate subject of conversation and of importance that I do not normally give to past events.  There I began a fragmented but exposing picture of myself.  The “Self,” as well as various value systems, I do not care to worry about, making me become somewhat of an open book for any passing inquisitive reader when I let down my guard.  I do not quite have a reason for my words or actions, only regret for forgetting the fact that most people share things with friends and family, stories that they were told but were only intended for those original set of ears.  Being known is a grand fear, unreasonable perhaps, and I also posses the same skepticism in needing to know that much about any one else.  The “Self” is no single entity, it is not one solid object, but a fluid, changing, evolving mass of organized matter, pushed by genetic impetus and circumstantial inertia.  It is being thought of as a single incident or string of words that seems wrong, no such singularities, even over large periods with a bit of consistency should be the definition of such singularity.  This, I cannot be.

Extreme good fortune has put me in this body, placed me on this planet, at this time, to have self awareness bestowed, to allow the greatest of all sights, the life unfolding. The Becoming is easily lost, to a degree, to the answering of belief and sets of beliefs, habits, knowledge, culture, solidifying the flow of experience to a few solid moments that are but mere shadows compared to that which they were derived.  At some point we are no single thinker, may you rest in peace my great Descartes, but a conduit, formed of a singular path of existence through which flows the essence of the expanse that guides and shapes and Is, Life Complete.

In a dream the other night I stepped through a door from the blackness of sleep into a large ‘complex’.  I was in some war-torn country, much of the images looking like the iconic images of war in Iraq.  There were gunmen set up between turrets, firing throughout the dream.  The floor was a polished marble and clean.  On the internal part of the complex was what looked to be an open air mall or outdoor shopping center.  The chains all looked to be brand names, just like any other mall, but the shops were a bit smaller, perhaps because the demand for clothing is much smaller in situations like these.  Guns were blasting, smoke whiffed through the air and the danger just outside the walls seemed omni-present.  The clerks at the stores all seemed fairly calm, the store signs all of the same font and coloring, perhaps military regulations.  Even the clothes looked similar, but there must have been at least a dozen shops.  The clerks folded shirts and brushed off dust.  As I walked along each looked eager at the prospect of a sale, welcoming and encouraging me, telling me how handsome I would look in one or another shirt, how strong the fabric was, how it was made of 50% Radon and 50% Helium, what a collared shirt would do for my neckline, how one may repel dust better.  I wasn’t scared and did not feel sorry for these clerks, standing there all day as no one came by and round after round blasted in their ears.  I was quite astounded, but gunmen stayed focused, clerks busied themselves and in the distance were mud houses, blasted and full of holes, distant enemies and dust blocking the sun, creating a blanket of hot dirty orange.  An officer came walking quickly towards me and asked what I was doing.  I told him, “shopping, I think.”  “Carry on,” and with that he walked past looking annoyed but satisfied with my response.   I turned to head back to the door, but it was gone and in its place stood some shelves with equipment placed on them.  I approached and there was a helmet with my name on it, a large gun and some MREs, all labeled “Donut and Coffee.”  I had been conscripted.

desoladora

[crunch crunch crunch]  pine needles and decaying wood underneath a pair of booted feet broke the silence of the still Mexican air.  The boots’ owner meandered, with no direction and nothing to do, and could not even consider himself rambling.  Walking was inertia and its exhaustion kept back any thinking.  Warm air wrapped his body, but his mind had no such comfort or closeness; it was a remote singularity, on some distant plane in another time.  Through breaks between trees he saw the distant blue that he always imagined was a pane of glass, thin and built by God.  His mind grabbed these things he saw, held them and played with them.  All he carried were these thoughts, picked up and left so easily.  Around others he built a barrier, the mortar dry for a few weeks but cracking and flaking, silence eroding it fast.  A clearing appeared ahead and, as it lay along his current path, he entered it.

The sky opened before him and just above the tree line a single wisp of cloud lay atop the blue.  Its singularity and defined shape frightened him.  So benign and soft, it turned monstrous in his eyes.  It was seeing another in a private and sacred moment.  He looked around at the circle of trees outlining the clearing.  This inner, open expanse of small, scrubby brush was broken by a protrusion on the other side, a bit taller than the patchy tufts.  As he approached it the smell of death entered him.  It was a rabbit, missing part of his face and covered with blood, some of the red mixed with the dirt clumping beside it.  A heat seared in his temples, and for the first time since his journey he thought of the villagers. He only allowed this one thought, of how they buried their dead but left others to rot.  Once he felt as they did, that rotting was a desecration of life, but now found it beautiful.  Those villagers would hold their virtue and smile, at the death of others not like them, smiling a vicious, sneering smile, so righteous and careful, so casual and clean, all horrid.

He could not leave.  The searing retreated but the thoughts, that he tried to leave behind or hope would dissolve of their own accord, were still there, just behind his eyes, inescapable, mixing with his blood and no longer bound as words or images.  Every breath stirring them, letting them live on inside.  His journey started less as escape and more to find pure experience, to be burdened no longer with ideas or words or the past and simply be.  Ultimately he was betrayed, by something inside himself.  Starring at the rabbit, he wanted to bury it and felt this was part of his betrayal.  Visions of shovels and carts appeared.  He also wanted to say a prayer for this rabbit, less for any sanctity of this creature, but to make profane the act of prayer.  He wanted to fly just then, to touch the thin glass pane with his tongue, to taste God’s cleanest creation.  The rabbit had become a part of him, rough fur against his neck and ears, and there was only one thing left to do.

The decision to die was made, but he would die by decision only.  He would lay down and will himself dead.  He had heard of that before.  People just tired of living could tell themselves to die and, if they wanted it badly enough, would collapse instantly and for good.  There were stories like that from the village.  Stories of great loss, stories that ended with someone dying, and one story is much like his.  A fisherman, so it is said to have happened, saw the suffering of the world and could not bear it.  He was not strong enough to do anything, nor did he posses the common quality that allows most of us to disregard suffering and concern ourselves with ourselves.  He jumped from his boat, but before actually drowning, he willed himself dead.  He would not allow the water to kill him, it was his deed to do and not the water’s.  So our booted man, filled with what could not be called courage but absent of fear, lay prone, next to the rabbit.  He tried to relax, but some muscles twitched.  It was the first rest since he started, so long ago.  For a fleeting second he wondered if he should say a prayer for himself, but what would he say?  To whom would he say it?  What good would it do, when he was giving back the one thing those outside forces had given him?  No, it was better with no words, for he was alone and should die that way, evoking no one and wanting nothing.  Slowly the light past his eyelids faded, the rabbit and sky and cloud and trees almost gone.  The muscles of his body finally stopped twitching.  Breathing slowed.  Gravity was there, but it was lessening its grip, pulling gently, loosening then letting go altogether.  Breathing stopped and his heart no longer pulled and pushed.  Thoughts were now gone, gone at last.  Finally, finally yes!, will itself, the last remaining visitor, closed the door on its way out.

unsubmitted

The Alibi has a contest every year with stories that are 107 words or less.   Here are three that I never submitted, and probably never will.

I threw a brick into the back window and immediately wondered if I had taken the correct course of action.  “… the Hell!” Alex yelled, stepping outside.  “I love Sara,” fell from my mouth with no forethought.  Through the back door I saw the eyes I adored look on in horror and glisten with tears.  Alex grabbed a sprinkler key and proceeded to beat me, bloody and broken. At the hospital I received two messages, one said I was not welcome back at home and the other said, “I cannot see you again.”  There under fluorescents, I wondered at love and thought it ought not be so difficult.

The Doctor’s hands were as steady and cold as his razor.  This procedure was becoming commonplace, but still dangerous.  Students watched from above to learn from the pioneer of these techniques.  With careful incisions, the piece of brain was slowly removed and put on a tray.  The Doctor felt its warmth through his gloves.  After the head was sewn, patient removed and the sound of students’ shuffling feet distant, The Doctor pushed the cart into an adjacent room.  Alone, The Doctor nervously reached in the waste bag, pulled out the gray piece, said, ” and now for the most delicious part,” and placed it gently into his mouth.

“There’s a little bit of blood,” came from the bathroom. “What?”  “I’m bleeding, a little.”  I don’t remember anything being too rough, but we were both quite drunk last night.  She crawled back into bed and put her head on my chest.  “Why don’t you love me?” Not knowing why, I answered with silence and searched for the reasons I usually fall in love too early.  When I stop falling in love and find I’m firmly planted in routine and, usually, a relationship, love feels different.  Love may exist only inside of us or it may need action to breathe.  We had, regardless, worked out its physical manifestation.

Grand-Mere

My aunt Kim has always been fond of taking the time to tell me stories of her mother, my paternal grandmother.  Kim told stories excitedly, imbued with humor and love.  “She was ahead of her time,” was how many of the stories start, and indeed grandma was.  I remember her full of life, until her untimely end, tall and thin, loving and sometimes hysterical, and also full of love.  She and my aunt seemed to care only deeply, never conditionally or partly.  One of the stories I never get to tell, but will tell here, does not involve my grandmother’s foresight or intuition, but her known but never mentioned side of eccentricities.  It’s hard to get my aunt to tell me stories of that nature, but is quick to remind me, if I were to bring them up, that grandma ‘saw things’ or knew things that others did not.  She always gave off an air of spirituality to me, though she never adhered to a religion, but spoke affectionately of saints and jesus and healers and teachers and, I think, even psychics.  This spiritual air gave a credence to some of her wild tales, at least to me.  My life has seen too many strange things to think our understanding of reality and time are easily explained or that one explanation is correct or even sufficient.  After my mother died, there were many people in my house, helping my dad, there to attend the funeral, helping with us kids that were more than content to do without the help of distant relatives or neighbors for whom we did not care.  My grandmother was of course there and my remembering experiences from those fragile weeks then were and are foggy at best.  Years later grandma was visiting and I was 18 at the time.   She waited until there was no one around and in the hallway of my house, asked me if I remembered the time after my mother died.  “Of course,” not really knowing where her questions were leading.  “Do you remember cleaning out your dad’s room, under the bed?”  Cleaning underneath a bed from 10 years ago seemed oddly specific.  “Do you remember what we saw?”  Her eyes were intense, and this was serious business for her.  “Don’t you remember?”  I stared at her, silent and completely confused.  “When we crawled under the bed, you and I, all of a sudden a beautiful garden appeared and two women were walking together, we couldn’t tell who they were, and we both looked at each other and crawled out from under the bed and ran out into the yard.  Do you remember that, honey?”  For a second I was worried about her sanity, then that quickly became me worrying that I, in my response, would be validating or challenging her sanity; then, as sometimes happens to me, something from long ago will appear, in my mind, and I won’t be able to think, to move, enraptured in some experience outside my body.  Many times this happens as a dream suddenly becomes reality, and as she stood there, my mind left that place and I saw [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ it seemed like a summer day, but the sun was not out; there was light radiating from all around, grasses, trees, birds all shining with some inner light.  There were two women, the first things I noticed because they were moving.  It could have been a hundred years a go, or a dozen, but the way they were dressed was in old, big white dresses, one carrying a parasol.  They were almost as white as their dresses, moving slowly away from me.  I could hear myself breathing, birds chirping and fluttering and some mumbled conversation between the women.  They were not aware of me.  Even the air was unusual, it glowed, had a texture.  The air was not an inert emptiness between things, it had a life, it pulsed and moved.  My skin’s pores opened and this air moved in me, through me, danced in my veins with what could only be described as homogeneous mix of ecstasy and fear.  The movement was in and out at the same time, a constant becoming smaller and larger simultaneously.  I noticed someone was holding my hand, but I did not see who it was.  I could only stare ahead.  The women’s voices chimed and resonated with the waves of light.  My bones wanted to melt and jump, all knowledge dripped from the condensation on leaves.  Humming, pulsing, dreaming, crashing, wanting, resolving, dying, living, loving, confusing, dreaming, chiming, shining, dreaming, dancing, falling, flying, clenching, smiling, smiling, smilin]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]  “yeah, I do remember it grandma,” was something that came out of my mouth, at some point.  She looked at me satisfied and assured.  She took my hands in hers, squeezed them and hugged me, my head in her chest and her chin in my hair.  Later that evening, with my aunts Kim and Debbie, my father and step–mother, older brother, younger brother, step-sister, and perhaps someone else standing in the kitchen, piling mounds of spaghetti on old plates topped with sauce from a jar, my grandmother brought up this incident from my childhood.  Her confidence could startle and this enchanted the room with silence and wide-eyed stares, everyone suddenly looking at me to verify a magical land under a bed.  “It was just like a dream I had, I have a hard time remembering…”  and I trailed off as my grandmother looked slightly hurt and everyone else embarrassingly looked back at food or drinks, puzzled and wanting to simply not experience any unpleasantness or weirdness.  “No honey, that was something that happened.”  Later my aunt Kim told me my grandmother was on medication that made her ‘confused’ and ‘remembered things that may not have happened’.  Sometimes one sees sleight of hand as magic, or illusion as magic, or not seeing fully be confused with magic, but magic is bigger, stranger, and closer to multi-dimensional travel and quantum physics and reality-as-it-is than most of the distractions known as magic.  Magic is an art, a way of living and thinking, and the ability to perceive the smallest of things that we are supposed to disregard.  My grandmother was magical, and I may have inherited, if not the art of magic, at least the ability to recognize it.  Her sunglasses are still in a drawer at my house, a picture of my brother and I, young and tired, eating at her house sits on a shelf and her spirit seems close as I play my piano, as she stood behind me in her house, rubbing my back as I played her piano, holding the damper pedal and just listening to sounds, sounds with no rules, no lessons, no demand other than to just be perceived.

Part one of one

I woke up around 10:30pm.  I decided that the 3 hour sleep routine was just for me as I lay languid and contemplating my next move.  I knew I needed to record.  It was Wednesday night, and I had a performance Friday night and had done very little to prepare.  Lately, I’ve been noticing the extremities of my body loose feeling and get a sort of numbness after laying one way or resting another.  If getting old was this way, that was fine with me, so long as I don’t have ALS.  Sometimes lying in bed I try hard to focus on what it is I am to do when I wake up and plan out my day, or evening at this case proved to be.  Usually, however, it means just more time half asleep questioning myself, hating myself, masturbating, wakeful dreaming and dreading going to work or generally procrastinating any acts of responsibility.  Tonight, all I had to do was record some music as backing tracks for my performance, and still I was stalling, not moving, dreading… all the usual feelings I usually have before getting out of bed in the morning.

There has been something wrong lately.  I haven’t been sleeping, I’ve been drinking too much and cannot focus.  I say only this as a set-up, not as any sort of desperate call for help.  I know quite well what happens to me internally and usually watch it happen with a cold disconnect, with knowledge of what is right and wrong, of what is good and bad, of what is and isn’t, yet none of those rules seem to matter much when I am terribly confused, conflicted and generally unhappy.  Reality seems to break down, to not be one static thing when all is falling down around me.  Usually ART does this to me.  When I create, ALL is possible.  However, when ‘all is possible’, very little matters except the biggest things… or the smallest, depending on one’s inclination.

After getting out of bed and dressing myself (partly) I pissed, killed a cockroach on my floor (which I’m still conflicted about), drank some water and sat down at the computer.  Before I started recording, I had to make sure I didn’t have a pressing e-mail I had to answer.  One awaited me, one of monumental weight that pulled me back to the center of ‘who I am’ and ‘what am I to do’ sorts of thoughts.  The reason I’ve become so much more distant of late, and distant usually in in regards of my interaction with others, is that I do not want to have control over another, nor someone controlling me.  This e-mail was another reminder to confront myself and reality.  After doing what needed to be done I got up, stretched and freaked out.  I would not be able to do anything tonight.  I had visions of my set on Friday becoming a ridiculous, unplanned version of what I wanted because I could not prepare. Having been a Boy Scout, this was doubly troublesome.  I told myself that after I got some beer, then, drinking the reward for work that was yet done, would buckle down and record like a madman.  I turned on fan to my house and smelled burning.  I disregarded it; nothing was apparently burning in my house.  Getting ready to leave is the most conflicting time for me.  Do I really need to drink?  Will I really record tonight?  Do I deserve to even be playing  such an amazing show with so many amazing bands?  Am I really a hack?  Does anyone still think about the thing I did at that party that still makes me embarrassed to even think about?  All doubt seems transfixed into that moment.  If I were to make any life-changing decision, it would be before I step out the door.  I decide to get some beer and ride my bike tonight.  I knew, just as I was making the decision to bike I would be biking a much further route than the one to the grocery store.

All of this was done in a haze.  The first hour after waking up is a blur to me, and perhaps that’s a developed self-preservation technique.  Little of the deep analysis I scrutinize myself with is present at those moments.  It makes things like going to work automatic, so when I finally begin analysis, I’m already in the middle of work and nearing lunchtime.  No opportunity given to question if work is worth my time, or if I’ve made the right decisions.  If there was only that feeling through out the day, or that haze was simply never there, I would perhaps be a whole person, but now, with different modes of existence, it seems I live multiple lives.  I just thought, “beer, music, biking, cool air” and was off with few delays.  When I opened the door I heard voices, then a light transversing the sky.  Some of the neighbors were throwing some ball that illuminated while they danced in the middle of the street.  The air was fresh this evening, but was there still burning?  I left my gated front yard and hopped on the bike.  Only a block away, I noticed LOTS of smoke to the south.  I turned down the next street and started to hear sirens.  There was a huge fire behind a group of buildings, but no house was on fire.  I saw the flames, reaching as high as perhaps 10 or 12ft with billowing black smoke emanating, but then soon turned around when the fire trucks arrived.  Beer then became my main concern.

The grocery store was close, but I biked like I was in a hurry, with purpose, as if I only had little time.  Life is short, and little time is all we have, but I have to usually trick myself into believing that long before I simply act as if that’s the case.  Getting inside the store I decide to check the balance of my account.  It turns out that I only had $5.  Not flinching or going away with the thought that my last $5 better be spent on something else, I went right to the beer isle to find something under that amount.  There were plenty of options, none so dissimilar, but I acted as if it were a great deliberation.  If I am to spend the last of my money, I thought, why not be picky and thrifty and get the best value?  Some cheap, high alcohol content domestic beer was the winner, but the only options for me this evening were 5 different cheap, high alcohol content domestic beers.   Paid, back on my bike, then I crack one open in a neighborhood behind the store and settle in for a long, slow, drunken bike ride.

This evening was pleasant, but there were also some hints of darkness, the sort of darkness in my thoughts that do not scare me, but which I cannot hide from.  It wasn’t long before I was biking past the first house I lived in after moving to this city.  I stopped on the street, took a long, sad drink and recalled as many memories as could possibly fill my mind.  Breakfast in that house was one of the fondest memories, various modes of using potatoes and green chile after having slept late and sun brighter than I’ve ever seen pouring through the windows illuminated the street just a bit as I stood there.  A near mantra, “who am i, what am i doing?” circled all.  I was tired, needing to record, and all I wanted to do was live in just my mind, as my body pushed itself through the darkness.  I wondered if the same neighbors, a nurse and writer, lived next door.  When my baby was born, a nurse approached me in the hospital asked me if my name was Clifford.  I said yes, and she said I was her old neighbor.  I didn’t recognize her, but she said no one could forget someone like me.  There, on the dark street full of doubt and loneliness, it seemed being unforgettable didn’t matter much.  I biked away, threw my empty beer in a can in the park nearby, and opened another.

There were some stars out tonight.  Being in the city, I was impressed to see 6, maybe 7 stars.  Maybe some were planets, I am no astronomer.  I was moving in the direction of my home, and even got right to the driveway when I decided to bike more.  I was not sure why I had to, but I needed to keep moving.  I gained some speed, and as my mind tightened a grip on my psyche, I biked harder.  Passing a school and some cheap, cramped apartments I began to wonder if I was running from something or towards something.  The difference seemed small.  I just then passed a couple of bikers, a man and a woman, talking to each other and biking the other way.  They seemed to come out of nowhere, almost upon me before I heard them.  It was then that I wondered if being with someone, and living for someone,   would make me feel more complete.  If it would do that, I would have taken that opportunity given to me some time ago and perhaps it would be available to me still this very evening.   I passed an empty building that once had a a Russian grocery store.  I had gone in a few times, bought some things, but hadn’t been there in a while.  The first time I shopped there I bought bread and anchovies and chocolate.  Checking out at the counter the Russian gentleman said, “mmmm, this is Good! Smell!” and shoved the bread inches from my nose.  “Yeah, that’s nice” was all I could say as the bald Russian stared at me with eyes that were intense and happy and almost angry.  I wondered where he may be as I passed.

I biked through some neighborhoods that I’ve been fond of transversing lately.  There was one street I was sure I had to bike down.  The other night coming home from a show at Stove I took some random, zig-zagging route and went down a street that had a near magical feel.  As I got closer and closer to that street the air was getting cooler.  The evenings are just now starting to drop in temperature, and my exposed arms felt like a damp, cold cloth covered them.   The breeze picked up slightly and the moon was suddenly visible all as I turned on this street.  There are no street lights on this street, and very few people had their porch lights on.  This could be one of the darkest streets for miles around.   One aspect that is striking is how many large trees are in front yards on this street, and not just large, but rather what could only be called massive in comparison to my now insignificant frame.  I slowed down, took a long drink from another beer.  I got some impression that something momentous happened here, long ago.  It felt like Christians might feel when visiting Bethlehem.  This was a sacred spot, powerful.  Ancestors and ghosts gathered here, light bent slightly above the trees.  Nymphs and elves might rest here upon their journey to other lands and planes.  Just as I turned off the street, a street lamp’s yellow glow became brighter, the wind stopped blowing and I heard a rumbling.

The city has had an edge to it, and the rumbling was part of that.  Helicopters were flying above.  There have been many out lately, and Watching news and seeing clips of war, then going out and seeing what appear to be patrols of helicopters, with search lights and abrupt maneuvers close to the tree lines a feeling of living in dangerous times in a police state could not be escaped.  …

Was I now being poked?  I was in a park, lying down, and someone was asking if I was OK.  I look around, my bike and my bag still secure.  “Sure, I’m fine,” though I wasn’t sure.  I get back on my bike, trying to recall.  The night air had taken a deliciously cold turn.  I was drunk, smashingly drunk.  There were no cars on the street.  I had recently held beautiful phrases in my mind, wanting to write them down later, but now they were gone.  I was disappointed in myself, I usually remember my good ideas, and tonight I was full of them, but now I had nothing from earlier.  Vague dreams fogged my thinking.  One was of sitting on a car, on some higher hill in the city overlooking the river, the whole west side and most of the east side. there was a festive mood in the air, people were hanging around, almost like it was the fair, but with no rides or food stands.  People were just hanging out.  Then in the sky a ship, some alien ship, is wobbling and spewing smoke and fast approaching the ground.  When it hits it causes an explosion.  The explosion seems big, but gets bigger and bigger, hot air and flames expanding towards us from miles away.  I duck under the car, and all around me is vaporized.  Flames and heat push past for a long time.  The last thing I see is looking up at buildings and all windows are blown out and everything is radiating an orange glow.  The other dream has me sitting in the passenger side of a car while some driver unknown to me drives the wrong way through a McDonald’s drive-thru over and over, circling the building and getting angrier and angrier about not getting any service.

The night was gone, my day done and blurring into another day.  I had work soon, and would need to recover.  I wish, dear reader, that I could remember more of this night for you, more of what was magical and pure.  There were so many thoughts I wanted to share, but now so much time has passed, this must suffice.  I was afraid I would not even be able to finish this, with so much lost and changed.  Life, however, is repeating and yet never repeating.  Maybe what was lost will turn up somewhere else, getting a chance to dance on screen in another tale, from another night, differently but with the same movement towards truth.  As long as my movement is in that direction, digging deeper and exposing what of myself I can, then I have done all I can do.   I am no man of action, and do not feel action and decision becomes me, but it may just be my circumstance permits it.  I am young and can afford to be a dilettante in all  ideas, love, performing and creating.  I see no need to hold a conviction, just to simply move in the right direction.  When I finally do find purpose and reason, I may not be so far from being able to act upon them.