Wind Surfing along pavement highways

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Gray

I’ve been doing better, but this bug has got me under its thumb to a degree, just with the sinus. Must be the season this year, because I’m not usually an allergy sufferer.

I’ve picked up on a few old projects. Spent the evening chatting with a good friend in D.C. who made the point that I don’t like to finish things. I told him that I simply don’t like things once they cease to be challenging. It, however, gave me a moment of pause and there are several loose ends I need to clean up.

In part, keeping my writing to myself, as I have been, is part of my secretive side. I like things compartmentalized and tucked away from sight. Thousands of things, millions of things. I was the child who wanted to hold the lightning bugs in his hand and keep them just so I could see.

When you have nothing, you make treasures of memories and relationships. I’ve come a long way from where I started life, but the habits are long-established. I like to replay things in my head, and in some degree, wound myself with their poignancy. I sometimes play things in my head in the quiet moments, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve made it less of a habit.

I can’t change what has come and gone, and more importantly, I can’t hold onto ghosts. My father. My numerous failed relationships. The ONE relationship by which I judged all of the others. My sister. My friends. Those strangers I could never figure out. My mother.

I have a motorcycle, did you know? I’ve been spending time getting reacquainted with it. I find, that when you hit 80, with thighs gripping a fatbob, most of those ghosts can’t hold on.

When one must put away childish things

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Gray

I’ve been brutally punishing myself again. Call it what you’d like, but my sadistic side is fairly vicious. It started with a hard-core detox, which I’d intended to write about, but really had cut short by a body protest in the form of a week-long migraine, followed by a raging sinus infection (which hit out of the blue) which then lead to my ear drum rupturing in the first, and later the second ear.

This is all, of course, with plenty of medical backup. So I’m not exactly just killing myself and not heeding a doctor’s advice. I, in fact, have to enjoy meeting another one today, who can maybe clarify just how long I’ll feel like I’m underwater, and/or how long the bloody goo will take to stop leaking from my ears. It’s been a fun ride.

And I’m a bad sick person. Through it all, I’ve been working and frankly, only stopped when I was sent home by someone who could in fact, send ME home. The one time he happened to be in town, wouldn’t you know. It has, however, left me with time on my hands, to not only feel the misery without distraction, but to write about it.

I really loathe time off. I find myself pacing a lot and something akin to a trapped animal. I waffle between resentment and respect for the person who put me here, somewhat against my will. But it is…what it is. I’m here, and I’ve got jack shit to do until I have to go take a hearing test to see what this sadism has cost my hearing.

And that, is some scary shit. I really don’t want to know. (Can’t be too bad, however, I can hear my cat bathing in the other room.)

All that aside, it’s given me time to think. Fuck it all. I hate that the most. Part of that detox process was to stop holding onto jelly fish. It’s a metaphor, but basically, something you like, that you hold onto, in spite of the pain it gives. For some people it’s smoking, but I gave that up years and years ago. Drinking? Nope, never had an issue with it.

My issue was always anger. I held onto it. I summoned it up at a moment’s notice, and reacted sharply when questioned in an area I didn’t want to discuss. Anger.

I’ve always enjoyed being angry. It’s a comfortable blanket for me. I wrap it around myself and I don’t feel a damn thing else. I know anger like someone might know a wine, or a book. I know how it feels rolling down my spine, the prickly sensation of rage, the way my fingers tingle.

And all that anger has taken its toll on me – because with my sadism, I’ve been killing myself, bit by bit.

My childhood was no laughing matter. I’ve always sort of thought it was normal, because that’s what I knew. It was the norm for me, so why would I think anyone else’s life would be different? And I’ve reluctantly accepted that chapters of that life time would make for excellent dramatic reading.

It’s never been an excuse forever, but in a way it has. It’s resulted in this drive of mine, which were I not a man of excess, could be viewed as a good thing. Instead, it has me at home, because my body was failing and other people saw it before I did.

The title of my piece is with purpose. And as I wonder into the larger world, I will say to myself, that I will never impress the dead with what I do to myself now. That his eyes will never change to look at me with favor, no matter how much I imagine them.

And that is me, putting away a childish dream.

The defeat of “until death us do part”

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Gray

I’ve never been married. I’ve been in a relationship where in I felt married. I’ve been in committed relationships, but I’ve never walked down the aisle and promised those words “until death do us part.” (Personally, I like how I titled it better, but who am I to undo tradition, if indeed, it is one.)

I can’t say I’m the expert on relationships, either, because I’ve had my own share of fucked up ones, in which I was probably the catalyst for most of the disharmony. I am, sadly, just a person who can’t always bend when I should and often read far deeper into things than perhaps is intended. In all of this, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that things end.

They end. It seems a simple thing to say, but when discussing the complex web of relationships and feelings and people, it grows complicated and there is no one single answer for why and what and who. It is just so very succinct as to say: It is what is is. ”What it is,” as in, however you perceive it, so it is.

Perception is truth to each one of us. It defines how we process everything we experience in a day, in life, and yes, in a relationship. And perception, flawed as a tool of reason, is shaped by our lives. Mine, for example, carefully watches for angles, plays, deception and assumes much of what I think, on what I’ve seen. If you know me, then you can figure out how that might jade me. If you don’t, just assume it does.

I question good, and almost instantly believe the worst. It’s brutal to be in a relationship with me, granted, but worse when I’m mixed with someone who likes to play on it. I’m digressing from my point, but ultimately, I think, we simply get to the point wherein we either decide to accept the flaws in each others character, or move on.

Now why then, do I shove my title immediately down your throat? To not let you gain some false sense of hope from what I’m telling you. No matter how I reason, no matter how I try to see (and do see) it working for someone else, I cannot bring myself to believe it will succeed. I don’t think people were meant to have forever. I think at some point, sometimes sooner, or sometimes later, that we reach a point when the bucket is full.

And I think that when that happens, you must pick up that bucket of hate-laden shit that you’re carrying and throw it out. Throw it out. I give you permission. Ultimately, I think we all deserve to be a choice, even me, even you.

The Tambourine Man

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Gray

He plays a mean guitar, music spills out of him like sweat. He bleeds it. His fingers always seem to be moving to a certain beat in his head and he responds unfavorably if you disturb him when he’s got a rhythm. Notes are written on bar napkins like a woman’s phone number on Friday night – except he’ll use these.

He seems out-of-place anywhere where he can’t make noise, or anyplace that streams the lackluster modern music he despises - ‘nothing more than auto tune and some Casio keyboard drum cadence.’ And so – he is out-of-place almost everywhere but the stage. In his life, he seems to be counting the seconds between the moment he’s in and the moment he comes alive, guitar in hand. He gave up on finding a middle ground sometime in his youth, high school maybe, just about the point when the skill became perfected.

You might watch him and wonder just why it is he’s sitting in the odd jazz joint, or student cafe, keeping strung-out minds studying. You might speculate on his long hair, and think about a drug addiction because he hasn’t shaved in over a month. His shirt hangs loosely upon his frame and his arms seem too thin to support the guitar without the embossed leather strap wrapping around one shoulder.

Upon closer inspection, you’d notice he’s clean, so homeless isn’t an option. You might assign him ‘slacker’ or ‘layabout’ as adjectives to dismiss his apparent lack of ambition without realizing that you’re assigning him your motivations.

He is living his life. He’d show you fingertips that are calloused, but still red and irritated. He’d turn your guitar while talking to you about his favorite music and laughing at some of the artists you’d told him you enjoyed – all while spitting out notes like Morse code to your brain. He’d have you singing, somehow, wondering just how you recalled the lyrics to a song you hadn’t heard in years.

You’d leave his company with 20 songs to put on your iPod when you raced back home. You’d spend three weeks trying to track him down again, only to have just missed him. He’s elusive. A gypsy, he’s here to do exactly what he wants to do. Discuss music. Make music. Be music.

Dire Straits – Sultans of Swing

The chameleon wearing glitter hot pants

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Gray

She makes choices that she knows are wrong and yet blames the decisions on something or someone else. ’Made me do it.’ is her mantra, but she doesn’t know it. It’s rhetoric that spills off of her tongue with a casual ease, and the stink of her implied truths that make any thoughtful person in her circle step back, slightly aghast. They aren’t the ones impacted here, it’s her followers, blindly believing her to be a beacon of some sort of life truth.

And she believes it on some level. It’s some mixture of narcissism and insecurity that has forced the cellular ooze most of us try to hide, to the surface of her personality. It’s her outward shell that both disgusts and protects her from life and from herself. Staying active in this movement, one she doesn’t really believe in, is the only thing that keep the walls from closing in around her.

Her personality is vibrant, but tinged with a cynicism that makes her bitter in a way she can’t recognize, but everyone else can see. She speaks in sarcasms as if her life has taught her something other than it outwardly appears – except that is hasn’t. Her life is exactly what she has made it become, but such a responsibility is beyond her to grasp.

‘Made me do it.’ ’Made me feel.’ ’Made me, made me, made me.’

But she doesn’t believe it – and that’s why the walls close around her. She doesn’t have faith in herself and thus, has no faith in anyone else around her. She makes herself into the ‘other’ her because she doesn’t believe anyone will want the reality.

She becomes what you want her to become until that gets a little too close to the truth.

The time for compromise and loss

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Gray

I sat watching him hold his head in his hands. We’d been sitting like that for several minutes, the doctor having walked off a moment earlier. I took a deep, shaky breath and asked him quietly if he’d like me to call his mother.

‘No.’ He just said it quietly and sat back against the bed, his head turned to one side, away from me. ’I don’t need her to come adjust my pillow.’

His voice trailed off as he was saying it and I watched his hand swipe across his face. Silence fell again, the din of beeping having long been dismissed into silence. He tried to move his foot, but it was caught in the blanket and he gave up, frustrated. I stood and moved the blanket for him and put his foot on top of the blue, tight-knit, and wondered how many people it had seen ushered to the other side.

I touched his hand and his fingers caught mine with surprising strength, given his condition. He looked at me and tears were running down his face. They matched mine. ’I thought we’d beat it.’

‘So did I.’ I felt my throat close and took another breath, but couldn’t drag enough air in and my chest shuddered, more tears leaked out of my eyes. My free hand I used to wipe my face. ’You don’t need this, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I got my hopes up too.’

……………………………….

I sat there for weeks and watched him. I watched the people usher in and out of his room. I managed a fine line between rage and appreciation at the doctors treating him. I watched him nap. I watched his body waste away for a second time. His hair had never grown back the same from the first round or the second. When we started this treatment, I’d shaved my head. I was watching it grow back slowly in the hospital vanity. There was gray.

He’d lost his ability to speak. His hands shook when he’d reach for something. Mine shook for no good reason.

He was always cold so I’d sit on the bed with him, this time, when I did, I laid back, and he moved his head to my shoulder. I listened to him breathe as if I’d stop if he did. I heard the door open and close several times, but didn’t bother to move or acknowledge them. We were comfortable.

The next time I opened my eyes, the nurses were pulling my arm to get me out of the bed. I felt disoriented, and another friend pulled me back while they checked him. I didn’t have to know the answer. I just sank into the seat and wept.

I’d known when that last breath had come.

The Verve Pipe – The Freshmen

On a jet plane to lint city

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Gray

I’ve been hiding here in this corner of the world, fooling myself that, in being a writer, just the act of writing would be enough. Some days it is, but another thing I’ve learned in my absence is the need I think most writers, myself included, have in sharing what they’ve produced. If this were a diary, I might have been content with keeping it all underwraps, but it’s not.

The people I’ve shared here, albeit in limited quantity, deserve for you to know them, and I, being an author, want you to know them how I do. Again, however, it isn’t enough. Someone asked me if I felt that I’d limited myself to a box that didn’t meet the need I had as an author, and I’m finding as time passes, that it doesn’t. While my previous attempt with blogging, extensively, dealt with more personal insight, it also helped me find an outlet for all that mental lint that gathers over time. It has to be emptied.

While I address this memo to no one other than myself, and my very elite list (read:small number) of readers, I felt it important to say. Directional changes should be communicated by your pilot after all.

The Victim, once upon a time

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Gray

She is the bitch. Hard as rock on the outside, and filled at the center with a core of steel that makes people envious of her drive and determination. Untouchable in her mind, and theirs, she tears into any problem like a slathering pit bull, and dismantles it like bone from cartridge under her teeth. She walks with her shoulders back and people move out of her way, not out of fear, but because they sense a purpose in her.

The ones that know her, love her, they find her fair-minded and balanced, and those that don’t know her, just label her the bitch. They speculate on unhappy home life, her poor children, her poor husband, her poor poor co-workers, all (must-be) victims of her ambition to be strong. It can be read upon her jaw line. It can be seen in the icy blue eyes she turns upon you when she’s caught you in a lie, or being lazy.

None of them see her vomiting in her private bathroom before she has to fire someone. No one hears the calls she makes to her husband when she’s upset or angry just to see if she’s being fair, or balanced. She’s always concerned with these things, you see, because she doesn’t want to be that person she feels is inside her. There is something lurking, something that would make her the best at her job, but the robot she doesn’t want to be. There is fragility in perfection, and to be perfect in one aspect requires so many failures in others. She seeks the best in all solutions and it manifests in her brain in the moments when she finds herself alone.

Once upon a time, she was a different person. Once upon a time, long ago, she was someone’s victim. The details aren’t important, she’ll tell you, but the growth it forced upon her in the subsequent years, hurt. Something like bone being stretched out, so too was her mind, until it no longer fit into the narrow confines of her lessons. Pathways were carved and she skewered the parts of herself with that same icy gaze until the pieces she no longer desired withered away inside her and came this new birthing of tender, pink skin all bare and raw.

No longer his victim, or hers, she is a newly created adult, a testament to the fact that people can change, but only by actually wanting to change. Her worries now are more simple, how to be better. She is a constant learner, a weapon for the future of humanity: an arrow.

And when she goes home, and sheds the mantle away, she seeks nothing more than to be the woman, the wife, the lover, the mother, and yes, sometimes the bitch too.

The Coughing Butcher

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Gray

He is a young man, but his hands are those of a 60-year-old, gnarled and jointed and always cold. Arthritis has set in years earlier than it would have, had he taken another path, in another life. It is another road not taken and he is smart enough to have known his options rather than cry victim when his choices caught up to him. He is handsome in a way that says look at me, but screams out the troubles that will follow him with dogged determination. A sinner’s face, a devil’s grin and death falls from his fingertips like blood on the cutting room floor at the meat market where he works.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinou/2173945771/

Almost always sick, his nose is pink and his body is thick from years of cold and muscle built slinging carcasses of cows across the saw blades. He dreams, and the high-pitched shrill of the blade slicing into bone is there, along with the mechanical click of the slate that slides back and forth with the movement of his hip and belly. His dreams are vivid, and he remembers them with a clarity that suggests there were many other paths he walked by on his way to this place.

He is quick to identify adjectives that describe himself, but slow on the actual facts of his life. Facts can be remembered, retained and adjectives are subjective to the moment and harder to nail down. His addiction is a simple one, and he hasn’t been caught yet, but it’s there in the way he chases after the pharmacy to fill prescriptions from his latest doctor. ’How is the cough,’ they ask, ‘getting better?’

‘Same as ever.’ His response is followed by a dry, forced cough he uses to punctuate the lie. He hasn’t fooled anyone. Texas tea isn’t just about oil anymore and they’ve been down this path all too many times with people harder to catch than him. Whatever the story is that they give him isn’t satisfactory, but he can do nothing but angrily grab a product absent the codeine he is seeking. He’ll put it down later, the display was just for show, and try again somewhere else, but the need for the fix is still riding him. He is sick, but he still believes it has something to do with his job, and not a thing to do with all the other crap he pours into himself.

But there is a job to do. It’s only later, when his finger lay detached from the rest of his body does he figure out something is wrong. He watches the wound bleed while activity swirls around him and realizes that he can’t breathe too well.

*****

He blinks a moment and pauses, offering his palm for my inspection. His hand is absent the index finger down to the joint. He rests it in his lap and rubs the scar absently before smiling and asking if I’d seen the latest pictures of his little girl. I smile and take the photo from his hand, and he slaps me on the shoulder twice.

‘Good to see you.’

‘You too.’

The Bruised Rose

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Gray

She is beautiful. She has a smile that has seen braces, skin that has seen a dermatologist, and hair that is groomed and always in place. She takes pride in her appearance and obsesses over the scale more than she should, but that will never change. (She’ll never lose the elusive 3 pounds anyway) She talks to everyone, and everyone talks to her…and about her. Her circle of friends is ever-changing, and it is because she eliminates those that disagree with her life choices. She is a battered woman.

There are ways it can be seen, but the biggest beacon is the shell of armor she wears and the way she hides when she’s upset. She doesn’t ever want you to see her cry because she’s afraid on some level that the tears won’t stop coming at some point. She hides at work. She is sick more than she ever was, and CPS is going to take away her children unless she leaves him. And they will take her children before she meets the rock bottom.

She holds whispered conversations in hallways, and proclaims her frustrations to those that haven’t stopped listening or haven’t bothered to vocalize objections. She is quick to announce when she is leaving him, but never announces that moment when she went back – and she always goes back. She is afraid of being alone. When others were dating, she married the first man she could to get away from her parents and the process began. Marriage, gradual decline of self-esteem, divorce, followed by another man who is just like her ex-husband, but much more hands on.

She fights the skirmishes with the gusto that she should be attacking the war, but the war rages, unchecked. She hates going home, but does so quickly just to avoid the phone call that checks her progress on meeting his needs. She fights with him, but that will only go on for so long.

She doesn’t believe she is battered. She believes he loves her and is simply misunderstood.

He’s an uncontrolled bipolar, and she’s in over her head.

Written In Pencil

under erasure