Polaroid Graveyard

November 6, 2009 at 9:42 pm (Uncategorized)
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I sped down south 77 at a dangerous rate, driving towards an hour jump in time, hoping to put as much space between myself and Talladega as I could before sunset. There is something very romantic about trying to escape.

I came home with a bottle of whiskey and a roll of sushi for dinner. I hate and drank, and watched TV. And I slept.

This morning I spent running, then I cleaned and showered. As I stepped out from the steam, into my clothes and out into my apartment, I ran into Laura Marie, mysteriously lording over the hardwood floors that ran into what is arguably described as my living room.

We drove to the graveyard with her Polaroid camera, with the last of her precious Polaroid film (apparently a thing no longer in production. In retrospect, its fitting that we spent the last of it surrounded by dead people). We took pictures of each other, of leaves and graves and lady bugs crawling across the face of Christ. As I posed underneath a large painting of an apple, I realized how happy I was to have left Alabama a day early. And now I am left to ponder what this must mean.

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My Body is a Zombie for you

November 2, 2009 at 6:46 pm (Events & Things)
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I ran over dead leaves, under a dimly lit sky, past gargoyles and skeletons and jack-o-lantern pumpkins. I ran to the end of Shimlles Park, and just as I turned the corner that marked my half way point, every muscle in my back shot out in a different direction from one another. My footing tripped and I stammered to the ground, doing my best to clutch my ribs, waiting for everything to relax back to normal. It began to rain as I crumpled back upwards, stammering slowly towards my apartment. What would have been a fifteen minute jog turned into a half hour drudge. If, off in the distance, Andrew Bird had been whistling, I believe this would have been an adequate snapshot of my life.

 

The next day I found myself in a friend’s hot tub, hoping that the hot water would sooth my innards, allowing everything to calm down inside me. For a moment I floated in the water, not touching anything, bobbing up and down without purpose, aimless.

 

This morning I awoke in a jolt of pain, as my back contracted and twisted and turned. I tried to take a shower, but the pain in my ribs that came with standing made it too difficult to breathe. The doctor will see me in the morning, which is all right, as the back pain has subsided little by little with each hour of being awake.

 

For a moment, not having much to do, I sat on a bench outside eating raw fish. A girl walked by that I have seen from time to time, and I thought about talking to her, and asking her to take care of me. I had a very strong need for something maternal in that moment, a fact that psychoanalysis might find interesting. Yet, I realized that in that moment, with my leather jacket and dark sunglasses, framing perfectly my dark and matted hair, that I looked too much like a drug addict to say anything to someone who looked so much like a mother.

 

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The Book of David

October 30, 2009 at 4:01 am (Uncategorized)

 

I leapt from the wrought iron tower, hoping that the industrial black cord would snap on the first recoil up, launching me across the go cart tracks and ferries wheel, landing me in the asphalt of the four lane highway, leaving my parents with the large dividends of my life insurance and the obvious millions from suing the roadside amusement park, ending all their troubles and pains and saving them from every sorrow they have felt, providing them a life. When I fell into the inflated white mattress some seventy-seven feet below, my sense of longing to be dead was only neutralized by the surprise that I was alive. Human nature is something that I have never been able to completely over come.

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The Running Character

October 23, 2009 at 4:05 pm (Events & Things, God & Things)
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I went running through downtown and towards campus, over to the end of the park that lies on the outskirts of what is Lee University. The park is lined by a large track, creating a kind of oblong oval to run around. As I turned off the side-walk to cross over the small bridge into the park, I noticed that a small boy (most likely seven) saw me coming. He immediately jumped up and started yelling “Go Kid! You can do it! Youre the Greatest!”  As I passed him, he gave me a fanatic thumbs up.

I kept on running around the last curve of the track and turned back towards where the boy had been. The bridge is both the entrance and exit to the park. This time, the boy was running towards me, both hands poised as a thumbs up. “Youre doing it!” he yelled, “Youre doing great!”

In a novel this would be some kind of an image, layered with rich meaning and lending itself to the overall plot and development of the running character. Sometimes I think my mind has been poisoned because I see what happens to me in a very literary sense, inasmuch as I relate everything to how it affects the dynamics of my character.

I dont really feel I am where I need to be, being that I am not doing what I want. Though I dont know what I want, which, in general, is a character flaw.

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Grandma Mummy

October 16, 2009 at 1:09 pm (Uncategorized)
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I was woken from an uneasy sleep in the stiff waiting room chair, surrounded by elderly acquaintances of my grandmother, all conversing in a mixture of pity and inevitability and gossip.  My mother was missing, gone to be with my grandmother now that she herself had awoken from surgery. The night before, she broke her leg. Worse yet, when she arrived at the hospital, the doctors gave her too much of some kind of medicine, causing her to overdose and have what would later be described as “an episode.”

During the walk from the bleach smelling waiting room to the bleach smelling hall, one of the nameless elderly women asked “Are you still with that sweet girl?” No, I said, we have moved on. “Oh, didn’t you try and work it out?” She then waited, with a very pregnant pause, as if though she really expected some kind of answer.

My grandmother was laid up in bed, wrapped tightly in several layers of white sheets. The wrapping followed all the way up to her chin, covering just over the top of her mouth. There was also a blanket over her head, covering to just the tip of her brow. This configuration allowed only her eyes and nose to poke through, comically enlarging the pitiful size of both.

The congregation of old people gathered around her and began to pray, with one leader praying the chorus as every other member adlibbed their own melody of “yes Lord”s and “please Lord”s at each specific cue. I stood in the corner, not joining in the music, doing my best not to cry.

As I walked down the long medical corridor towards the exit, two orderlies pushed an old man in a hospital bed passed me. He had a dozen different tubes and bandages and needles going in and out of him, as well as an oxygen mask covering his face. He gave me a thumbs up as we passed, his eyes going soft, as if though I was the one needing encouragment.

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Brenda

October 5, 2009 at 2:38 pm (Events & Things, God & Things)

Yesterday, I met Brenda. There are no stairs leading to her home, instead the walkway is a rickety construction of particle board and nails, forming what might arguably be described as a “ramp.” She was shorter than I had imagined, though up until this point I had only seen her in photographs on a computer screen, lacking any kind of relation to any other thing. Her file explained that she had lived in sub-standard housing all her life, and that last year her land lord, without reason, evicted her from the apartment she had lived in for almost thirteen years. There she had raised several children and grandchildren, but she admits it wasn’t home. She is currently living in a house provided by members of her Church, as a temporary form of residence. I stepped into the house, through the rotted door way and into the hanging musk of moisture and mildew (not necessarily a dirty smell, but rather a very poor one). She showed me to the recliner in what could be described as the living room, asked me to sit, and apologized that the nurse was busy giving Robert a bath, as she knew I had wanted to meet him.

“I praise the Lord, He made it happen.” She begins, “I’ve been waiting for this for the longest time.” The nurse comes out of the bathroom, easily visible, carrying Robert in front of her with her hand under his arms. Though Robert isn’t very large, the nurse is tiny, and has to hobble to get him into his room. “I appreciate all Habitat for Humanity has done,” Brenda continues. “It has been such a privilege and a blessing.” The nurse brings Robert, freshly dressed, into the living room and sets him on the couch next to Brenda, a bandage is wrapped around his neck, and from the center of his throat extends a plastic tube. He is clutching a small stuffed dog, caressing its head with the flat end of his thumb. Brenda smiles and places her hand on his shoulder, “Robert has been such a blessing in my life, he was my gift from God.”

When Robert was eleven and a half days old, he was diagnosed with infant meningitis, which was caused by a bacterial infection in his brain. The inflammation this caused damaged the right side of Robert’s brain, inhibiting his ability to process nonlinear and nonsequential information. This event was the gateway for several different difficulties in Robert’s life. He suffers from Cerebral palsy, seizure disorder, and scoliosis. Because of this, Robert is severely physically disabled, depending on Brenda’s lone care for the majority of his life.

“I got custody in 1986. I didn’t give birth to Robert, but I raised him like he was my own; he has been a wonderful blessing to me,” Brenda starts to cry as she ruminates over this thought. “He quit walking by himself when he was twelve on account of scoliosis. He wears dippers you know, he can’t do anything for himself.” He begins to gurgle a little, as if though he is trying to cough but is unable. The nurse comes over quickly and attaches another tube to the one in his throat. “Hi, my name is Denise, by the way.” I lean over from the recliner, and we shake hands across my yellow pad of notes.

“The land lord, she come told me I had to move. That was difficult,” explains Brenda. “I called Habitat after that, I had seen on the news they were taking applications. So I called and talked to Mrs. Connie and asked for an application. A little after that Connie gave me the call and told me I had been selected. That was about a year ago.” Since then, Brenda has been living in the home provided by members of her church. At first, she was living there for free, but now she pays the couple a little money each month. “I like it better that way, I don’t like to live on nobody for nothing. God has blessed me, but that don’t mean I have to be a burden.”

It’s in these instances that I feel something less than human. Or maybe “person” is the right word, perhaps I simply feel like less of a person. I lament because I am lonely, or because i feel a sesne of never ending failure. But Brenda has spent her entire life caring for soemone who can’t even comunicate, and still, her biggest worry is being a burden on others. It’s in these instances that I realize we all have it so terribly wrong.

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A Failed Engagement

September 14, 2009 at 11:07 pm (Uncategorized)

I fear, on some occasions, that growing up means giving up the better part of happiness. Two ex-coworkers came to visit me over the weekend, one newly single and one married vegetarian nihilist. The kind of situation that happens like a mechanism, unable to stop, being that the two were too stubborn not to come and I too timid to tell them not to. The evening consisted of discussion concerning the morality of incest (the nihilist saw nothing wrong with it) and the fallacy of love (the nihilist saw no point to it). To say the least, it made my weekend more miserable than it had already been constructed to be.

The nihilist, most completely, depressed me. He claimed that he did not love his wife, that he would cheat on her if she would not find out and that the idea of any emotion he had for her being stronger than what it was would be easily dismissed as romanticism. A stark contrast to everything I believe, or try to believe at least.

The other coworker, and reason for their visit, had recently been left by his fiancé, whom worked at the same restaurant that we all had over the summer, forcing this coworker to see her every day. It was his birthday when they visited, also the anniversary of the failed engagement. He and I began speaking of our despair at the beliefs of the nihilist when this coworker asked me how things were with my better half. I then undertook the arduous task of explaining that things had not worked out between the two of us and I too was now single.

He paused to spit into his empty Coca-Cola bottle. “It seems that fucking vegetarian nihilist is right, love is pretend.”

Of course this sentiment is dramatic, of course this is an isolated chain of events and of course it’s easy to believe in love and romance and everything we are supposed to believe in. But I will admit, at times, the evidence we have is more than a bit alarming.

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Monks

September 8, 2009 at 7:28 pm (Events & Things, God & Things)
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I leaned on my bike, an attempt at being coy, listening to three drunken friends bellow a song that one of them had written about Old Testament theology. I should have been sleeping, but instead I stood there in the dark, listening to the three reminisce, including myself as a character in a memory or two. This was all very bitter sweet for me, because I feel that I made some sort of a mistake several times over the past few years, as I did very little to become the fourth of them.

Michael, the specific reason for the drunken revelry, is leaving this evening for a year in England, where he will serve as a monk at an environmentally conscience abbey. Last night, I left a bag at his apartment, filled with documents I need in order to apply for food stamps. This morning I rode my bicycle there to get it. His girlfriend was there also, I tried to leave quickly as I assumed I was not wholly wanted at that moment, though both she and Michael insisted I stay.

Michael began to play the guitar, a song he wrote that was the girl’s favorite. I sat and listened, much like last night, a bystander to something rare and meaningful. Bitter sweet, yes, because though I witnessed these things, I was only in the corner.

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God and the French

September 7, 2009 at 3:02 pm (God & Things)

I rode my bicycle, alone, through the dark streets of the better side of Cleveland, through hanging clouds of pot and clove cigarettes. I didn’t expect coming back would have such a melancholy effect, but as it would seem, I have felt very awkward lately (if awkward is the correct word to use at all).

Last night, Matt and I sat on the back porch of my cousin’s second floor apartment as he smoked. In the back of his building, there is a line of trees covered in vines and kudzu and other unnamable vegetations which separates that lot from the adjacent one. Just beyond this growth is a large white house that my friend Rachelle and her perfectly French boyfriend, Patrick, recently occupied. The house is rustic, and the insides have been gutted out. The large rooms have yet to of been filled with nick knacks or signs of life, instead they prove to be colossal in sight of the small tables and dim lamps cowering in the corners.

From my cousins porch, we could hear them talking through their open kitchen window in a muddled language somewhere between French and English.

I walked over to say hello, bursting in on dinner party the two were having with some friends from North Carolina. I was immediately given a glass of wine and a seat at the table, as everyone acted as if though they had been waiting all night for my arrival. Eventually, my cousin and Matt joined us, and were given the same warm and embracing welcome, met with glasses of wine and smiles full of teeth.

Despite our best refusals and explanations that we had already eaten, we were given plates of finely cooked food and more wine. After Rachelle and Patrick cleared the table, they returned with fresh cookies and French pressed coffee. We sat for a long time after that talking and laughing and working through conversational language barriers.

I wish that every night were like that, and that every friend were that inviting. Joy and love are very seductive traits; they are things I seek after. This doesn’t set me a part, of course, because these are things that everyone seeks. But, in that, is a great deal of sorrow. We all want to be happy and to be loved, and the way we can most readily find either of those is through other people. Yet, eventually, it becomes evident that others won’t give it freely. Essentially, we won’t give the thing we want, and in turn we don’t get it. People are shitty like that. I suppose this is why we need God and Christ. Though, even more sadly, from our vantage point they both can seem so far away.

But, this is the same basic problem. God appears silent because we are silent towards Him. Human nature is very self destructive.

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Footprints & Other Lame Poems that are True

July 22, 2009 at 9:53 pm (God & Things)
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Somehow, I have an apartment in Cleveland, furnished by the generosity of others. I am working a good job here that pays well enough to support me during my transitional period in Cleveland as I look for some kind of work. A few weeks ago I was despaired, thinking that God wasn’t looking at me. But now, if would seem, everything is slowly falling into place. I say this with a good bit of faith because there are still things that need to happen, but I believe they will. However, these things would not have come to pass had I not gone through a time when God seemed silent. Yet, stale though the sentiment may be, God was never silent. Instead, He was constantly working. So why would I then believe that He stopped? He is a clock, perfectly wound.

I have a job interview tomorrow with Habitat For Humanity. If I get this, then all of my needs will have been met. But even if I don’t, I must not accept that it is for a reason. Though I am a proponent of free will, I must believe that all things have reason, if not in their innate action then at least in their miraculous reaction. If I do not get this job, then I was not supposed to get this job. Maybe that is a better way of thinking: not everything that happens is ordained by God, but everything that must happen is assured by Him. Hm.

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