Walking on my toes down the driveway, trying to keep my heels off the wet things: wormy-looking little brownseed, translucent pods that look like insect wings, giant black ants trooping across the squares who don't notice anything; being careful makes me feel very tall. Green algae thrushes in the shady spots where the light doesn't come through the trees after it rains; between the texture of the cement is another forest, an eighth of a millimeter high. I don't want to step on anything wet, dry, or sharp. What if the wet things are alive?
Prediction: tonight, I will beg for a few dollars to go to a show. Just to go - just to be out among people. Pull the ripcord and hit the ground and stagger up and hurl my stupid backback into the dirt and pull the goddamn parachute out by hand and fling the silk into the still air as hard as I can. Other people'll think I'm dancing, but the fact that there will be music playing is pure coincidence to this.
Prediction: tonight, I stay in and watch Law and Order. Instead of asking for $5, I'll help with a quiet lawn project, listen to some music in the garage, and work up the courage to go running.
Prediction: I will look back on this time and wonder how I will ever get back to where I was before this time, and wonder how I will go on. I will of course, wonder which "when" I was referring to, but "why?" will feel like so much of a sucker-punch than I won't be able to face it very often or for very long.
My predictions are never about the future.
What happens to us is circumscribed by the relationships we maintain, and the heart and hope we put into them, is like setting a table, a simple, optimistic thing; a nice life is the one where new friends get forks and napkins and sit down to become family. A nice life has lots of new friends and old family. Sometimes someone will ask if they can peel an apple for you. You can peel an apple for someone else. It's not weird.
Dad got a neuropsych evaulation today. I got something to help me sleep. We're the only people here. He's asleep.
Prediction: I'll stay home to hang out with my dad, so I don't waste $12 and spend the night standing in front of a bunch of amplifiers, so I don't drive around any more little towns. I don't want to hear anybody or see anything, anyhow.
We shouldn't be surprised at what happens to us.
So it's down to a science: science is a description of things that keep happening over and over and over.
Somebody predicted that if the temperature of the vacuum in our universe isn't actually at it's lowest possible value, it could skip down a degree or so and the moment and from wherever that happens everything becomes over: all the subatomic particles break apart and so do we, quicker than a flash of light.
Somebody else predicted that the whole universe is a computer, and whether it's on or off doesn't make any difference: if it's off, it's our destiny to turn it on, and we'll only be smart enough and ready to turn it on when the universe is dying. Just in time, we flip the switch. When it's on, everything that's ever lived will live forever.
So everything I've ever seen or had is a prop: then life is a theory, or life is a simulation.
See? there's a difference. On a personal note, could you slice me half an apple?
Don't miss the world because you only live once, they say: especially since you can't miss the world and you'll never die, I hear.
British Sea Power, and The Rosebuds.
What happens isn't happening, and in the meantime I'm walking around trying to figure out who we are and why the whole mise en scene looks so scab-thin and why the air feels scratchy and why our feet clop like hooves instead of the little slaps I was always accustomed to. Oh, life. Life takes a lot of believing.
In rehearsal: if your steps sound hollow to you, keep quiet about it or you'll deserve what you get.
Continuing, I addressed the audience. I'm 24 and too old to just walk
around and look at people and wonder what I'm seeing. Don't waste gas.
You're supposed to know by now.
(The ongoing - it begins immediately.)
Actually, hold on - lets go back a beat.
Why don't you?, accuse the eyes of successful people. My eyebrows struggle to explain to you, it's that I'm not used to being looked at. Now the corners of my lips go firm and I don't mean them to be. I'm just looking, I stare. We're not looking at you, accuse the eyes of successful people. The concrete creaks when I put my weight back on my heels, and I look down at my feet to see how that could be because how could that be?, and though my brain says I don't have any lines my cheeks go hot anyways and when I look up you can see I've forgotten them, and crosses all a cloud of trouble over my face. I love you for your poise. I love that poise!, and the flush of it excited me so much just now that if I knew who you thought I was supposed to be then I'd break character to tell you what I just saw. You've got so much poise, I don't even trouble you. Your eyes weren't looking at me to begin with, your eyes were saying. I'm sorry I interrupted you. The set seemed weird to me all of the sudden.
So anyways, after the show, I predict that I'll write you a prop letter.
Prediction: I will be thinking about what you might have read, long after we struck and the cast broke up.
Dear beautiful genius, fairy-friend,
Predictions being what they are, we should never be surprised what happens to us.
And oh, life.
I love you more.
I'm canceling an appointment with Dr. Adelman today. The overdose built up and turned my body into a centrifuge and flung my thoughts apart, while I laid up, sleepless and growing wilder without sleep. Now, nine days later, the pinwheeling feelings've have fully come and gone and left me ghosts, the terrific vacuum in my chest's filled in, and I've still got some birthday cake left over. It's ice cream cake. I turned 24 soon-ago.
I'm fine. I'm not sick. I'm not worried.
What - me, worry?
I'll be fine.
The French Kicks were beautiful.
I got to tell one of them about what their songs meant to me. I wasn't trying to be nice, I just meant it. I got to say thanks.
Tonight was really nice.
There were so many beautiful girls, and a guy my age, perched in a back corner of the bar in this red checked shirt looking for all the world like a leopard, listening and watching, his back curved with impossible relaxation, and yet such intensity in the eyes of a seemingly effortless person. I wished anybody else had seen him; I looked at him and saw a man I understand somehow. An instantly lovable, estimable, dangerous species. The world belongs to such people. It's no imagination - you can find the wilderness looking back at you in any crowd, if you look hard enough. Nobody else seemed to see him. We animals are really all the same, but people forget. Here was an artist's image of an artist, a maverick scent, an obvious cleverness, lapsing at ease. The sexy girls in the make-up and the beautiful dresses, dancing up front and getting less attention than they'd thought they were - they didn't seem to understand, somehow.
The music was wonderful. So much happened. They seemed sweet. I sang along. The band played nicely. It was fun.
Wasting drafts of stupid jokes, awkward greetings for unsendable letters.
Dearest Cara,
By the time you read this, I will be dead.
No, wait. That's not it.
I try to get that stuff out of me before.
MJ is watching me from the floor, hypnotized between sleep and waking. Dad's asleep. I finally got my medicine today, and took it. My chest hurt for a little while, but I think I'm okay. At least, I feel like I'm okay.
Okay. Fine. Good. They all mean the same thing, which is usually "don't ask any further". Sometimes, it's "please, oh God, please follow up so I know I exist to somebody." But most of the time, it's polite.
Polite politics.
"Fuck off with your Goddamn questions" just makes people ask more questions.
"What? What did I do? What's your problem? Did you hear what this motherfucker just said to me?"
We like polite politics around here.
On the phone, a representative from the Democratic Senatorial Committee (asking for money) asked my dad how he's doing today. "Not. Too. Good." He answered. She sort of paused, of course, and then said she was sorry to hear that. She asked for money anyways, but he'd hung up the phone after telling her he was broke, and I was on the line already and I asked her a few more questions.
Apparently there are 28 Republican seats in the Senate open this term. There are 12 Democrat seats up, too. They'd like to win them all. They want our help. We have to get our government back under control.
I told her we had no money to give her, but if she sent us a letter, that she'd probably get some anyways. I asked her when the refund checks were coming out, and she said sometime in May, the first of them will be mailed to people. She said everybody gets $600.
I told her she could have some of that, when I get it. She didn't think I was serious and so said nothing, which I suppose convinced me that I wasn't being serious, and that I'm going to send nothing. She got herself off the phone. She's going to help get our government back under control. I hung up, too, after she did.
I don't care much about politics.
Tonight's a show. The French Kicks are playing; they've come all the way here to play an hour or so at Local 506. I know how a lot of their songs go, and they're good.
There's a black ant walking around in the kitchen - he just went under the table, and he's walking around down there. I don't know where he's going to. If I weren't real, I would make myself the size of an ant, and float around behind him and watch him all day. I don't know why, but God made me too big.
I'm so very grateful for the friends I've had. They've been good to me. So's my dad. He loves me and has hope that I'll be okay.
He thinks I'm going to be better than fine, because he says God's given me great gifts. I just have to shake this, whatever it is, off and I'll catch up so quickly. He says I have no idea.
I get mad at him, because I don't want to just hope for something that feels less tangible than a dream; I looked at my neurocog-evaluation yesterday and today and I feel every possible success I've ever failed at fall on me like a wall of tires and I'm sorry for myself. I imagine a life of not being able to really do anything, and the words of the report grind on me like yellow rope.
I remember reading, when I was a little boy, words from a progress report that my parents got about me when I was in elementary school. It started, "Patrick is a very bright youngster...", and proceeded to talk about me not listening in class. I remember thinking how nice those words sound, how good natured a person might be in order to write them, and how whenever anybody used my name, 'Pat' and 'Patrick' both, I felt like I would be a kid forever. Everybody older than me was always Older than me; I chafed against that, and the inscrutable faces of the Older Kids seemed pained and exaggerated and like they would never be like me again, which repelled me and fascinated as much as the Teachers' all-intending motherliness (which I know now was really more about just being willing to be loving than wisdom or maturity).
I remember once I saw a teacher be a sister to one of the kids.
I was young and I didn't feel like a "bright youngster" but it seemed to be a phrase that people thought should make me feel special, just as surely as they knew it would make my parents feel good. I'd be embarrassed, which once or twice made me say things just to get away from feeling singled out for something that made me stick out from the other kids. I wanted to get that mention over with as soon as possible. They'd tell me I was special, and I'd say "I know." They thought I was being rude on purpose, so they'd look at me sternly. You can ignore a kid or rationalize him away - they could figure I just wanted to go play and let me off. I would be thinking about the other kids, and I felt like they should be defended from any teacherly accusation that I was intelligent, different, special. I didn't ever know how. I felt like we should all be alike and like each other, and I really wanted them to like me, and I was afraid of being different to them.
I remember the kids who'd struggle, and this one kid in particular, Matt, who was very funny, a natural athelete, seemed to fear no authority, and I thought he was really clever and everybody thought he was cool. He had all these older brothers who were discipline problems and achievers, real Guys. He was kind of vulgar because of his brothers. I went to Pre-K with him. I remember feeling this desolation, this utter distance from people my age, creep up on me, and by the time I was 7 I'd become nobody. I had a few friends. I remember wishing, hoping that I was going to grow up right. I liked those kids, and I liked the ones who didn't really like me okay except for the fact that they didn't like me, and I remember the powerful, awful feeling of rejection that tore through me when our class first learned as a group how to criticize one another. I knew the Older Kids did. I remember this girl calling me a know-it-all on the playground, and I didn't have any idea what to say. I sure didn't think I was; I didn't mean any harm, I didn't think anybody was stupid. I didn't understand. I remember her eyes got big, and she looked like a grown-up adult person, lines in her face appeared. I remember thinking she looked like her mom for a moment - her mom was a lady who was younger than most of the other moms, and athletic, 'cool', and very beautiful. I remember talking about who had the coolest mom, and I remember halfheartedly trying to make my mom seem cool, but my mom was very shy around the other moms, and was kind of pedantic with the kids, so she never really got entered into the running. She was more of a 'mom' mom, I think was what we came up with. I remember, a year later, on the playground, which was becoming less playing and more merely 'talking' by the month, thinking that that girl, whose name was Angie, was going to be very beautiful. I remember wondering if she'd be mean and prideful when she grew up, or funny and relaxed and maybe even spiritual. She was clever, but she was darker than me, and her family went on cruises, and both her parents were Cuban as I recall, and so I felt apart from her by a thousand years.
I felt alone, but that God is real, and that He was Peace, and I didn't believe the stupid banners at church that said so, but I believed Him, even though I couldn't remember even way back then, when he'd first told me He was. But I remember that I could remember a time before I knew, and I thought that it was all important somehow. I remember playing with my little cars and thinking about God, and looking out the window at something beautiful like a red sunset in the sky or the idea of seeing Saturn if I got my telescope right or the fragile but perfectly-placed like the tall, gold pole with the black VHF antenna on it that perched above the roof and looked like a line drawing, and feeling that I should run and tell somebody this unintelligible thing: that it's good, and that it's important, and that it's holy, and that's important. And that I liked them. I remember being upside-down, looking at the light in the blinds, or the natural cursive in the dust, or the beautiful vivid mud I could make in the little garden space made of bricks that we'd always had big plants in, and that my grandmother would come and garden with us every so often, and all the snails, and know that it was an emergency somehow. I remember wanting to be a poet, despite the fact that I thought that being a poet meant you were a serious-looking young man with dark hair and a long face who wore lots of brown wool clothing and wrote only in inky black pens on letterpads, and as a poet you were a person who wouldn't talk very much to people or make a lot of eye contact, and you were demure and would always stop your writing to serve them. I thought that didn't sound like much fun, but it was worth it if God said so. I didn't know much about poets, and nothing I've ever learned about poets since I was four years old has ever made me want to be a poet, and I thought poets were decadent, bored people who wore clothes they dyed themselves and smoked cigarettes and talked about flowers like they were sunsets: and would garden and wear their flowers too, as if that wasn't fatally presumptuous and just bad taste. I felt like if I could be a good poet, I'd settle for wearing the wool, because I knew I'd be allowed to take it off and be a regular person. I'd only have to wear it long enough so people would know that that's what I wanted to be. And then, after they saw me, I could take it off.
Everyone has to know, God made this for them. It's supposed to be for you. I don't remember thinking it was for me. My dad would give us lots of chocolate ice cream in bowls, and I knew that was for me. He would tell me it was. My dad taught me a lot, and I learned a lot on my own, and I saw a snail on the deck today.
I had a sea-green book I would read called 'Catholic Catechism for Adults', with a smooth cover and it was from the 60's, and in it I learned that being spiritual was very important. I would find it and read it sometimes after playing or after dinner or before praying with my dad and my sister. It was always in my dad's nightstand, on the bottom drawer. There would sometimes be holy cards there, which I would stare at the pictures of saints, but mostly read the backs of. The book and the holy cards and the rosary that was sometimes in there and the magazines all smelled like wood. Because that's what the inside of a drawer smells like, you know?
I prayed that I'd be spiritual, and could see then a clear, and difficult path through my loneliness and into adulthood. I feel like I've been stumbling on and off that path ever since I didn't decide to start walking it for the rest of my life then. My dad was a good man, and he wanted me to be a good person, too. It was his book, and I remember eventually asking him if I could have it some summer when I was still very much a kid, because I thought ownership was adult and if he passed it onto me I could learn it and face the challenge to be holy. He said sure like it didn't matter. He was always telling me that possessions didn't matter, and I remember trying to tell him 'that they matter to me', because I didn't know how to tell him that I wanted it because it was his, and he was good, and I wanted him to know that I wanted to be good like in the book, and that I wanted his help. I remember that book.
He was always saying that I was just like my mother. I figured I knew what he meant, because I felt like I saw the resemblance, and I knew he was disappointed when he said that, and I remember trying to use my little toy ideas to convince him that it was okay. I remember climbing onto him by his work uniform, and smelling him because he smelled like grease, and his metal ball point pen would poke me or scratch me, and I loved him so much when he came home from work. He would play the piano and drink bourbon, and I loved his songs.
I didn't mean to write all this here, but I miss my dad while he's asleep and I meant to just tell this next part, but this is still true.
We listened to this Gershwin I downloaded for him in the garage today. "Rhapsody In Blue." If I could do anything in the world that was good, I'd put my heart to write that. It's a beautiful, beautiful speaking piece, and I feel the call to say things that way just as surely as God made me and just as surely do I feel my body's broken and worry that none of my wheels will ever turn that way and I wonder at what I was made to be. It's a great gift, somehow - even to feel inside yourself, what it is that you could-might be.
I wish with all my heart and none of the rest of me that I'll learn from my mistakes. I miss all the people I love so much. The wise, the gone, and the going.
I was young and I knew it.
Mom went to the hospital last night. They scanned her brain, and found a dark spot near the back of her head. Years ago, she worked at the post office, and something fell on her from a shelf. Driving home from work, her left side began tingling, and she felt disoriented. Over the phone, she tried to tell us it was stress, but even she knew better. We met her at Norwood, and dad drove her back to WakeMed. I went home and fell asleep on the couch, waiting for calls that never came.
Today, I'm going to take my first half-dose of bitter irony. And the Vyvanse.
The difference between my ironic indignity and somebody else's horrible tragedy is really only a few pills, when you think about it.
Choice, we perversely consider, is a virtue.
Outside, the birds are lecturing their young about nobility and frivolity: last week, I watched a boy discover a chick that had fallen two stories from a gutter and died on the concrete sidewalk. Young death doesn't make any sense. His dad kept calling him away from the little bird's body.
At 1:45, I've got to be at the free clinic.
Dad says I should talk to Father Sal at St. Raphael's.
I've slipped offscreen.
A fiction suggesting a Resolution has been found, and occasion to reflect that paradoxes are easily misplaced.
He looks out the window.
He looks out the window.
He looks out the window.
He.
The establishing shot pulls back to reveal a guy looking out a window.
This guy is loo-
He is pale-blue, having been stabbed repeatedly by a ---
The camera is pointing at a guy who looks like he's looking out a window, but has in fact bled to death, aided in this grisly endeavor by the 5 or so inches of calligraphy pen that's torn a jag into his femoral artery.
When searching for Good Intentions, it's usually a good idea to return to the place where one last had them and start from there.
Hm.
The camera, it's unwavering eye fixed on tragedy, is one of six - two overheads and two cameras on dollies are congregated a ways away from the body, glancing at tile floor and corrugated ceiling and wasting tape amongst themselves but otherwise silent. The remaining camera is looking in a mirror, an inch away from itself and whirring in and out of focus.
We, on the other hand, have seen this one before, which is why we changed the channel. To Animal Planet, actually. I wanted to see some lions.
But, bored with the premise, you-
But, bored with the premise, I-
But, bored with the premise I've-
But, having exhausted all possible outcomes for these thoughtless, plotless suggestions of time, place, space, and populous, God -
But anyways.
"Don't ever stop doing what you're doing.
...shoot your shot."
And a billion little moths lifted out of the brown leaves and into the air for the first time, billowing around like a gentle cyclone, catching light on their white wings. By and by, every moth wanders off. Late in the morning, it's warm and silvery.
Sip.
"Where are my bitches?"
"Where are my bitches?"
"Where are my bitches?"
"They're all gone."
Devote the day to driving around, just to stick to the seat, taking laps all around Atlantic Ave.
Minutes of Friday spitting out like calculator tape. With this many months of this deficit, years overdrawn, past due, if time is money then my life is a crime spree. And they'll never be able to take me alive; I spend every second I have getting away. The math saves me: I treat time like it's worthless and I have more time to myself than anyone could possibly ever need. When it's all said and done, I'll have wasted not just all of my time, but all of your time, too.
I am devilishly clever.
Hours of Friday in my little red pace-car, driving from place to place.
A hot Friday afternoon in the city, and the notorious criminal mastermind has executed another daring caper, this time in the Warden's own car! Now safely escaped to The Outside, he takes the weekend, lights it, takes a drag, and slowly exhales. The smoke curls it's way out the window in a loose slate-blue lanyard, and rising out over the roof it plumes decisively into nowhere.
All day Friday pacing around and with only echoes to keep time, reflecting every step for me off blocks of Raleigh walls while I walk my cell. Everybody is a jailer in uniform.
Stealing is a dehumanizing way to live. There more you take, the less there is. The less there is, the less there is to take. Soon, there's not much and then there's nobody. It's getting to the point where you can't even get a minute in a city of like a million people. You steal enough and waste enough and then nobody will give you the time of day.
How are you supposed to start over with nothing?
The instant you're born into the world they take your entire life away from you.
How are you supposed to start over with nothing?
Friday, trapped at the end of the week.
I'm just out for some sun, to hear some music I got.
"Where are my bitches?"
"They're all gone."
My dad just wrote a short story.
"Two loaves. $7.32."
"They're going to eat us alive."
