Today is Saturday. You are a mammal AND a person.
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I saw the movie about Harvey Pekar, American Splendor, and thought that I, too, could make comics about my life. I found these crude [both meanings of the word] sketches recently while sorting through old papers looking for my birth certificate (see earlier post). I thought I’d show them to you.
I erased some names and one unique detail that would embarrass me or someone else.
A poem my aunt wrote for me 5 years ago after my first (and next to last) poetry reading:
POEM FOR MY NEPHEW
The stone set quiet against the green,
And the young poet, in garlands,
Pleased as any stag or ox.
The priesthood smiles
Waiting for the rush of blood.But no, that was
An age ago. The crowds
Had beat the square to dust beneath their feet,
And danced in great chains, spilling half the wine.Now it is a lonely thing
A man, a rock, the wind,
Remembered notes of but a single flute.How will he learn, then, to shake his horns, consenting,
And come whole from the madness of the God?
-Kathleen Piper
I’ll never forget this thing I heard about Ecstasy once. I think it was a line from a movie, or maybe a book or off the TV but the guy said, “Each time you do E it’s like taking one ice cream scoop out of your brain.” I wondered if it was true? I still wonder. It seems possible. And the more I think about it, the more I’m certain it was from a movie and I’d probably be embarrassed to find out what movie it was I was watching but, why would they say something like that and not check the internet to make sure it was true first? Or perhaps that was the irony in it. What the fuck am I saying. Of course it’s not true. I’ve done E like five or six times and I still have all of my brain.
I bought Monopoly for nine dollars yesterday. I got it in my head that once I played it, all the fun I had as a kid being the dog or the top hat and loading Baltic Avenue up with those red plastic hotels would come rushing back. I haven’t gotten to find out yet.
Thursday I woke up at five am with a terrible feeling in my stomach. I sat up, touched the skin above my belly button and frowned. I know this feeling, I thought. I went to the bathroom and sat down to pee. I sat for a while, hoping the nausea would fade. I tried laying back down and then realized the sick feeling was indeed intensifying and oh god, don’t let this be what I think it is. I am going to throw up.
In fact, I threw up for eight hours from both ends of my body. The kind of cookie tossing that leaves your eyeballs pounding, clinging to your sockets for fear of breaching the contract they hold with your face. I was sweating and disoriented, and passed out on my bedroom floor because I couldn’t find the energy to move three feet in any direction.
Monday approached me. She clearly thought I had chosen to spend the day as her life-sized body pillow. She made a thousand biscuits along my back and then sniffed at my hair, grazing my cheek with her paw. Brrrraw? She cooed. “Uhhhhhnn,” I replied.
Thankfully, I have people in my life. People who’ll cover you with a second blanket and buy you more toilet paper and turn in your very first college paper that’s due at the exact same time you’re actually, dramatically, thinking it will be your last. Although now I wish I could have changed it’s title to something other than “Paws and Effect”.
In the summer, on Thursdays, I would often go to Crow Bar, down on Mississippi, for Karaoke. The walk’s not bad if the night is warm. When you don’t use the microphone you have to sing louder, so that’s what I’d do: drown out my thoughts with my own voice.
One night, closing my tab at the bar, while my head was turned, someone slipped a torn photograph of a woman onto the bar in front of me. The right third of the picture is tinted orange from some error in exposure or developing.She smiles softly, sitting in a bar (out the window behind her you can see a tiny piece of an Oregon Lottery keno sign) head turned three quarters profile. A red-eyed Mona Lisa.
On the back, in the functional cursive of a pharmacist, is written: “If you could live your life exactly as you’d like, how would that look?”
There is a line below that, and then an empty space, perhaps inviting response.
When I got home I taped it up next to my bed, woman facing the wall. It’s still there, reminding me that I haven’t figured out an answer to that question.
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Let me see the colts
That will run next year
Show them to a gambling man
Thinking of the future
Smog, A River Ain’t Too Much To Love
IF IM ALREADY DEAD
THEN BREAK ALL MY MIRRORS
FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF INK
TO THE SUITCASE OF INSTANT RELATIVES
PRESS YOUR PAWS AGAINST THE GLASS
WHERE THE WATER YOUR HEAD PRODUCED LANDED.
I woke up scared today. Things are piling on top of each other and seeping into my dreams. The last three nights I’ve had insanely wild sleep, and I originally blamed it on the full moon. Then I blamed it on the stones I’d placed under my pillow. Now I think it’s just real life.
My last day of work is December 18th. This morning I witnessed a screaming match between my boss’ wife and our HR lady. Afterward she sped off in her Blazer, only to return 20 minutes later and whisper under her breath “I just slammed two bloody mary’s!” before starting a second fight with the boss. I was humored, but unnerved knowing the serious dysfunction of this place will continue long after I’m gone.
My health insurance is up at the end of this month if I don’t continue to pay for it through COBRA, which would be $300 a month. I am having a ‘procedure’ done next Thursday and depending on how that goes….I have a feeling. I have a feeling I am going to rack up a giant medical tab. But what is there to do? I’m not going to give up school and keep working this shit job just so I have health insurance.
I am imagining the knots of stress twisting in my chest. The dreams have left me with different sensations: disgust, fear, ambition, fascination. When I woke I was an hour late for work, and the morning light radiated a ginger color across my bedroom floor. I’m still scared.
