I wished my family would go away every day the day I went to east Texas to wander through the woods for no reason. I ended up kicking aluminum cans older than me and laughing at couches rotting way past my dues.
My uncle had insisted.
It was his Property.
Just like that. Capital boring letters. THE PROPERTY. Let's drive two hours to see THE PROPERTY.
He called me "Hollywood". I was a magic elixer and we would forget that we had all forgot my mother like some inheritance gold. Sorry, mother. I'm sure you never enjoyed this place, despite the way your brother insisted that you did. You died in the north. The north is filled with places like this. To such an extent, that they're annoying. You'd call us in when we played in woods like these. How could you enjoy them?
Lighten up. I made the mistake of wearing sunglasses and nice clothes. I had been to Santa Monica Blvd., once, and I hated it. But they called me "Hollywood". Probably because I wasn't impressed by the woods.
I could have been looking for a real job. Or bothering pretty girls on Guadalupe St. But I was wandering the woods like I did for 3 years when I was 15 and high all the time. An insatiable appetite filled me apathetically.
"Your mother loved these woods." He said to me.
Bullshit. I know because I hate these woods. As they stop to take every picture like a grandfather dying from brain cancer holding the youngest grandchild. We both know it's bullshit as we waste our time and the worthless dog sniffs the roots. Had I brought my gun, I think, I could've at least shot some cans.
"This is a pine." They say, as everyone crowds around digging a plant with nothing special about it. This land drags me down.
"Look how old this can is." Says a cousin-in-law holding a 7-up piece of trash. She's worthless. At first I thought her red hair was a nice change but she revealed herself to be boring as hell. She asked me to quickly explain the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel." I lost her when she said it sounded "Too liberal." I didn't ask her what she meant, just smiled and ate my dinner.
They fell further behind as I walked faster along barbed wire fences towards the road by the car filled with brownies on THE PROPERTY. UCLA is a joke, and if I'm Hollywood, no one loves me. This is my country. Finally, my family emerges, only described as wearing bright colors fearing the next door neighbor who happens to be a washed up country music star, might shoot them. Don't shoot them.
Didn't you hear? My mother loved these woods.
It's some ground we bought back in '72. The neighbors call to buy the lumber. But I never saw any trees worth cutting.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 21, 2009
But one fiend at a time
I'm the boy in the room with a hole the size of a fist punched through the door at the end of the hall. The year I realized the girl who sat in front of me, Julie, wore a thong, I smoked enough marijuana to come home completely detached from reality everyday but in tune enough to sit somberly in front of a television older than me and have silent tears drift down my cheeks.
I'm not sure what the tears were for. But outside the sky tore itself apart with snow and other cold things like wind, while my father tinkered around in the kitchen.
The winter was quiet enough to hear him chew his crackers through two well constructed stories and a hollow bodied door and one old television dubbed over with "Obscured by Clouds." When he peeled an orange it would wake me.
Trees croaked with blankets of snow, and wind was thankfully loud enough to drown out the sound of his throat clearing. Somewhere, though, I could hear a gripped pen in a white knuckled fist giving me D's and F's. Leaned back in my home, back pressed against fist-punched walls within the Water's soundscape, I could hear my punishment from the future. Future father would say,
"C's are a disgrace."
And the house would creak, quiet enough for socks three rooms over to grind against a carpet and wake everyone from a deep sleep. Hidden girlfriends would huddle under covers and their soft voices would be hushed by their loves. Drunk sons head upstairs to deposit drugs first, and secondly they would warm food in microwaves while above their light stomachs and heads, a father would pace from bathroom to bed. Kidney stones are better than divorces and widows. The silent pain from a kidney stone eventually fades.
Grey pants sit on my floor. Lone socks converse in the corner. Dances with shadows on my chair. A light wind blows outside, cutting through the snow on the trees. It falls like lint from a belly to the bathroom floor. Harmless. Somewhere a single hand detached from all that is youth slips an envelope into the bin. Only name is marked for my father.
I am in the woods laughing with my friends like the last day of school.
A sun slowly sets over the individually ordered houses. Everyday and it's nothing different. The same cars driving come by like old women at a pants sale. A cyan backs into the driveway. Dark grey parks along the street. Tires being more costly than convenience. I try to stay away.
Non-ringed hand reaches into the mailbox. I pull on some resin. His hands tear open the envelope filled with C's.
Some days later and I'm sitting in the Prague, slowly sipping Pilsner Urquel and laughing with a Czech blond about the desolate ways of Minnesota.
I'm not sure what the tears were for. But outside the sky tore itself apart with snow and other cold things like wind, while my father tinkered around in the kitchen.
The winter was quiet enough to hear him chew his crackers through two well constructed stories and a hollow bodied door and one old television dubbed over with "Obscured by Clouds." When he peeled an orange it would wake me.
Trees croaked with blankets of snow, and wind was thankfully loud enough to drown out the sound of his throat clearing. Somewhere, though, I could hear a gripped pen in a white knuckled fist giving me D's and F's. Leaned back in my home, back pressed against fist-punched walls within the Water's soundscape, I could hear my punishment from the future. Future father would say,
"C's are a disgrace."
And the house would creak, quiet enough for socks three rooms over to grind against a carpet and wake everyone from a deep sleep. Hidden girlfriends would huddle under covers and their soft voices would be hushed by their loves. Drunk sons head upstairs to deposit drugs first, and secondly they would warm food in microwaves while above their light stomachs and heads, a father would pace from bathroom to bed. Kidney stones are better than divorces and widows. The silent pain from a kidney stone eventually fades.
Grey pants sit on my floor. Lone socks converse in the corner. Dances with shadows on my chair. A light wind blows outside, cutting through the snow on the trees. It falls like lint from a belly to the bathroom floor. Harmless. Somewhere a single hand detached from all that is youth slips an envelope into the bin. Only name is marked for my father.
I am in the woods laughing with my friends like the last day of school.
A sun slowly sets over the individually ordered houses. Everyday and it's nothing different. The same cars driving come by like old women at a pants sale. A cyan backs into the driveway. Dark grey parks along the street. Tires being more costly than convenience. I try to stay away.
Non-ringed hand reaches into the mailbox. I pull on some resin. His hands tear open the envelope filled with C's.
Some days later and I'm sitting in the Prague, slowly sipping Pilsner Urquel and laughing with a Czech blond about the desolate ways of Minnesota.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
To The Winds Pity, Who Sigh Back Again
Part of the bed again. It didn't matter. The bed was beginning to feel like a part of me. I wasn't sure what month or day it was. Or what year really, but that didn't matter either. I awoke confused, thinking of how this bed and its sweaty pillow knew me better than I knew myself these days. And I vaguely wondered how I had returned home, to a place in the past long gone and dead, with people who I didn't know anymore, and who were miles and miles away. But time is funny like that, I am certain that it is not a straight one way road. But more of an intersecting rotary, where you can get on and off in different areas any time you choose.
Because I was certain that I was home again. I could feel the cold air of New England winter snuffing my nose, the great exhale of winter. Despite twenty or thirty passing since I had last returned, I didn't particularly care how I was back. Or how I was a young man again. And I didn't want to open my eyes for a while, even after waking.
Because with them closed, I could feel the old room of my childhood, tucked away in the far corner of the big, cold house, safe and secure. In my mind, it was winter, and snow was silently falling onto the frozen hill of our court yard, and I could see the passing plows pushing snow in the street, blocking the driveway which would no doubt upset my dad when he got home from work at 5:30 as my brother and I played video games. Probably a football game, as it was the season.
We'd be there, Polar bear.
Then I could feel my cellphone in my pocket, even though I hadn't had a phone until I was twenty, and suddenly I was older, and it was vacation time at the university. I was walking under burned and ambered leaves which feel the air to their deaths on the ground every septemeber. It had been years since I was even in a climate which had an autumn. But there I was, within the laughter of the living youth, crossing the streets with books tucked under my arms and my black winter cap pulled tightly down over my long hair. I rubbed my chin, and felt a goatee which I hadn't sported since I was an optimistic, smiling student.
Chipping away, Polar bear.
Taken from my prime, I awoke with a gurgling sound. I was back in the present now, and my eye lids felt very heavy. My lips are sour sandpaper. I was in my bed, before a great window which I always insisted stay unobstructed so I could view the weather. Bedridden, and rarely speaking, I sat before this portal to the living, every day now, watching the weather change. It was the best television I could ask for. The acting was fantastic. Mailmen drive by with their holiday surprises. Couples holding each other in a lovely way that made anyone watching forget all the terrible news that wouldn't matter in another few days. Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. Polycythemia vera. Idiopathic myelofibrosis. Whats a few more weeks. Months. Such a wonderful time.
And more and more, as the bed began to mold to my skin, I felt at peace with the way things had come to be. No bitterness or spite in my thoughts, for I could always escape to the happier times of splendor in my mind, where time was just a ride that I could climb upon and go wherever I had been and where I will always be.
I'll always be there, Polar bear.
And I thought to myself sometimes, this must be what Christ had felt, on his lonesome cross, waiting for his own weight to crush his lungs and choke on himself as the weather slowly moved overhead. Probably hoping to fade and disappear into the wood. Left alone with thoughts and too much time, watching the weather move. I closed my eyes, and saw the sunlight making strange patterns through the rushing blood in my eyelids. Flowing like the blood in my veins. My white cells drifting through the rivers of platelets, dying. Drifting already dead. Millions of little white corpses in my body.
Polar bears starving on drifting islands of ice.
I was gracefully back in my younger self again. My clothes wore tight on my muscular arms, and a scarf was tied tight around my neck to protect against the wind which wept from the thick forest. I was on a back porch somewhere in autumn again, at a pub it seemed. And around me were the beautiful women I had surrounded myself with when I had the charm and wit to do so. And we laughed and drank from pitchers of beer, smoking cigarettes like chimneys and telling stories in our thick accents like we did at least once a year in the valley. The whole world lay before us a virgin, young and unfulfilled. And we were the youth, bright eyed and dangerously innocent. Only concerned with each others smiles.
Just wanted to say thank you for being here with me. As I lay on my own cross. Right now my skin feels like its on fire. Can you get a sunburn with out being in the sun? Did Christ's skin blister and whither like leather, dead armadillos on the side of the road pounded by rubber into pavement under hot skies? The birds circling looking for a meal. The birds wouldn't get me. And they didn't get the Son either, because they took him down. But they would've. The birds take the bones. Break on rocks like oysters for the soft marrow. Such a wonderful time. God, I hate birds. I always hated birds.
Do Polar bears eat birds?
Because I was certain that I was home again. I could feel the cold air of New England winter snuffing my nose, the great exhale of winter. Despite twenty or thirty passing since I had last returned, I didn't particularly care how I was back. Or how I was a young man again. And I didn't want to open my eyes for a while, even after waking.
Because with them closed, I could feel the old room of my childhood, tucked away in the far corner of the big, cold house, safe and secure. In my mind, it was winter, and snow was silently falling onto the frozen hill of our court yard, and I could see the passing plows pushing snow in the street, blocking the driveway which would no doubt upset my dad when he got home from work at 5:30 as my brother and I played video games. Probably a football game, as it was the season.
We'd be there, Polar bear.
Then I could feel my cellphone in my pocket, even though I hadn't had a phone until I was twenty, and suddenly I was older, and it was vacation time at the university. I was walking under burned and ambered leaves which feel the air to their deaths on the ground every septemeber. It had been years since I was even in a climate which had an autumn. But there I was, within the laughter of the living youth, crossing the streets with books tucked under my arms and my black winter cap pulled tightly down over my long hair. I rubbed my chin, and felt a goatee which I hadn't sported since I was an optimistic, smiling student.
Chipping away, Polar bear.
Taken from my prime, I awoke with a gurgling sound. I was back in the present now, and my eye lids felt very heavy. My lips are sour sandpaper. I was in my bed, before a great window which I always insisted stay unobstructed so I could view the weather. Bedridden, and rarely speaking, I sat before this portal to the living, every day now, watching the weather change. It was the best television I could ask for. The acting was fantastic. Mailmen drive by with their holiday surprises. Couples holding each other in a lovely way that made anyone watching forget all the terrible news that wouldn't matter in another few days. Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. Polycythemia vera. Idiopathic myelofibrosis. Whats a few more weeks. Months. Such a wonderful time.
And more and more, as the bed began to mold to my skin, I felt at peace with the way things had come to be. No bitterness or spite in my thoughts, for I could always escape to the happier times of splendor in my mind, where time was just a ride that I could climb upon and go wherever I had been and where I will always be.
I'll always be there, Polar bear.
And I thought to myself sometimes, this must be what Christ had felt, on his lonesome cross, waiting for his own weight to crush his lungs and choke on himself as the weather slowly moved overhead. Probably hoping to fade and disappear into the wood. Left alone with thoughts and too much time, watching the weather move. I closed my eyes, and saw the sunlight making strange patterns through the rushing blood in my eyelids. Flowing like the blood in my veins. My white cells drifting through the rivers of platelets, dying. Drifting already dead. Millions of little white corpses in my body.
Polar bears starving on drifting islands of ice.
I was gracefully back in my younger self again. My clothes wore tight on my muscular arms, and a scarf was tied tight around my neck to protect against the wind which wept from the thick forest. I was on a back porch somewhere in autumn again, at a pub it seemed. And around me were the beautiful women I had surrounded myself with when I had the charm and wit to do so. And we laughed and drank from pitchers of beer, smoking cigarettes like chimneys and telling stories in our thick accents like we did at least once a year in the valley. The whole world lay before us a virgin, young and unfulfilled. And we were the youth, bright eyed and dangerously innocent. Only concerned with each others smiles.
Just wanted to say thank you for being here with me. As I lay on my own cross. Right now my skin feels like its on fire. Can you get a sunburn with out being in the sun? Did Christ's skin blister and whither like leather, dead armadillos on the side of the road pounded by rubber into pavement under hot skies? The birds circling looking for a meal. The birds wouldn't get me. And they didn't get the Son either, because they took him down. But they would've. The birds take the bones. Break on rocks like oysters for the soft marrow. Such a wonderful time. God, I hate birds. I always hated birds.
Do Polar bears eat birds?
Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here
It always rained on the days I would pack all my earthly belongings into my car and leave my life behind to go somewhere else. A year ago, Lars and I walked out from a girlfriends house on a rainy morning in the Massachusetts valley. I exchanged a much familiar awkward embrace with her before we left, gently tickling her bare feet as she lay in bed looking up at me before I left all my regrets with her. We ate a rainy breakfast with Lars' sister on campus for the last time, then pulled into a department store bathroom with water dripping off of us. We washed up and proceeded to drive eleven hours to Ohio through the gray roads of Conneticut and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is soggy, boring state. Some states are more annoying than boring, like Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico. But Pennsylvania and Nebraska are boring. It rained again when we got to Nebraska. That storm had almost killed us.
But now that I was in Eugene, Oregon, rain was expected. Dismal for eight months of the year, the twenty something year olds which seem to run the place are content to stand still in the moving universe. Egotiscally grasping at the straws of its past, Eugene longs for a time which in hindsight seemed better than it actually was. The bare downtown streets are brightly naked during the day, dusty and bleak. Bare of any semblance of evolving life or an economy. Until night falls, and the bars open up. Then the streets would fill with complacent shadows of people who refused to grow up. Purple jackets, blue hair, facial tattoos, leather pants, dreadlocks, drifters, beggars, tweakers, homosexuals, gypsies, buyers and sellers. It was like Neverland. Everyone was a Peter Pan.
I had moved 3 times in the year I lived in Eugene. And the pathetic streets of downtown always remained my true home. My last night in town, the two female bartenders I had befriended my first night a year earlier looked at me with somber eyes. Brimming with tears, they crossed the threshold of the counter and hugged me as I stood to leave. How fitting. Their best customer was leaving.
My friends did the same. My friends-- a collection of people I had gathered in the last twelve months. They were sad to see me go. My brother thought I was a fool for even arriving.
He couldn't believe I had made it a year in Eugene. The town was dying fast, and it would never recover. Even with the university, there was not much life blood rushing through its veins. The economy was absurdly non existent. The roads cracked and uneven. People happily sitting back on their $9/hour jobs. Homeless on the corners. A harsh smell in the air lamenting the advent of a new season. Trees were starting to get that sickly look as they danced with autumnal death. I had experienced the worst luck of my life in the last sixty days. I was homeless. My breakfast waffles were in the shape of Texas. The writing was on the wall.
When your breakfast tells you to do something, you do it. Close your eyes and let the chips fall where they may. So Austin it was. A new place to start a new life. The polarity of Eugene, Austin was hot, big, growing. Positive. And if I could survive in Eugene, I could make it in any American city. This time on the road would be different. For some day, we all shall find our buddhas of love beneath this illusion of life. For the road is life. And it beckons.
But now that I was in Eugene, Oregon, rain was expected. Dismal for eight months of the year, the twenty something year olds which seem to run the place are content to stand still in the moving universe. Egotiscally grasping at the straws of its past, Eugene longs for a time which in hindsight seemed better than it actually was. The bare downtown streets are brightly naked during the day, dusty and bleak. Bare of any semblance of evolving life or an economy. Until night falls, and the bars open up. Then the streets would fill with complacent shadows of people who refused to grow up. Purple jackets, blue hair, facial tattoos, leather pants, dreadlocks, drifters, beggars, tweakers, homosexuals, gypsies, buyers and sellers. It was like Neverland. Everyone was a Peter Pan.
I had moved 3 times in the year I lived in Eugene. And the pathetic streets of downtown always remained my true home. My last night in town, the two female bartenders I had befriended my first night a year earlier looked at me with somber eyes. Brimming with tears, they crossed the threshold of the counter and hugged me as I stood to leave. How fitting. Their best customer was leaving.
My friends did the same. My friends-- a collection of people I had gathered in the last twelve months. They were sad to see me go. My brother thought I was a fool for even arriving.
He couldn't believe I had made it a year in Eugene. The town was dying fast, and it would never recover. Even with the university, there was not much life blood rushing through its veins. The economy was absurdly non existent. The roads cracked and uneven. People happily sitting back on their $9/hour jobs. Homeless on the corners. A harsh smell in the air lamenting the advent of a new season. Trees were starting to get that sickly look as they danced with autumnal death. I had experienced the worst luck of my life in the last sixty days. I was homeless. My breakfast waffles were in the shape of Texas. The writing was on the wall.
When your breakfast tells you to do something, you do it. Close your eyes and let the chips fall where they may. So Austin it was. A new place to start a new life. The polarity of Eugene, Austin was hot, big, growing. Positive. And if I could survive in Eugene, I could make it in any American city. This time on the road would be different. For some day, we all shall find our buddhas of love beneath this illusion of life. For the road is life. And it beckons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
