Creative Writing

Revisionist Mystery I

The one lamp illuminates the room with a yellowish-orange light. It must be almost 9 pm.“Dad, you’ve heard of this….you’re not one of “them” , are you? “The brow furrows, he sighs. ” We’re not Jewish. I’m not, your mother is not , you are not. “” No ,Dad. that other stuff we talked about?”Dad laughs now, not a true nervous laugh, and not the laugh when he talks to his friends on the phone, but there is something wrong with this laugh, it doesn’t’t fit into the something-really-is-funny category. A disturbing chuckle which does not refute. I am helping him clean his den while he transforms PDfs into Word documents and types up my legal forms. Tap, tap, tap. Space. Pause.
“I need to focus on this now ” he says as he types away. ” and don’t talk to your mother about all this.” Space, tap, tap tap.He touches my wrist- “ Go, take a break. You look tired. There’s coffee and food out on the table. “ When all this is over you will feel better, ” he says, unconvincingly. “Oh, before I forget, when we go up to Russian River , you will feed the fish, water the plants?”“of course, Dad”.The phone rings, I recognize the name, one of his professor friends. He wheels around to look at me with that blank , confused “I-don’t-speak_English” look on his face which I know in this case means “Are you still here?”I go, close the door behind me, I head to the kitchen, mother must be out on the front deck smoking- and eye the prosciutto, cheese, salad, bread , all spread out on the deli paper. It’s the good stuff, but I don’t want it.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Later.I’m standing there, waiting, waiting- the inevitable cash register/computer that never fails to quit in almost any line I am standing in. Strains of “I Shot the Sheriff” play out in the background. The woman in front of me, turns her head over her shoulder and rolls her eyes at me in acknowledgment of our mutual suffering. Both of us are too far in to defect to another register, our stuff is on the conveyor belt. The hateful Sheriff song has ended, a worse one in its place, behind me a man with chips and a bottle of some kind of alcohol sings along.”Brandy , you’re a fine girl, do, doo , dodoo it, doo, do”.. I catch his movements peripherally and discern possible methamphetamine at work. I feel relieved he is lost in his own world, and will not likely share any mutual suffering with me. I get to the register, the poster child for future perfect dead soldier scans my items, he brings to my attention my failure to press some button .“I’m sorry, I’m not really awake today”.

“Neither am I”, he says, looking at me. His hair is fair and cropped close, his eyes are surprisingly dark brown for how light his hair is, and he has been in the sun recently. He smiles a friendly, sympathetic smile, I smile a no-teeth, weak, motherly smile back . I haven’t noticed the bagging clerk, who looks vaguely like a Santa Claus mixed with an aging, heavily mustached country singer. He asks if I want help out, I sweetly decline, as I know he will keep me in the parking lot talking, and I already know too much. This time he doesn’t’t get huffy that I said “no thanks”.

I get back to the house, put everything away, boot up the PC. The Skype is flashing. Lists of names of people I don’t know- or know better than I should. Pop up messages with links I will not click on. Pop up “add me” requests that seem to come from nowhere , with nothing that identifies them as anyone familiar even in a vague “screen name” sense. People telling me more things I really don’t want to know. Asking me stuff I don’t have answers to. Wanting what I can’t give them, that I no longer have myself. People “happy” for me, “sympathetic” . Then there are the resentful, the cautiously casual, the “fake friendly” and the “fishermen”. Dante, surely there is room for instant messaging in Hell?

Mental note: take that out of the start up. Run>>msconfig>>startup>>uncheck. Talk to tech geek son about other VOIP clients. Or not.

The Thoreau-esque cabin image comes to mind again, the scent of dirt, eucalyptus,cypress, the sound of leaves crunching- simplicity. There are no Laura Ashley or Martha Stewart anything in these visions. Ever.

Answering machine flashing as well. Appointments. Discussions. Questions. Fake good cheer. My eyes narrow. I erase them all.

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Revisionist Mystery Chap. II

Colder than tepid water surrounds me. I have fallen asleep again in the bathtub. The phone is ringing. I look at the empty silver bowl next to the tub and feel a renewed nausea, hold back the dry heaves. With my foot I push the drain lever down. The caller has hung up on the machine, good. I have at least an hour before I must be at the school, but I am moving slowly today, it takes me an hour to do what I used to do in 15 minutes. I used to be praised for quickness. Now I have to go through all these mental checklists, as if I don’t even trust myself to be spontaneous with my own judgment. What do I need to take with me? Does the car have enough gas? Did I leave anything on? Lock the doors? Do I need to bring anything to the school?Hmm, that is a strange pain, almost as if someone was hugging me too tight , as if , when a child, someone picked you up a little too enthusiastically . This wasn’t like the other one, which was also in my chest, but sharp- enough to cause a grimace. This one was more like “Hello, Avon calling. Would you like a sample? You might be an ‘Autumn’ type, let’s try this palette on you”…always enjoyed having them come by as a child, and started to think that make-up and perfumes must have the power to make people happy and nice. In a way, I think I have still been guilty of making unrelated correlations like that, missing the “they want something, they’re selling something” factor.Blahh what is wrong with my coffee? It doesn’t’t taste right. I look at the glass coffeepot, then peer into the area where I pout the water, but the coffeemaker is black, I can’t see anything. I sniff the glass coffeepot, thinking maybe something was in the cup I drank out of, maybe the dishwasher didn’t’t get all the soap off. I microwave another cup from what was left in the pot, but that one also tastes strange, metallic.It’s going to be in the 70’s all week here, in November. It-s 1030 PM now and it is 60- still I am cold. I don’t care about the weight loss, I am only peeved I don’t fit my old clothes and my pants are falling off. It is all the hair in my brush I feel bad about. My face is not the same - it scares me that the more the bones in my face show, the more I look like my mother, and we don’t speak much.~~~~~~~“I don’t know. He doesn’t’t do things like that. I don’t know if I believe it. Uh-huh. Uh-HUH. Yeah well, what do you expect, right? Yeah, I’ll be there. ” I knock on the door to his den, feeling bad for listening. He opens the door, still on the phone , “My daughter is here now. Yeah , I’ll see you up there.”

He sits back down in the obnoxious overly padded leather swivel chair. “What are you doing here? You’re still sick. You look awful. Are you eating?”“I miss you too , Dad. ” I say sarcastically. “Are you still going to that thing in the redwoods?” He ignores my question, puts his hand on my head. “Dad, don’t. I don’t feel that bad today, I just wanted you to print out my transcript. Remember , I emailed you ?” I get the dreaded “Huh? Duh” look that says he has forgotten about it.“why don’t you go lay down on the sofa? I’ll bring it out to you, there’s smoke in here”. I leave and head for the living room, my mother gives me a random undeserving dirty look, the look that at once says “you’re a pain, you want something, don’t bother me..” which I have no intention of doing. If I am lucky, she will not offer me some god-knows-how-old leftovers. The main phone rings. I know it is my sister, it is always her on the phone almost every rare occasion I am at my folk’s house, she must have radar , and I resent her for it, even though I don’t really want to be there myself. Still, she manages to occupy my mother, having the gift of seeming interested in my mother’s ramblings , most often times second-hand accounts from my grandmother of what famous person died that day, interspersed with whatever else mom is worried about. ..” and Anne-Marie is here.” she whispers, though she knows very well I can hear.

She mentions me as if I am the topper of all the days bad tidings, and as though they can’t ‘really talk’ because I am there, the useless non-eater. I start reading titles of the books on the walls. I look at authors, trying to discern whether there is any order to their book madness. There isn’t’t. Vonnegut, Snyder, Burroughs. At least they have them by genre. What is wrong with me? I never cared about order as far as stuff went before. Now I want to categorize everything. Taxonomy ”Taxis” in Greek. Arrangement. “Nomia”= “method” . I only used to do this when I was super bored, not merely stressed or waiting. Something has gotten into my blood. Classify, re-classify, sort, hierarchy. The unequalization of the stuff of our lives. I conclude that messiness is much more “=” than neatness and order. Mess makes everything actually “less than equal” . I think of the computer error I got a few months ago “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” , a different blue screen of death that flashed and rebooted.Mother brings in a bowl of consommé, and puts it on the old 60’s picnic style wood TV tray. “You should let me cut your hair. It will come back better. ” she says as an aside, covering the phone mic, then goes back yakking to my sister about Pavarotti and the neighbors and their horrible barking dogs, and taste in backyard decor.

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Chapter III , A Kettle of Vultures

Slowly I convince myself it didn’t’t happen. Pieces come back to me and I mentally try and shred them, “obliviating” them into nothingness. I have become a revisionist of my own life, and I can say I am getting damn good at it. People who are simply “in denial” have no ambition. Fooling oneself is a daunting task. I wonder if this is why people do drugs and if the drugs actually work for them, to achieve what I am trying to get. I mean, if one drinks to forget or go numb, one knows the pain will come back. Sometimes I resent drugs and alcohol don’t do for me what they do for addicts and drunks.They have some easy way to escape, even if it hurts them -t least they have something that comforts them, or keeps them from crossing the fine line between being OK , not being ok, or worse, not being OK and people knowing it. I know there are other reasons people get “high”- fear, or because it makes their mind think more quickly, maybe they think it makes them more creative or able to work longer or be inspired when they really aren’t’t, to care when all the caring has gone, their passion like a child’s helium balloon that has drifted into the hallway.The mommies chit chat, tell me how wonderful I look (while I secretly envy their bovine happiness), as if being evaluated is part their social dance -they notice my weight, though to me, these women always look the same. I try to remember the self-deprecating obligatory return compliment about some quality they have that I wish I did. Their leader yaks on about something , the others infomercial- like, coo and ask questions. Ha. They have no idea.Found out I had something called a key logger on my PC since January. I thought I had complete control over the PC. I didn’t’t. There was something else too, a “sniffer”, but I am not sure where that was, I ran the usual anti-spy stuff, but it didn’t’t get it, it was hardware, not software. It is interesting how some people can play it cool like they don’t care about stuff and be totally insane inside over something. I can’t do that , not convincingly anyway. I could only get away with only letting part of it show. Do people have to learn how to be that way, or are they taught?One of the dads had “reading duty” the same day I did with the class. He sits at the end of the table, I sit in the middle, facing the wall doing the one-on-one reading with a first grader. I thought this dad would have gotten his own table.

There are others sitting empty nearby. I was here first. The “Rules of Space” dictate that he has invaded my space. “Erik Geier” , (not his real name, he has a name with an odd spelling, that tells something of where he is most likely from)he says, telling me who his son is, (I already know ). I think I have seen the mother here and there at school. She is tall and big, with a slightly contemptuous look on her face. I am somewhat afraid of her, but only in the sense that I am afraid of crossing the street in front of an oncoming RV. I don’t think she has ever deigned to say even hello. It is possible I have become so small and insignificant, I have become invisible. Still I am stared at, but rarely does anyone smile at me. Not even away from school, like at the grocery. People talk, people tell lawyers stuff ( even about my politics) lawyers tell other lawyers stuff. Feeding upon your soul, endlessly generating paperwork and letters, pitting people against each other. I don’t want to have anything to do with lawyers ever again, even if they are on “our” side. I have lost faith in doing things the “regular way”, speaking of which ,I may visit the “compound” next summer.I only allow myself to look at him while finally gets to reading to his own son, and I am waiting for the next kid to come in. I do it to torture him for sitting at my table, but I don’t know if he notices , or if it has any effect. Then I stop, as if I were lost in thought and called back to my task, as if I had never looked at all. He is not very patient with his son, though he spends a long time on him, after he is done with him says he has to catch a plane and bolts. He’s attractive enough, but there is something creepy about him, and not in a Dracula way. He made a big to-do about telling his son when he is at mommy’s to do more reading. Does he know? Why did they schedule him today to volunteer? Ugh, maybe it is all one big cluster f*&k coincidence, and I am reading into stuff. But everyone else sits at their own table. I feel that sick, sweaty sense of embarrassment and shame, but he does not notice. La Di Da. Nothing means anything. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but sorry, I can’t afford to be like that anymore, now everyone gets what I call the “disadvantage of the surety”.Your subtlety blows, Geier. As does your style. It would have been better if he said nothing and we just read to the kids and it was nice, for what it was, without all that. Without you making comment after comment to your kid in front of me so that I know what your situation is. As if you were waiting for me to ask, or volunteer info. Good luck, Jack. I have never even spoken to you before, though I have seen you around occasionally. Your kid, though darling, does not resemble you. I finish reading with the rest of the kids then go outside in front of the school alone during recess as my “shift” is not over. Some other mom is trying to get me to buy something . I can’t buy jack. I owe my father nearly 10K .~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I met with the college adviser. The one for my major , that guy was all right, somewhat nerdy collegiate type, round glasses, sweater, probably about 10 years older than me. He leaves the door open to the hallway even though there are people out there. I ask if the towheaded children picture on his desk are his. He says grandchildren. I praise him for having kids early. He actually looks up at me for saying this. We speak about what class catalog requirements I will be held to, the one 20 years ago, or the present. It is called “bulletin rights” now. I make a comment about that sounding “PC” but he doesn’t’t respond humorously . I am creeped out.He is as bland as stale Saltines to my comments, only sometimes looking up at me, I can’t tell whether he is afraid, curious, or simply thinks I’m weird. I looked at what his “specialties” were, but picked him for other reasons, because I knew he would probably do a good job and not offend me, yet I am afraid if he knew me , he would most dutifully be be offended by me.

I notice he is a little unnerved and unused to the “familiarity” of someone my age. He also has a whiff of do-gooder righteousness . I also pick up he has picked up something about me, and I am not sure he is crazy about it. I stop with the “we are ‘equals’ ” camaraderie and go into “respectful student” mode. He starts functioning a lot better. After another student peers in and asks to see him after me, I try to cover my earlier attitude with some sappy thing about my parents having been teachers, and how people don’t realize how much out of class work there is. Right after this I have a momentary panic as I try to remember whether my dad has worked there.No, I think not. Mr. Sweater & Jeans has relaxed a bit. I asked him if he has been here a long time, and he says something about how he was probably here when I was here the first time, after attending JC- I don’t think I had him, but rather than be rude and either a) not remember him, or b) lie and say I didn’t have him, while he has my transcript in his hands, I plead it has been a very long time and much has happened. This isn’t’t a good enough cop out for him, and he says Oh, he still thinks I would be able to remember. Oh man, now he has turned the tables on me and I am not half as good as he is at playing it cool. Oh hell, I actually stuttered ” I , I don’t think so”. He smiles, having got me back, and glides right back to where he was. I try not to exhale audibly, as he has blown my entire fake confident act.We go over all my paperwork, my long transcript, he praises my grades, shows me what I still need to do for my degree. I had thought he would be my one and only stop, and we have made progress as far as information , but he sends me to yet another building for further bureaucracy . I walk up the hill, passing though the student union, past the murals of Cesar Chavez and Farrakhan .The collective “gayness” of the advising dept is only surpassed by their officiousness, and their dramatic airs, as if they stepped of the set of “Dangerous Liaisons” . I wonder if they realize the silliness, or if they simply can’t help it. I make a comment about “back in the old days” when I started school there, and another one appears, an older Black , and sashays past the others, without looking at me, he comments to another in a whispery voice, ” She doesn’t’t have the right to say that”. I think I am supposed to take that as a compliment, but from him, it doesn’t’t feel like one. They all affect the tone of “I’I’ve heard it all before, honey , let me tell you, nothing surprises me, nothing is abig deal. La Di Da”, which is bad enough when straight people do it. I think I prefer the straight “Flo the Texas waitress ” version of this.

The lead one does not want to give me an appointment, and starts questioning me about who sent me, and what my issues are. I don’t want to tell these fags my details, but then I recognize this guys voice, though it is clear he is trying to sound less gay now in person than he was on the phone- why I don’t know , I can still tell- I realize I spoke to him on the phone the previous week, figure I might have to deal with him again, might need help from him so I better be nice. It is clear they have pegged me as a straight white woman, they trying to weigh whether I am an “OK” one who “approves” and finds them fascinating or whether they are objects of puzzlement and derision. I can’t fake the former, but try to cover the latter with an air of nervous desperation about school. My part in their play, “Clueless Breeder”. I can tell they are entertained by me, even as they condescend to me, which is something I don’t think I have experienced from a gay man before, let alone a clutch of them. I get an “Alice in Wonderland” feeling.

They give me pages of paperwork, yet tell me there is yet another place I must go to- I turn back in the direction I came from originally and head back down the hill.

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Revisionist Mystery IV : Path of the Puritan

I’m walking down the path to the next building, black-clad. There are college students climbing a cypress tree. Lots of them. It is cold and the humidity is high, made worse by the fact the encounter with the fruitcake division made me sweat. I find the student services building. There are many cubicles to approach, like at a bank. A black woman beckons for me to come up, as there is no line. I explain to her my situation. She starts musing to herself why I was sent there, and how possibly my advanced standing paperwork is on microfiche because I went there so long ago when I started, blah blah blah.. I have more stuff to fill out, she says they will mail it. Registration is a month away, yet I don’t trust this. It seems flaky. I want my damnable paperwork, what is the big deal? But it is always a big deal at “institutions”. I see arguing or trying to get her to do things differently isn’t’t going to work. I see now I will have to get dolled up like Judy Garland and go back up the hill prob next week and sing show tunes. It is only approaching 5 yet it is almost dark. I have to get to the car as I am in a 2 hour parking and probably almost a mile away from where I am. I put on the IPOD knock off and listen to the Puritan pod cast, walking in the cold in my decidedly unhip leather bomber jacket and boots (see page titled 2+2 on the home page for a better look at these, click on top of page “Spoils of War” to get back there). Walk , walk walk, past the gargantuan Leona Helmsley Parkmerced apartments, past the low lying ones in their shadow . I used to know people that lived in the towers. They had metal doors that slammed like prison cells. The apartments were big , but smelled funny like a mixture of various foods and people, and had this unhomey feeling. Yeah all apartments are kind of un-homey, but these were even more so than any of the smaller complexes or duplexes I had lived in then. There was always noises of other doors constantly slamming and echoing voices of other tenants. It was far from peaceful. Now they are painted in awful “urban trendy” tri-color earth tones, which give it that false “new and happy” look common to many housing projects. Look at row 3 #3 http://www.parkmerced.com/image_gallery.php. No, I definitely wouldn’t’t like this a bit. Vague memories of the apartment complex my Yiayia and Papou owned out in the avenues when I was a little kid come back to me. But that was a normal sized building, not a tower. It must be the scenery that brings it back. The Puritan guy is going on and on. I listened to some other educational mp3 from the teaching company a while back on Cotton Mather and think of the Mencken quote:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy

I think I could be bitter enough to be a Puritan, but don’t know if I could be “good enough”. Besides, I have this horrible tendency to end up laughing at my own folly, even as I repent. Definitely not Puritan-like. I have the clothes , though- loads of black cotton gear, and long skirts. But the piousness is what makes it, and I don’t yet have that. I don’t like their premise either, that we are all damned, but some of us are saved by God’s grace, but it is not based on what we do, it’s just random. Huh? All of this for possibly nothing? Worse, probable damnation? Is it just me or would this philosophy encourage “getting ones damnation’s worth “? Pure? well, untouched, yes, for the most part. Pure , I don’t know. Not of heart. I turn off the preaching and put on AC/DC.

OI, OI, OI, TNT.

I drive to my parents to pick up my sons, dusk traffic on Skyline, red tail-lights foggy beacons , window open to keep me awake like all the coffee hasn’t’t.

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Revisionist Mystery Chapter V, “Prisoner’s Dilemma”

The task I have been avoiding- getting the last bits of stuff out of “that room”, which hasn’t’t been “my room” for months. It feels as if everything that happened, happened there. There’s my specter, outlined in chalk in 3-D, illuminated by the glow of the CRT screen. They say murderers do like to revisit the scene of the crime , but I would tend to think the dead try to avoid them, unlike the popular ghost mythology that says they hang around. Perhaps they only need to get their things packed as well. This place is like a hotel now. Sometimes the “boss” is around, sometimes not. Winter (for SF, anyway) is here, and I now realize that room was a lot colder than the living room. There’s still not much talking, I’m not doing this to win approval. I may have started that way, but now it’s become something else. The advertisements say “think different”. I have “become different”, and not by choice, which is a whole lot “different” than reading a ”self-help” book about “how to….” the old me is still there someplace, but the new person ( her name is Prudence, like the song) is running the ship for the time being. I wonder if she will stay , and if she does, if that means I will have “to go”. The new person doesn’t’t approve of a lot of the stuff I’ve done. I don’t blame her. Neither do I. She knows talking to me is dangerous. That is when she must be sleeping. Like now.~~~~~~~~~~~~~I worked so hard in front of the house weeks ago, tearing weeds out for hours, digging holes , putting new plants in. The more strenuous and back-breaking it was, the better I liked it. There really is something to be said about the old penitentiary system. It causes one to think, yet the work prevents going over into dangerous mental territory. The thing that the prisons don’t get is that the work itself is not suffering, it gets one away from the suffering. I have never cleaned, scrubbed, weeded, carried, donated, just in general worked as steadily and as hard as I have the last couple months. This work isn’t’t “to get” anything. It’s to try and “make up for”.I don’t think there is anything to get, now. I can only give work, so this is what I do. I also have done a lot of volunteer stuff, telling you where and what doesn’t’t matter, only that if a person wants to do these things, all I can say is that you do not need to contact a group, there is plenty to do on your own, without getting someone’s permission to do it, then having to do it on their terms. In many cases you don’t even need to tell anyone you are going to do this or that nice or useful thing, you just do it. If you do it this way though, there is zero glory, no school credits, no starring role banner or anything like that. Like paying off a debt. You don’t posture or advertise it. You don’t expect the credit card company or a bank or whomever loaned you the money to say “All right, we’re going to host an awards ceremony for you because you paid it back!”. You pay it and make it right because you know if you don’t, bad things will happen. Or have already happened. Or are still happening.Hope only gets you so far, then it shoves you out of the train, and you fall, go rolling down the rocky slope, “Oh Effing hell, it’s really like THIS!”…That’s when the crying comes.Where is this elusive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial ? Maybe the same mechanism I am lacking w/drugs and alcohol keeps me from this little goody as well.~~~So as I was doing some task that in More’s “Utopia” would be deemed demeaning, I was wondering about the differences between prison labor and monastic life as compared to the “Utopia” concept. Work as penance, work as spiritual, then this “utopia” , which sounds neat-o, but gives me the creeps, not only because I don’t believe it, but because I am not a believer in equality -let me say, I am anti-equality. I don’t think it is even possible. How can everyone contribute the same value and get the same benefit(s) when all cannot fundamentally do the same work, or even the same quality of work? Kind of like I have my doubts I can ever be a “good Christian” (if I wanted to) , but there are women who are and can, like some are engineers and astronauts, but men are generally better at it. Women bleed with the tides, what does that tell you about our connection to nature, not artificial rules?Speaking of blood, I have cut myself on something, but the pain and mess only make me angry that I have to stop what I’m doing to bandage it. When one is in the prison of ones own mental torment, anything that is a distraction is news and welcome. Like I said in a previous chapter , drugs and alcohol never have done much for me, if they did, I most likely wouldn’t’t be scrubbing shower grout and starting to feel woozy like perhaps I have created a poison gas with bleach in the toilet and the anti-mildew ammonia spray in the shower..I think I romanticize Christianity because it seems so simple and easy, and yes, even magical. But I know life isn’t’t that way- I have to focus a million times a day back to what I am doing and not drift . Intention, intention. Be strong, behave well in front of people , go to the meeting with the principal, the teacher, the school psychologist and the speech therapist- I take them all on and beat them at their own game, making up little catch phrases they seem to love, putting things in terms of “plans” and “steps”, knowing I am Basing them all the while, and almost hating them all, with the exception of the principal, whom I can tell is doing the same thing I am to a degree. I leave and look around- there still no priest, glowing light of goodness anywhere to be found, no dove flying with an olive branch.I actually wait to come here to get my stuff until after dropping the kids off for school , until after the garbage men have left for fear I will run into the same guys who have been there for the last 7 years. Hence avoiding my own history. Avoiding explanations. The light has burned out in the lava lamp,the wax coagulates around the coils.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Revisionist Mystery VI: Before and After

” I know you don’t want to fly, but just think about coming to Greece with us, ” my father says and takes my hands in his. I really wish they weren’t’t going , but I won’t say this. I wish he hadn’t’t asked me, I feel like they need to get away from me and my problems. “you can forget about all of this, you can rest, see Athens, Piraeus, Skyros.” After months of continuous motion, it is all I can do to get dressed, deal with the boys. “I’ll think about it. , Dad”. He stares at me, brow locked into a permanent furrow. ” I will call you later. Drive carefully”. I get a call from a friend, we exchange tales of woe, make unfunny jokes at the others problems, commiserate. I feel bad that I know he is too smart to be fooled by false brightness, so I don’t try. I wish I could handle things the way he does. I don’t know if I go with this “misery loves company” stuff. With few exceptions, I have learned that most people are pretty much assholes and don’t care, they only fake it for one reason or another. From some other universe, speaking another tongue. I used to feel bad that people made fun of me for not being as hard as they, it hurt to be mocked in such a cruel way, but now I am becoming so bitter and awful myself, I mock myself better than they using their sophomoric , second-hand, unoriginal humor.Lots of Lulz. Worst. Year. Ever. Best. Mindf*ck. Ever. OMG ! Secret Sock puppet In-Joke screen names! Wowie Zowie, aren’t’t we cool and clever, let’s rip on some more people, yeah! Itz all about ME! Whee, everything is a big f*cking joke. Everything is a sarcastic put down. A rip off of something or someone else. Amalgamation of pop culture crudity with the little smirk of haha I’m going get mine. Mo’ money, mo’ bitches, MTV or “family guy” cartoon ‘humor’ at its Kosher worst. Yeah, it’s been real. Real f&cked up. Lawyer $ score 10/8K his lawyer is winning, almost 20K total! . Those papers would have never been filed had it not been for the 6 months that preceded it..Best. Bullsh*t. Ever. This Sunday I will be spending the entire day at a required and court ordered workshop about kids and divorce.Pieces of my hair, in light daddy-long-leg spider colored strands swirl by my feet, and collect at the bottom of the broom in tangled skeins. I tried the expensive shampoo I have stashed away, didn’t’t help. Tried to eat more protein, tuna fish. Didn’t help. According to the net experts, if there is a little bulb at the root, it is not breaking, it is falling out, but they say it will come back. It’s not covering gray that did it, it’s stress, the HMO Dr. says. The rest is “low hemocrit”, you can’t give blood (I already knew that)- here have some iron pills, rest more, come back in 3 weeks for more blood tests. The good news is, you don’t have Thalassemia, but you could have a blood transfusion if you want (NO THANK YOU). Haven’t had this crap this bad since I was pregnant with my teenager. My hair was great then, though. A light chest pain, like a cloud floating over the sun, passes, another smaller pain, space bar, done. Is this where my heart was? I wasn’t going to tell them about this new little development, they have done enough to me today. ..Think about the work I will have to catch up on, since I have been too tired today to accomplish much. I actually had to lay down and drift off, even with Jr here for a short time- thought I had slept enough last night. Think about what is in the freezer in terms of making dinner. I think much about when we are done with this life, and what , if anything there is after this. What will be left behind. It comforts me that for the most part , the kids will most likely be all right, as there are only 3 grand children. Someone walks down the street, whistling the tune to a song I was playing on the guitar a few days ago.

I used to have so much faith, I had extra for those who didn’t’t. Feel like I paid in blood for all the depth of a Bob Ross painting lesson. “Let’s put a little tree here, swish swish, there we go, and a bird in the sunset, maybe another…it’s so easy, there’s a mountain, add some snow..”I’m folding laundry, myself and the boys are watching “Little House on the Prairie” re-runs. My youngest asks “Mom, where’s the prairie?” The oldest finds this funny, then launches into one of his trademark lectures, this time outlining the history and features of the ridiculously expensive fountain pen my father got him. ” and look , Mom, the nib is engraved. Did you know there are people whose sole purpose in life is to repair these? This guy Waterman gets all the credit but really other people made fountain pens long before he did..there was this French guy….” Lately , I am grateful for his superb recall, his vast knowledge of trivia and love of thoroughly knowing a subject. This used to drive me up the wall after a time, now I could fall asleep to it, his informed litany, punctuated every so often with “Do you understand? Are you listening?” (How he knows if I am not perfectly attuned to him I don’t know, but he does).. ” Mom, aren’t’t you going to ask me stuff about it?” I say, “No, I just like to hear you talk.”

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Chap. VII , Revisionist Mystery: Endurance

I am looking out the museum doors at these little day-moth type creatures, flitting in the sunlight. Stuff starts playing back in my head from earlier this year. All fake? Some real? All a total scam? How could someone keep that up for that long? None of it was the truth? If one constantly equivocates , hedges and backpedals, does that take away from anything they do as half-assed and whatever is good for them in the moment? or is the things backpedaled on just as real (or unreal) , but the person is full of cowardice about whether real or unreal, either way? Was I that stupid/naive or are people really that good of liars? Both? Neither? -It is kind of like that game where one person says “I always lie” and you have to figure out what statement is true. Only in this game, no one says “I always lie”. I can only believe it was a horrible game. A very high-stakes expensive game- a game that as it played out, did not occur in a vacuum to which the other party was “incidental” , a bystander. Moves were made because of the other party. He was the reason. Oh God, make this stop. Hot feeling behind my eyes. “Oh no you don’t, Missy, not here”, says Prudence. “Stop it! Get your sh*t together. Stop worrying about luxury things like sincerity , companionship- you don’t require a great deal of that anyway, you can’t miss what you never really had, honey- what part of the charade was more or less real, stop clenching and grinding your teeth, girlie, you can’t afford to wreck those crowns now. Believe it or not, some people are even more f*cked up than yourself, how many more people do you need to tell you the same things!? They should know, right? You got people helping you, you are doing the best you can, you got this weekly radio thing going, you’re going on tomorrow at 7 , shut the f*ck up with your crying, and ’ was any of it real or not real, ” crap, no one f*cking cares and as long as you do, you are more of a JOKE so suck it up, I’m sick of your sh*t!”..~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I catch the widower looking at me across the carpeted classroom of a horrible presentation on hissing cockroaches from Madagascar. I have no clue how to respond, and it is not because there is anything “there”, or that I am made uncomfortable, like I once would have been. I don’t feel anything. He is not looking in the way I would have expected. I am far away and he is looking at me as if he concerned , yet far away as well. I can’t worry for him, his memories are better than mine, more officially “real”. Earlier he made a comment about something I was looking at, ending with my name at the end. It was some kind of question, but I didn’t’t hear the whole thing, and feel like an assh*lle that I was still in outer space when he was talking to me.. It was something like ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have that, Mia?” but it was about a waterfall or something in the nature preserve. There is enough chaos with watching all the children I am able to avoid whatever it was he said. However, having recently learned some lessons in ’shining on’, I hand him a piece of dark chocolate from my pocket. He takes it. I tell him it is the dark stuff and he says that is his favorite . I only feel self-conscious in the sense that perhaps I am not putting up a good-enough front of “ok-ness”.

I cannot afford to feel anything, certainly not here, in front of teachers , kids and parents, don’t feel, forget, forget, not real, not real…I am haunted by my own suspiciousness, mistrust, even of myself. Like going to a play , you think you know the plot, and not only does it not end the way you thought, which would have been a disappointment, but not horrific- In this scenario however, when the last act commences, it starts off well enough- but then you start to realize the actors are imposters, they are not the same as you have been watching for the first three acts and worse, they are playing reversed roles, then an alarm goes off in the theater, people start yelling, throwing things, calling names, you run outside to escape, disgusted by this- you find that you are ill from the dinner you had earlier, someone has stolen your wallet, and upon returning dejectedly home, having stepped in something unpleasant along the way, you find it burned to the ground, your children and spouse blame you, your friends, neighbors and even people you don’t know are either laughing or looking scornfully at you, having read the local tabloid paper starring someone you thought close who has now betrayed you, and uses your pain and his lies (or were they lies after all, or are they only ‘lies’ now? Does he even know?)in which to make his case for some new scam he is working on “See, See, I was saying it like this, I meant it like this, really it is all her fault, do you see it like that? You can, right?”… and your solicitor has sent his man , standing in the ashes, he has a note, it is demanding more payment.

Whatever confidence in my judgment and perceptions I once had has been shaken. I did so well in the logic classes, not-so-well in math. Some teachers couldn’t understand this. I do. Theory vs practice. Stuff that doesn’t make sense is making me crazy. Now I not only don’t trust anything on its face, I don’t trust that things that used to make sense still will. I stretch out my legs and put my head back against the wall and pretend to sleep. One of the giantess mommies wakes me up. It creeps me out that she is nice to me though secretly no one likes her much ,and for good reason- she does come off as sort of a worldly snot, always preaching about how this other school doesn’t allow sugar and neither should ours , how there should be a better dress code, how many places she has traveled to, bragging to the other moms how she ate crickets and other insects. Is she nice to me out of some kind of pity or because she perceives I too, am an outsider?

The boyish girl presenter has now taken out a tarantula, and one of the moms goes outside, gesturing as if she is phobic of this hunk of fur and guts , carried on a piece of wood that is not going to be put down . I am not afraid of the tarantula, though the presenter girl-boy creeps me out as she seems to be overtly attached to pet insects like spiders and exotic cockroaches, and has named them, so thrilled when she gets one under the microscope (or whatever it is) and projects it onto the screen for the kids , huge images of close-up insect parts- ”Look there is its fangs!” “see, see the spinneret’s, you can see her making some silk!” Blah. My older son might like this as there is something vaguely medical (something he is interested in- medicine, physiology ). I wonder if she is aware she has given it a name that means “little she-bear”, after the constellation Ursus Major.~~~~~~For some reason, there are many more boys in my son’s class than girl s(my mother would say “that means there is going to be a war” Mom, there’s a war now) , and they all sit together at the picnic tables. Widower has to sit with his daughter and her girlfriends that he drove, alone. All the mothers who agreed to drive and “chaperone” (be on duty) have boys. Nurse Ratchet (my new best friend) starts in about her in-laws and how past Thanksgivings have gone, and how she got some crap because she made stuff that wasn’t traditional Thanksgiving fare last year, or changed it somehow.…”and then I made a Thai lemon thing, blah blah”….Another one chimes in, an especially smiley, self-satisfied and very round mom chimes in about how we should go to the Ritz-Carlton for their Christmas whoop-de-doo, how it is free, you don’t have to even be a guest there, and they give away free egg nog and favors, blah blah blabbity blah, and oh how if you get a glass of wine how we should go to the bar to get it because some waiter came by and suggested a glass of wine and it turned out to be 30 bucks a glass (her obnoxious braggart part as obligatory as the moral in an Aesop’s Fable). I say something like , “they should have told you it was going to be that much a glass”- there is enough of a small silence in response to let me know I am “outclassed”, even though I know I shouldn’t have said that, but was disgusted enough by her peacock display to not care. She then tries to pave over it saying “Well, I didn’t’t tell my husband “- conspiratorial laughter between she and Nurse, who misses the obnoxious part and feels the urge to compete, citing some wine tasting thing up past Healdsburg , where you pay per sip .. This was now my cue to brag, but I don’t, so Humpty Dumpty starts with how she has tried to cut down on the drinking because she is watching her weight. I still don’t care what they think.“Oh, does wine really have that many calories?” I ask innocently , the insinuation being it is not the wine but whatever she is gorking out on. She says something to the effect of “Oh , well it sort of takes away my willpower as far as saying no to food as well. “.“hmm, I never thought of it like that”, I say, the proverbial knife in her prodigious gut, (”I wouldn’t know, I’m neither a drunk nor a compulsive eater”) this isn’t just payback for this one money-flaunting episode, I have had to listen to her brag for over a year. Why these two seem to want to include me in their little mini snot-cadre makes me worry. I don’t brag about my travels, I have never even been on a plane- I feel smug that even though I am not stick thin, and have even been a little overweight for standards in CA (though I have been described by turn by folks in other parts of the country as “Bite-Sized”) , I am fairly thin at present, much more so than either of them anyway. I suppose this whole snooty rant of theirs was payback for my rant about consumerism and vulgar materialism at Christmas. Roundy didn’t’t like that one a bit, I could tell, she was going on and on about how she was buying some cell phone and her son was going around the store saying “I want this, I want this”..and she just laughed about it.

“but he isn’t’t going to get all of those things?” I say , in my best self-righteous, almost religious voice.

“Well, not ALL, ” Roundy laughs. That’s when she launched into her ‘charitable lady’ routine about the Ritz. What almost made me laugh out loud at this, was when she spoke about how “you find a really nice sofa, or something with a nice background and decorations, then you get someone to take pictures of the family in front of it”.. (as if her own palace was not possibly up to par?!). Still this whole rant wasn’t as bad the first rant I heard from her- talking about some relative of hers (or perhaps someone who had married into the family).
“Those people actually thought that buy-on-credit , you know, ten dollars a month from Fingerhut stuff was ‘nice furniture’ . Their whole place was full of that cherry -veneer-looking-but-really-particle-board . Can you imagine? they had all these crappy little end tables and cheap reproduction prints of ladies and angels on the wall, you know the stuff. Kind of a mish-mash of their idea of what ‘rich people ‘ had . You know, as if they were desperately trying for a pretense of grandeur they had no hope of possessing. Oh, and get this, when they came out and stayed with us, they said something about “we should have brought the extra furniture we were going to give away in case you ever might want to fill up this place! as IF!? ” (bursts into hysterical laughter). How I hate her, flighty yet pretentious. Her Cheshire cat smile conceals a greedy viper, ready to unhinge her jaws and swallow entire shopping malls. I feel bad for her fingerhut-loving family wherever they are. Not because of their catalog furniture, but because of her.

I was wondering what she would think of my “decor” , or lack thereof. Kind of hunting lodge gone to seed . What she’d think if I told her that I dream of playing Scrabble with Ernest Shackleton in a cabin in the Antarctic , or making coffee for Thomas Edison and telling him I love him too, (so what if it’s post-mortem-) not for his numerous inventions but for the way he thought.

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Revisionist Mystery chap. VIII: Homeostasis

“Thanks, you have a good one”, I say, putting on a no-teeth “smile”, and handing the student an empty coffee cup. I used to be good at making people happy, entertaining them, and it was real- now I don’t know that I can do this anymore. I look in the tip jar and it is confirmed. I used to make huge money in tips in my youth, even when I spilled things on people. What am I doing wrong now? A question I ask myself several times a day, looking over my shoulder as if there will be another self, namely “Prudence”, who will either shake her head or nod in approval, but she hasn’t’t been around lately. Or, is this her? OK let go of that for now. No, I don’t think I am her right now, she doesn’t’t worry or think about things this much. Prudence is a hard, get-it-done type. Prudence doesn’t’t cry or think about “what if things happened this way..” I start the trudge up the hill in the semi-fog, cutting across the very green but not recently shorn grass, past the murals of Chavez and Farrakhan, wondering where the Palestinian mural went that there was so much made of earlier this month. “Well. What are you interested in, what are your talents? What do you have to offer….” the advising person says to a boy probably less than ten years older than my son. The adviser is a somewhat loud Morgan Freeman-esque type, very self-possessed.. I think about these questions as I wait my turn, happy that at least this boy, according to his story, has made it out of the military looking to be relatively unscathed. Talents? Offer? Ha. I am relieved he does not seem to have the chip on his shoulder, at least not the same kind as some blacks half his age or less. He has attitude, but he is neither pissed off nor a victim. This old, wise preacher thing I can deal with. It appears the Officious Broadway Actors Guild of last week are not around. “You are not the oldest student here,” “Morgan” says to me, I cringe. “I had an 85 year-old woman in one of my classes last semester” (”all right! At least I’m not 85! Thanks, dude!”). This does not make me feel better. He looks down at all my paperwork, I start rambling about requirements and asking about deadlines. “You need to relax. Calm down”, he says. I am afraid he is going to offer me a paper cup of water or something. He lifts a stack of papers and shuffles and straightens them, then gives me “the look” as if to figure out what exactly is wrong with me, before he makes his pronouncement.”It appears , at least for your GE , all is in order. Your grades are good. ..okay, okay..” as he flips page after page of my over-long transcript. “we can use this and this and this for your segment three related cluster..”

I am thinking about how much time I paid for the parking garage and how much time is left . “So, it looks like we can use human sexuality for your segment three even though they are not concurrent or your official concentration- hmm you haven’t declared a concentration”.“OK, if you think I need to declare something, then go ahead. I guess that is just how it worked out, if you can use the health ed stuff, then that’s a good thing”.“Don’t be embarrassed, ” he says, in the voice of a combination of benevolent guru , “lots of people use human sexuality as their segment three, it’s a part of life, nothing to be ashamed of”. I wasn’t embarrassed until now. Because he is so loud. The down jacket is now feeling sweaty. I tell him I didn’t’t bother to get much advising when I was last there, I just followed what was in the bulletin as far as requirements.“Well, that is a mistake many students make, they try to do it all themselves, without any advising, and see, see how you lose out that way- this other class, you didn’t’t even need to go through all that with the internship at the boy’s school. You could have just used this one that you already had passed with an A…” I try not to breathe audibly as he continues his sermon.

“yes, I know that..now” I say, in my best I-am-repentant-better-believe-it solemn voice, which is actually my most real voice as of late. I am afraid he will misunderstand, take my statement in a back-talk type of way, but he doesn’t’t. He believes me. He looks up and past me, greets a co-worker (?)“Hey, you criminal, when did they let you out?”They have an exchange of sorts, whereupon the adviser abuses him a bit, and the other, a short , somewhat chunky South American (?) looking man nods and laughs and then makes his exit. “Morgan” then makes a few little reflective chortling noises to himself as he gets back to my forms. Now I am starting to feel post-sweaty-panic icy-cold shivery , I can tell this is almost over. He sees the pictures of my sons in my folder and asks if those are my boys, wants to look at the pictures. “Big age difference, hmm?” he says as he surveys the wallet photos. Remarkably, he doesn’t’t comment that perhaps they don’t look very much alike, as 99.9% of everyone else does. He must have drawn his own conclusions.“Yes”, I concede, “one is now 6, the other 16″. I look at the pictures, smiling what I hope is a sentimental, motherly smile.”Well, ” he continues,”they will be so proud of you..” and he continues, which is making it all worse for me. I cannot even tell if he is sincere, or if he is on some level judging me. It doesn’t’t matter much, but I want out of there so badly by now that I say some trite thing about not giving up after this long. He likes this and heartily agrees, the others behind him echoing that sentiment about never giving up, and how it’s “never too late”. This is truly retch-worthy, but now I smile a grateful, “I-am-saved” type smile. He likes this too, and bestows on me some parting blessing, “Go, my child, go out into the great big world , and get yourself a better job than shucking lattes, so you can support your kids, and may God keep you..”. He doesn’t’t actually say that, but that is what I hear.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~In dreams, I can escape all this. In dreams, things have played out in such a way that people are treated better, things make much more sense. In dreams, things seem less surreal and confusing than waking life, where there is supposed to be a road map, laws of up and down- physics of living. In dreams, I never want to wake. An alternate reality where there is peace, all things wrong have not happened, and all things right follow the course of things that are good. Good begets more good, empathy and compassion begets true intimacy, understanding -similarities that words only serve to redundantly illustrate. In dreams, there is no fear and despair- loneliness, confusion. In dreams there is no constant disillusionment.

Even dreams that are not happy make more sense than my real life. If logic is not at least a close relative of reality, than what possible gauger does one use? Perhaps the lady doth expect too much.

~~~~~~~~~

Tomorrow night the boys won’t be here. I think of last time I was left to my own devices with movies. What I think I told you before were “feel-bad movies” One was a documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RNfL6IVWCE “Jesus Camp” , which chronicles some kind of Christianity that probably doesn’t’t much exist out here , but sure does in the mid west. The lady who runs the children’s program in ”JC” is scary. But even the “JC” documentary was better than http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUgMUYD8olU “Imaginary Heroes”. Want to feel like sh*t ? Yeah, rent that. If I never see another fake-edgy, overtly dysfunctional (obligatory gay suicide or drug suicide etc, as if most White teenagers are ready to blow their heads off at any given moment. Don’t worry I didn’t’t ruin the end of this POS flick, that was how it opened) and disaffected grownups and youths movie, I’ll be better for it. Blah. Here’s a torrent link to it just to further deprive them from making a buck. . http://www.sumotorrent.com/details_492337.html?ref=

That whole “genre” of crap makes me want to watch Nick at Nite for the rest of my life, which might be a bit longer if I stay away from “feel-bad” movies. Mind you, I don’t need a gazing at the stars happy ending. I don’t much care for the typical romantic comedy (or any comedy for that matter). I am a black-wearing, paleo-goth . I am not after schmaltz (isn’t that what the yids call it?). However, I also don’t need to take away the message “Yes, your suspicions are confirmed. Life really does suck, and look how much worse it could suck if you were these people, although this too, could be you someday.” F&^% you, producer of this depressing, non life-affirming, no redemption value, un-biodegradable, unsustainable, soul-poisoning product. Take your fake edgy, celebration of F*&^ed -upness , and grow yourself a polyp with it. I’m going to rent Passion of the Christ, even if I don’t watch it, just to give a dollar to Mel Gibson.

I can’t decide if I want to hold my breath, gasp for air or light a smoke…

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Revisionist Mystery Chap. IX: Dear Prudence

Dear Prudence open up your eyes
Dear Prudence see the sunny skies
The wind is low the birds will sing
That you are part of everything
Dear Prudence won’t you open up your eyes?~ Beatles There’s people in this horrible seminar who are ordered to be there. One guy is loud and mad he has to go to this as well as the twice a week therapy with one of the co-facilitators. There’s what appears to be an illegal alien next to me with a translator, another one, a male, a few rows up . There are people who only have recently been granted custody because the the other parent has beat the child. The facilitator, who sounds like “Lois” on “family guy” swaggers about the room, pausing for effect “You don’t call your ex an asshole or a bitch. It’s about the chaaaaaaaalddd” (child) as if she is a combination of jewish grandma meets evangelical preacher. When I go out to smoke on the break, the few other women there talk about how horrible their ex’es are, how long it’s been since they’ve seen their child, one shows me pictures of her new boyfriend. “so then we all meet in the park , in a public place, like we’re supposed to, my 13 year old son comes up to me , and throws a bag at my feet. ‘here’s the rest of your stuff!’ ” one woman says, she looks not only thin, but possibly on drugs. Another one, who has hair sprayed,dyed Elvis-black hair and is missing a tooth, tells me she has a four year old from a one nighter. I try to be kind and say, “well, you did the right thing, it beats the alternative”.To this she says , “Oh, I already did that three times”. I’m aghast, I don’t know what to say to this , but nod and act impressed with how sad and horrible her story is . I go into the bathroom, into the large handicapped stall and lean against the wall.”What are you doing in here? Hiding much? What did you expect it was going to be like today? Did you think it was going to be ‘fun’? Gawd , Anna”.“Go away Prudence, I didn’t’t call you”.“Ha, this is the thanks I get for trying to help you. You go back in there, and take your medicine and stop with your middle-class sniveling. You should be glad you aren’t’t them. You don’t feel like one of them, do you? I bet you’re going to cry for a week over this, haha… oh and do something about that hair. Is it still falling out?”“You’re just as fucked up as I am, Prudence. At least I’m not afraid to feel, I’m not a poseur like yourself, who prides herself on how fake tough she is. Even if I am weak, at least I’m REAL ” ..“You better watch how you talk to me, Missy. I kept your anemic blood in your pathetic little veins. Keep it up and next time I won’t save you..I may be a bitch, but at least I’m not a whiny little bitch like you. Awww, why don’t you just go home , put on your wuss Cat Stevens and smoke your pussy Merits and write your shitty poetry , or touch yourself, then cry into your pillow…”“Shut. The. Fuck. UP!”I go back to endure hours more of the workshop. I write notes to the closet queer on my notebook, which he leans over and reads with great interest. If there’s one thing fags love, it’s intrigue, no matter how small. I write how I feel like the high end of the Springer show. He nods and smiles, amused. He writes back about a book he thinks is so wonderful, called “Mistakes Were Made”, he says the cover features a man from the waist down, who has painted his house and painted over himself as well. Now I feel betrayed by this 6′ 7″? (some ungodly height, much bigger than all the normal-tall boyfriends I’ve had, to be sure) will o the wisp . I wonder if he has Klinesfelter syndrome.He is into mainstream Oprah reading material. I feel like telling him “listen girlie, I’ve been rejected for who I am too, though not for the same reasons, and I haven’t resorted to Dr. Phillistic Psychosnivel woodpulp.” He whispers to me about how Aronson and Tarvis, or whoever it was who wrote it won all these awards, blah blah and how great they are. About now I’m thinking that the TV Oprah book of the month club mentality would be even more unbearable than his faggotry. However, he is , as is typical for his kind, much more articulate than your average very dysfunctional (or illegal alien) adult male, so I am happy he is in my “group” when we have to start doing the obligatory dreaded small groups, because then it won’t have to always be m who is the “group leader”. Who wants to lead these, oh, what is the cutesy internet put down of the week - “ass clowns”?Lois continues on, Virgil leading Dante onward to further reaches of hell,” So you tell them , “Mommy and Daddy still love you, we just don’t love each other”. I feel ill. I think of the cliché “I love you, I’m just not ‘in love’ with you”. How about “I’m ‘in love’ with you, I just don’t love you”.At last lunch break comes, some kind of Asian woman from the class is walking next to me. I ask her where I can get a sandwich. She gives me directions to Draeger’s . I tell her I heard what she said about the lawyers and this psychiatric evaluation they encouraged her and her husband to pursue, as they fought over custody, which is hugely expensive. “now we don’t want this, but lawyers say ‘can’t stop it now, must follow through’, and they keep writing letters to each other, costs so much. Now husband and I hate lawyers more ! We are friends now against lawyers. We both don’t want this psychiatric evaluation. I not crazy, he not crazy, we were just angry, now this costs thousands, we say we will agree on custody plan, but lawyers keep push, push , push..” I agree how evil they are, and tell her to try and talk to someone at the superior court, say because of the language problem you and he both misunderstood, see if they can get out of it, and don’t go to the evaluation, both don’t go, and don’t sign anything else. She leaves to go to some Hawaiian place and I find Draeger’s. The place is very la de da. Expensive, dolled up to the nines in Christmas decor, crawling with well-groomed, bejeweled elderly rich from Hillsborough. I get my turkey sandwich and get the hell out of there.Upon my return, I notice the people in class are all standing outside. We are locked out, only the people doing ’supervised visitation’ and ‘child drop offs’ for weekend custody (parents get there, drop child off and leave, then other parent comes and picks child up) are coming and going. None of them let us in when they get buzzed in , as if this is the ad-deg wing at Pelican Bay. Super-max loser zone. Finally Lois comes back from stuffing herself through the lobby , sees us, and lets us all in. I go to the restroom and piss like a racehorse, having consumed 2 large coffees in the AM. More photocopies are being passed around, with little diagrams and charts and cartoon people on them. This is reminiscent of psych 101 with a sprinkle of women’s shelter material. No, those were even better than this. People are eating their food, and the second workshop woman gets her turn to start in asking us about our kids. More horrific stories. Lois’ co-conspirator looks to be late 20’s or early 30’s , prob a psych or developmental childhood major. She barely hides her disdain and revulsion behind a squinting , concerned mask as people talk about how their kids are “handling it”. She puts us all in groups according to the ages of our kids- those of us with big age differences in children have to pick one. I go with the oldest, so I can stay with White Sissy Pants, whose kids are a bit younger than my oldest, even though he is prob 10 years my senior yet he has been married 30 years. Will this day never end?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter X: Ides of March

At one time, I would have been uncomfortable in a place like this, now I’m not worried. The receptionist (or whatever she is called these days) looks me over, she knows I am not a regular.

“Hi, this is your first time here, right? Would you like some tea?” a tiny Asian girl says. I am holding a coffee.

“Thank you but..” she notices my coffee now”Oh, hee hee, my bad.” (now she seems out of place) “we have a fruit bar, if you want to check it out”. (I don’t)

“OK, thanks,” I say , ignoring the fruit bar and sit down on a sofa. This looks like a combination of office, lobby and living room , but very small. There is a kind of picture on the wall, with raised fake rocks and water running down. It makes an artificial trickling sound. The place smells vaguely like incense , and something soapy, like lavender. There are various small vases with flowers around. The colors are all pastels, peaches, pinks, purples and some dark green accents. I’m so tired from tossing and turning and waking up various times all night I have that out-of-it surreal feeling , I didn’t really want to go to this , but this was a gift from my father, so I couldn’t reject it. I close my eyes, try not to actually fall asleep to the strains of some new-agey type music going.

” Lucinda will be with you in a few minutes, just be comfortable” she chirps.

“OK, ” I say opening eyes, small smile. She looks at me a second too long. Maybe she thinks I’m high or something, because I’m tired.

A few minutes later I am guided down a hall - this place is in what probably was once a garage in these San Francisco big stuck-together stucco houses-

“We have two rooms available, you can pick which one you like, OK?”

She lets me in first. Square, about 10 X 10. The rooms even parameters with this mish-mash of girlie frou-frou are incongruent. The window has chiffon-like periwinkle-colored drapery. The walls are more purple and pastel, fake flowers in a huge vase, massage table, different new- agey stuff playing , a large mirror with a little ironwork cat on top. “Want to see the other one?” she says brightly.

“Sure” I say and follow her down the hall even further. There’s a narrow door with a too-high doorknob, as if it belonged to a pantry. This room is small and narrow, real wood lines the walls, small slats of redwood . Unlike the first, this room is dark, the window has some kind of opaque curtain, and the heavy, utilitarian hand-crank peeks out underneath. A faint scent of pine permeates the air. There’s a Sheepskin rug on the floor near the table , a chair at the far end, and a floor lamp next to it. I walk to the chair, and half-turn , “This is fine”, I say , removing my jacket and hanging it on the back of the chair “Thank you” I say, hoping she is on her way out soon.

She has materialized a gown, “You can wear this if you want to. OK, she’ll be right with you”, and puts the gown on the table as I have started to undress.

“Ok , thanks”.

The table, which is really almost like a dental chair, it has beige leather and a white sheet tucked in around it like a bed. Where the pillow would be is another segment of the leather insect body of this table/chair, with an open space so one can breathe. I don’t put on the gown but lie face down trying to find a way to get my hair out of the way.

“Hi. I’m Lucinda . Looks like you’re ready.” she says, or something like that. I look up. She is tall, shoulder length hair styled surprisingly into a non-hipster-y, almost politician’s wife ‘do. She looks almost like a doctor. I feel relieved . Some people are scared of doctors, but I like them. Not because I think they necessarily “have the cure” but because (good ones anyway) are direct, they have a systematic way of finding what is wrong , usually do and fix it efficiently (shrinks don’t count) , they notice details , and they don’t tend to get lost in their own head .Doesn’t mean I will always follow their suggestions, like flu shots, I think those are a scam and ineffective . Lucinda is solid, or at least tries to appear so.

She starts working away on me, and I am driving down the mental highway, trying to figure out of I should stop for gas and keep going or look for a “vacancy” sign. I’m happy she doesn’t have music playing and tell her so. She gives a short non-committal reply about how people who like the music usually pick the other room. She keep rubbing away.

” You’re very tense” she says,

“Yes.” I agree. “I know” .

“Well, try not to fight it if you can, become conscious of your breathing, I’m going to work on your legs and lower back , and come back to your shoulders and neck ” (I wasn’t aware that I was fighting it, thinking now maybe I should just go to sleep).

I try for the real thing and go against the drone of her advice, or whatever she is saying “become aware of your surroundings, blah blah”..and eventually she stops talking-. I try to become less aware of my surroundings as far as paying attention, and start noticing things that just drift in.. that halfway zone where thoughts, memories are non-linear, but this is not the real sleep I didn’t get last night, this is “dollar-store sleep”. Ahh well, you get what you pay for - but I’ll take it. Finally she gets back to where it hurts most. She turns my head out of the little breathing zone and to the side. As much as I didn’t want to come here, she is helping me. Or trying to. She is really pushing hard now, I feel my neck make little clicking noises as she works away. When did I last feel this relaxed? I think I am drifting again, starting to feel a dizzy sense of letting go.

“Am I hurting you?” she says, out of the blue .

It takes me a minute to process this, I thought I was asleep , for real this time. She hands me a tissue. “It looked like there were some tears” she says.. and there are, the little paper from the table wet and stuck to my face . There’s salt water pooled near my nose. I’m somewhat embarrassed, but pretend it like is a non-event. I know why I cry. . Being touched at all, as nice as this is, it is not the real thing, or even a close relative. It only mocks the memory of the real thing, kicking sand in its face like those old Charles Atlas cartoon ads. Nyah nyah, haha . Empathy without intimacy. Nearness minus passion. A bloodless pulse. Incompleteness. I would like to have one of those sobbing, racking crys, like I have not had in months, but I don’t do so. I’ll save it for a special occasion.

“Oh. No, no, it’s good, I’m fine , probably just letting go of some stress in my sleep, go back to it, ” I take the tissue and pat my eyes. She replaces the paper , and I lie back down. She returns to it, not quite as hard as she was doing before then after a while she says to turn over, she then massages my temples , scalp and jaw.

“Try not to hold your jaw so tight. ” she says . I decide not to tell her about the past “TMJ” or the gnashing of teeth at night, or pain that makes one’s mouth water, or bags of frozen vegetables pressed to the jaw, or doctors who didn’t have the answer to this. She works on my arms now, I figure it must be getting towards the end of the hour as it seems the arms and hands would be the last stop.

“you don’t go out in the sun a whole lot ” she comments, almost as if to herself. Ha. I don’t go out much at all.

Then a qualifying ,

” you must cover up. Usually people’s arms or legs are darker, but you’re pretty much all one color” .

I didn’t know what to say to this, but fake laugh and acknowledge the truth of it.”Yeah, that’s true”.

“Now people won’t get that little bump on their finger from writing so much, because of the computers , you know , from when people wrote with pens” She is working on my right hand, I know she can see the remnants of exactly what she was talking about. I wonder what else she has noticed that she didn’t comment on.

I think of that scene in Silence of the Lambs where Jodie Foster as “Clarice” circles the body , looks at the hair, holds up the dead girls glitter-polished nails , “looks like town to me”.At the end she gets a warm towel and puts it over me, tells me “please, don’t leave anything, your dad has taken care of it” (I’m assuming this means to not tip her?) then says have a good weekend or something, and shuts the door quietly on her way out. After a minute or so, I get up , go over to this strange blue standalone sink and wash my face, brush my hair and get dressed. I feel lighter, but still very tired.

Chap. XI: Duality
I’m soaking in the tub, the water dyed green by the pine bath salts. The only thing better than being near the water is in the water. It is probably too hot. My hair, up in a banana clip is growing damp with sweat. I start to feel that awful relaxed feeling that might lead to a tear. As I grab the soap and shaver knowing I will not cry if I am too busy trying to avoid cutting myself, the phone rings. I grudgingly answer it in the you-might-have-the-wrong-number voice. It’s my long distance friend Betty. She asks if she has caught me at a bad time. “No way, ” I say, keeping still so she doesn’t hear the splashing .
She’s very polite, much more conscious of social niceties than I am. Sometimes I wonder why she even likes me, then realize I may provide some kind of entertainment for her, a ‘place’ she has never been, or out of some kind of bizarre curiosity. Then I feel like an a**hole for thinking that..No it isn’t that, I tell myself, she’s not trying to get information, maybe she actually is just being nice, wants someone to talk to, be a friend to, as we all do . Sometimes I am jealous of her,not even in the usual way, not for the things she has that I don’t, but for her whole life. I don’t know if I saying simply “she knows more than I” would be accurate, but I can say “she has seen a lot more than I” which I believe has lent her some kind of strength or resolve, though sometimes I also think this is partially affected.

Again I wonder what she sees in me . What is it I could possibly offer her, after the adventures she has had. She always tells me I don’t give myself enough credit, but sometimes I wonder if this too, is a backhanded compliment, rather than sincere, there’s a gentleness in her tone that skates on the coldest , thinnest ice. I remember at one time feeling sorry for her, but the thought of her feeling bad for me is more than I can bear on many levels. I hadn’t even entertained this possibility till recently. The idea of someone else being the sympathetic, mature ‘bigger person” towards me makes my guts rumble. My holier than thou way of coping has not only been outsourced, but she is better at it than I.

Oh why O why couldn’t she just be like the scowling , squinty eyed grade school girls from the “other side of the tracks” who yelled nonsensical curses as they tossed me down rocky slopes - I dusted myself off and it was over until the next time they caught me walking alone. I could console myself with my father arguing with my mother about whether to me in private school(they didn’t) , and how I felt favored by him -the horrible girls who hated and made fun of me for no reason no longer mattered . I saw them all as a pack of wolves, or jackals. Betty is much harder to cope with. I wonder if I am to Betty what those girls were to me. I dodge panicked “moments of silence” by making lots of noise and pretending not to hear what she said, buying time.

“What?” Clang , clang. “Oh sorry, I was trying to put stuff away, bad idea!”. I vacillate between moments of feeling I can handle Betty, with or without backhanded compliments and subtle messages and innuendos and moments of sheer terror that she knows everything and wants to kill me. I want desperately to believe, for all her experience out in “the world”, that I lack, that I also have skills , or at least good instincts- that sense sniffs the air, tells me whether to run or fight. I drink iced coffee in small sips, so as not to choke or develop nervous hiccups. I fight the urge to become loud, to yell “It’s true, it’s ALL TRUE! I had no idea it was you. I never thought it would go where it did . God, if only I had known it was you, yes, I remember what you told me, but I didn’t put it together. Oh God, Betty, I’m sorry, forgive me. ” That’s one variation on the theme. This particular one is only any good if she doesn’t already know.

She asks me how things are going. I, at once eternally guilty and paranoid, stutter something about trying to stay busy and healthy. This is almost like how I imagine “confession” must be, perhaps worse. She compliments me and says she is trying to do the same. Ironically, we almost never talk about political things unless it is impossible to avoid. I peer out behind the heavy drapes and glance the powdery moon in daylight. I alternately smoke and tear off my fingernails, we discuss her visiting me, she knows I am not keen on flying, but to her, it’s nothing, so she will come to me . She is on a cell phone outside, I can hear the gravelly crunch of her steps, though her speech is not that of someone walking at a brisk pace, more like walking around a yard . Crunch , crunch, then quiet, maybe walking on grass, crunch , crunch. Get this, she wants to take ME on a tour of my own city. What have I gotten myself into? I do not want to try all this weird foreign food at downtown restaurants-I hate spicy , exotic food! I even said I would cook everything! But I don’t say this.

How can I say anything in objection to anything she says? I have no right. I treat her as if I was the murderer of someone in her family, and she is unaware of it, though she suspects. Sometimes I can’t tell whether she is trying to “gaslight” me, or I am just reading stuff into everything. “Sure , Bet, It’ll be fun” (ugh, pain in my side). I try not to breathe audibly, putting a washcloth in the drain so it won’t make that slurping noise, my finger over the receiver while she talks so she doesn’t hear as I silently rise out of the dark water.

But this is revisionist , this is how things would be Betty were actually still talking to me. As is, she hasn’t spoken to me since last year .

~~

Chap XII- Shore Leave

“hey, not so close to the water!” someone yells, as a black dog, maybe some kind of Labrador mix, bounds up to me. The dog makes me turn to see how it is. A white-haired, white bearded man wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap is waving to me, I think. I look around. I’m not in the water exactly, I have my boots on. I’m picking up rocks and am holding an especially good volcanic one about the size of my fist. “you shouldn’t walk so close”, he calls , walking towards me, ” it’s deep right there where you are, there’s an undercurrent”. I recognize him now, he’s out here a lot in the morning. I back away from the water and up the grade. through the mushy sand, and think how to thank him for rescuing me from a danger I am not sure exists and how to sound sincere about it. He has abroad smile “Never turn your back on the sea, ” he says.

“I thought this beach was OK,” I say. He goes on to lecture about how people get swept out all the time. I realize quickly he just wants to talk, which is fine. I look out on the water. .”That’s not the islands,” I say, “Do you see that?” . I know very well what I see out on the horizon is not the islands, it is probably a ship, but this will give him something to talk about. There’s little patches of white to either side of the freighter. “I thought it would be kind of a lousy day to be out there. Supposed to rain, look at the waves.” The waves aren’t that big, but picking up.

“Oh this isn’t bad at all, and you have to consider out there isn’t as bad as here. If you get lost or things get rough sometimes you’re better off riding it out there than trying to come back in. ” I mention the movie “The Perfect Storm” . “That’s a true story, you know”. I tell him I do know, but only found out either at the end of the movie or sometime after that and wished I hadn’t seen it. “But you knew about ‘Titanic’ and you went and saw that.” he challenges.

“Yes,” I say, feeling cornered, ” but I knew that ahead of time”. He looks puzzled. I just smile at him, makes perfect sense to me. He seems to be over whatever it is he can’t fathom and starts telling me about the different sizes of swells -the closer together they are, the worse it is. I tell him it sounds like childbirth contractions and he laughs.I can tell he is not from here, he has some kind of light accent, but it is he who asks if I was born here. “Yes, I was, at UC , in the city”. He seems thrilled that he is talking to a native Californian, which amuses me . I bite my lip to keep from chuckling at this. Is it that rare to be from here? I don’t tell him I haven’t been much of anywhere else , a few western states, Canada and Mexico, or that I’ve never flown. He says he has been out here since “In ‘67, I was out in the bay and had a boat sink on us. Got rescued, obviously, we were only in the water an hour and a half but it was miserable”. I recount the story of a friend who spent 7 hours out in the bay with another crab fisherman but survived. He seemed surprised they survived. “Well, they were really fat, and probably drunk,” I explain.

Then he starts telling me about how expensive things are in the UK. I try to keep up with this. ” More than here? I remember, wasn’t it, if something cost a dollar here, it was 2 pounds there?” I say. “Oh no, you’ve got it in reverse , you pay more here for the same thing.” He starts talking about economics, I start treading water, dog-paddling as I walk . I’m thinking I wish he were a real teacher, and I am pretty sure he is not, but he is teaching me nonetheless. “It’s because our dollar here is worth less now, because we are so in debt as a nation, this war, not exporting anything”, he says, and I try to steer the conversation to politics, thinking that if he brought up the war as a detriment, he won’t mind my criticism of it. We talk about the “100 year war” proposed by one of the candidates. I talk about my kids, how sick I am about all of it with worry. He starts telling me about that particular candidate and something called the “Keating 5″, and ripping off older people. “When did this happen?” I ask. “About 25 years ago” he says, “It’s going to come out,people have short memories here, the news only cares about who people sleep with, and no one really cares about that anymore”. Then we make off-color jokes about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, how she was famous for that and later diet ads involving what she does or does not umm, imbibe?

” We live in a tabloid culture”, I tell him. We talk about the remaining candidates. Aside from the candidate we have already rejected, I make a comment I don’t know the real difference between the other two. He can take this any way he wants.It is too early to hear or speak about Muslims and black churches, for one, so let him think I am color-blind, which isn’t a total lie, as I do not think the candidate is particularly representative of black America. I think he favors the charming, articulate one, as opposed to the holier than thou bitchy one. I agree that many think his competition is not particularly like-able ,to her detriment. He says he doesn’t trust her and stars talking about things I have a vague idea about, but know he doesn’t have the time to explain to me. ” but they are all dishonest in some way, they all wallygag back and forth for whatever suits them that week, whatever will play well”.

He says he is torn between “charm” and “bitchiness” as to what the country needs. He doesn’t believe the US will ever go for socialized health care because of the big pharmaceutical companies losing money, that they wield too much power and have too much money invested to relinquish anything to socialized health care. I listen with interest and feel lousy that he is probably right. I remind him we already have lots of socialized health care, just not for working stiffs who can’t afford it. We start talking about local politics and begin the long trek back to the parking area. The sky is turning a grayish-blue. ” It was good to talk to you, maybe see you here again, ” and tells me his name. I immediately think of an English actor with the same name. I tell him mine and he takes a hold of my hand, not exactly a handshake in farewell. It seemed a genuinely friendly gesture, which leaves me with a feeling of good-will, yet somewhat saddened. Will I see him out here again? He is not unattractive though not my type, but this is not that kind of thing. It’s not a man/woman thing . Nor is it some weird father-complex. Have I forgotten what it is like to have a friend?

~~~~

XIII: Carrion/Carry On

I spotted his movements as I started up the narrow, steep path of the cliff. Up, down. Up, down as he pecked and tore at whatever expired creature -turned-dumpster-dived brunch lay at his feet, resigned, floppy. Both of us were in dusty black , but his feathers, richer than my faded clothing bore a sharp contrast to the brightness of the red comb on his head, while I only shone with sunscreen and mild sweat. He opened up his wings a bit, not all the way, as if to tell me “I don’t appreciate you interrupting my carrion-noshing”. I stood there for a moment , uncaring what the tiny people on the beach and in the water would think, and raised my own arms while advancing up the path. He flew away, circled high as he watched me pass, a little goat scampering up the hills of the acropolis. Probably less than a minute later when I got some ways away , near a configuration of larger boulders and rock promontories complete with a cave, place to sit with a view, and a wall out of the wind. It looked like something out of ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’. I decided to rest there and looked back to see if Mr. Turkey Vulture was still swooping high overhead, worried about his lunch, but he was not.

He was busy flying the length of water, from the sand back to where I had originally seen him, but without landing or seemingly even flapping his wings- coasting. He had transformed himself into something almost majestic, if it were not for the fact that he fed dead things, and was not quite as good-looking as his brother raptors, the hawk and eagle. Feasting on the dead lacks the warlike and more risky appeal of killing and victory - the vulture will not appear on coinage. At first sight, he was actually fairly repulsive, the way he rhythmically pecked at something that was probably once a smaller bird as there were no rabbits here that I knew of here. I could not tell if the white was fur or feathers . Oh, he was far from pretty, yet I could not help but be impressed by his flight, his crude table manners belying his grace and wingspan.

I thought how, for all his bluster, he must never have been truly worried I would steal his breakfast. Perhaps I did not give him enough credit. Look at him now, he was quite far away from where I stood, continuing his pattern of soaring back to the land, half swooping over the sea, and back to the outcropping of rock where I sat , watching. He was never worried, knowing people don’t eat the kind of meat he does, even with his tiny brain, he does not act the way a dog might in that situation. Is he showing me I was never truly a threat? Is he showing off? It is obvious he was not much worried much about ‘politically correct’ as I approached his picnic table of death. He wasn’t interested in ’social justice’, being at once the coroner, waste management system and garbage disposal, among other things. He is not a predator, but more like hospice, watching over, circling , almost guarding the dying until he catches the tell-tale scent that life itself has flown away . The eagle neither looks nor waits for death, but rather opportunity to cause such. Mammalian carnivores will eat something deceased, but would probably prefer to thin the herd by preying upon the weak, or injured.

The turkey vulture doesn’t care about ‘gender inequity’ ,or ‘privilege’ - he has not one shred of Vulture Guilt ,nor does he worry about investing in programs that would help birds less equipped to survive-in fact he is very carefully involved in seeing how other creatures are either < or > than himself ,especially as it relates to his survival. His slight show of feathers was meant to show he was not pleased at my unexpected arrival, yet the protracted flying which followed showed he was neither starving, nor was I a threat to him. I leaned back on the rock and looked up towards the tops of the cliffs, away from him, due west. Not even a gull to be seen out this far. Of course he is relaxed, he has no competition.

~~~~~~~~~~

XIV: Correct Me if I’m Wrong

” Aww man, I don’t know if you want to say that around me.” the young man said. “I told you about my accident, right?” In fact this was probably the 5th or 6 time I’d heard about his accident. He carried around pictures of himself in the hospital, in a coma, with what looked like part of the left side of his skull gone a beautiful, sleeping angel . Then pictures of him awake, a decent enough looking kid, with the blank stare reminiscent of the vacuous wannabe tough-guy rappers like Eminem, but this kid isn’t mugging for the camera. Above the hospital bed a sign read, ‘My name is Sean. Please use my name.’ I ask him about this, he says in so many words it was the only thing he clung to, though he didn’t remember his name from before the accident, the fact he even had a name was proof of a life before.

“Well, since the accident, I changed. I’m not like my dad now , this total republican..” he continued on about how he didn’t like to hear this word or that word, and trying to form a coherent argument but keeps pausing, trying to remember the point, and what he just said. I start to realize even if I ‘get anywhere’ with this kid discussing what is going on in the world, he won’t retain much of it, the ending conclusion or why. Still, I feel kindly towards him, almost motherly, he is so damaged. We had kidded around the last time I ran into him that his accident had caused him to become ‘politically correct’. Interesting that he can’t remember he just told me this story a day or two ago, and the week before, but can replicate a UK accent and Scottish brogue with no problem. I am reminded of a computer that is low on RAM when he loses track mid-sentence.

“You know, you don’t have to label yourself,” I said, “You’ve had an accident, and you’re a lot better. You aren’t really the same as all other groups who want special protections, you’re still you. Because you’ve had an accident doesn’t mean you have to give up who you were before and sign up as this new category.” He looked at me, his peach-fuzzy startlingly blond-red goatee blazing away above the chain around his neck that carried a flask full of ativan to prevent seizures, and a round medical ID tag.

“You’re still not black, or gay , or an illegal alien, OK?” I try not to say this last with either derision or sympathy towards aforementioned groups, but factual. He shakes his head at me, like I don’t get it while I am thinking the same but then he laughs and says ,”you’re cool, I can talk to you.” as he gives me another one of his fake punches to the arm, buddy-style and continues.

“Hey, I used to be really good at math. I know I’m not as smart as I was. It bothers me, I remember the way I was, but I can’t be that way now. Hey you know that kid, the one that hangs out here with the really sad looking girlfriend, I think he’s like homeless? ” I know the one. The one he is talking about is a real piece of work.
“That guy ripped me off for 50 bucks a few days ago . I probably would have helped him.” he says and I am amazed he can suddenly remember all kinds of stuff about this guy now that he is angry.

“How did it happen, ” I ask, “you leave your backpack around?”

“I don’t want to talk about it”, he says, even though he brought it up. This explained why when that same kid was making a huge point to hang around in front of us a few nights ago, Sean avoided him , looking past and through him with a far-away smile on his face, while the thief smoked and hung out with some guy that looked like a combination of meth addict, male hustler and Columbian drug dealer.

It’s the left side of his head that was crunched, though he has been put back together under the knit , north woods with earflaps hat he wears along wit the knapsack/portfolio of news articles and hospital pictures. All laminated and in a kind of order. Sometimes I ask to see the articles again, to pick up things I missed the first time.

“You have to stop apologizing for the accident and what it has done to you. Unlike what Reagan when Reagan asked the question, you actually ARE a lot better off.” He doesn’t get this , he wasn’t born then, even if he did remember stuff.

“That was the one-liner Reagan used in a speech, and successfully, though some would argue we were or weren’t better off under Reagan. Forget that, ” I say, “That is just something from a speech, asking people if they are better off , just campaign talk and promises, you know, like what is going on now. My point is, even with whatever damage you have, you’re still a lot better off than most of the rubes wandering around here. “

One of the stalwart coffeeshop hangout dudes laughs in agreement.

“Sean, look at it like your brain is a computer, which it kind of is, but way more sophisticated- yours might be hurt, but there is still a lot going on inside, whether or not we agree on this or that. A lot of these people ,” I gesture towards the far-side people being dispensed out of the Ross store toting bags of trendy crap,  their hardware is OK, but their programs are all messed up. Or there just isn’t much there period.  There isn’t a lot there in many people, or what is there is messed up, and it’s not by accident .” I almost start railing about MTV, but decide that would be too much and make him lose the one point I am trying to get across, make a mental note to use that another time.

” Besides, you are a warm and friendly guy, and not scummy, and I’m not just saying this to be nice or charitable. ” I think of Phineas P. Gage, and wonder what Sean was like before the accident.

” You know how , umm ‘intolerant ‘ I can be. I hardly like anybody ” I’m not sure if he is following but I think he realizes he has been complimented. I begin to wonder if it actually is a compliment. Is he like a big but harmless  dog to me, like his Irish Wolfhound is to him?  Is hating  and being disgusted, let down by so many others good reasons to be friendly  with someone? Because they aren’t in a position to hurt you?

“well, thanks for hanging out with me today, I was all bored..” he says..

” Don’t thank me for hanging out with you. When you say me out walking today, and waved , I didn’t think, ‘Oh,  let me do a good deed for the day and say hello to Sean The Disabled’. I might be hanging out with you for my own reasons ,maybe I want someone to talk to , or just listen to. ” I am reminded  of the  ‘it isn’t always about you’  small psychological maneuver too often used to change the subject , put the other person on the defensive.

“Wait, wait, what was that last part again? ” he says, a flicker like the orange light on my PC . He’s thinking about stuff, at least making an effort.

I stop myself from saying “It’s not that hard”, and again  realize how many of these  verbal little nasties I have picked up, feel disgusted at myself, even if I don’t use them, I’m thinking  them, if only in attribution.

” Sean, I’m not hanging out with you for charity. You’re OK. You don’t even have to be politically correct around me. ” Now I almost feel like I am politically molesting him, or ‘practicing’ WN approaches on him. The playing field here actually IS imbalanced , greatly. He has a good excuse for not catching on too quickly or needing things repeated, unlike a lot of others who never catch on, even if they understand the words. In some twisted sense, from how he speaks, and even at times how quick he is to stop me in whatever rant I am on, I can tell that there really was a great deal of intelligence there. I don’t want to cry but have to be careful.  I feel a power over him in a way I wouldn’t have had sans accident, and it is not the usual type of power I have. There’s no way I’m going to tell him this, even if he understood it it might be offensive or hurt him. There is nothing sinister in this realization,  but I feel I must not abuse it, or try to go too far with my own crusade. I decide to keep the focus on trying to get him to self-identify as who he was before, rather than see himself as lumped in with every other I-am-oppressed-and-downtrodden group.

“You’re still you, Sean, not a head injury or a group, if you want to talk to teenagers and show them the pictures and crusade for helmet safety, great, but I’m just saying, you really don’t have a lot in common with these other groups. We both grew up here, went to the same high school here, know a bunch of people here. You know the kids of people I went to school with- we have similar parents, similar up bringing, you liked to skate, I like to walk and climb. ” I avoid the W word, I don’t need it. I feel a twinge of sadness that I know he would have gotten my jokes , before.

“You are not a head injury whose name is Sean, who is completely as apart from everyone else around here , OK?” He’s staring, his pupils always large even in daylight. I don’t think this trait is from the injury, as i have seen this same thing , and usually in eyes the same color as his- a pond-like greyish-blue, not many assorted flecks or striations of color.

“You’re not bullshitting me, ” he states, ” I can tell. ” and I believe he can tell. If he thinks I have an agenda, he doesn’t know what it is.

“No. ” I tell him, thinking of the ways in which the ‘rest of us’ are disabled or damaged.