Upon Waking At My Desk In The Garage

I wonder if any roaches crawled on me as I slept. There's a good chance that happened, it appears to be their most social season of the year down here; it's absolutely disgusting to watch. I wonder if Josh woke up and wondered where I was -- I get sad when I am as absent, distant, from our life as I have been lately, and I'm sure he gets just as sad, if not sadder.

Last night, I felt very compelled to go sit inside of the Buddhist temple off Florida, which I've never been inside of. It's been a very, very long time since I've felt so pulled to a holy place, so I should have taken the urge seriously. I didn't.

I went to City Park and sat on an empty sidewalk instead; pulled out a notepad, and loaded a picture of Mark Twain on my phone. There, I tried to draw his likeness. Not too long ago, I would take to drawing ink portraits of famous people when I felt like this -- lost, restless, hopelessly behind on all matters. I'm not an artist, but it was my soul's antidote somehow. Everything would feel better after spending two hours scribbling out a picture in the zone; my shoulders would melt, my compass would stop spinning, and I'd suddenly remember where I was, who I was, and what I was supposed to be doing next. I have no idea how or why it works for me, but it always has.

It didn't work out last night, though -- my Mark Twain was nothing more than a dark blob staring at me cockeyed from an unpleasantly-yellow legal pad. His nose looked badly broken, like someone had taken a heavy fist to his septum, and it appears that afterwards, the surly bastard didn't care enough about his nostril capacity to let a doctor check it out. From the drawing, I can tell that his face melted at some point after the blow, for reasons that remain unclear. I took a half-hearted stab at his shrubby eyebrows, promptly failed, then put the pen away.

I began to regret not busting in on the Buddhist temple. It was late by that point, and I imagine the Buddhists hit the hay pretty early, so I went to this crappy coffee place on Jefferson, deep in the city's Bourgeois Enclave. I only go there when I don't want to run into people I know -- usually after I miss a deadline -- but I had intentionally left all my work back home. I sat at a table outside, next to an unfortunately large Bible study group, taking the lone chair they hadn't needed. I had no idea what I wanted, what I was looking for, or what piece of me had gone missing earlier that afternoon. With no work to toil over, I forced myself to sip my iced herbal tea into purposelessness, staring at the blurred headlights as they zoomed down Jefferson, taking all their purpose with them. Purpose -- I didn't want any of it.

I'm not sure how long I sat there, but at some point, I became aware that I've been acting like a robot for God knows how long. Weeks? Months? Please don't let it be years. When did my switch flip to autopilot? When did I stop feeling the zeal that used to ride shotgun to my life like clockwork -- the overexcited, almost embarrassing joy of being alive? All the hope that once carried me feels like a quarter of what it was, and I have no idea where it's going or why it's evaporating.

I have no reason to be unhappy, or even the least bit unsatisfied -- from all angles, my life looks like it's in order. Everything is in its place... but it's not; it's off somehow. I am married to a man the universe seems to have created for me; I'm actively writing my first book; I'm a borderline professional wedding photographer; I have everything going for me that can possibly go. In a month, I'm moving to a place I've always wanted to live, with the person who first took me there. I'm spending more time with my family and friends than I have in a very long time. What is this dark cloud hanging over me; what is it made of; where did it come from? Where has my compass gone -- did I break it? Did I lose it? Did I accidentally sell it with the box of wedding decorations at the garage sale? Did I at least break even?

I think I'm gonna go visit the Buddhists today, like I should have done yesterday. Maybe that's where it all went wrong. They don't have any answers for me, I'm sure, but they might have silence, and I think I could use some of that.

Things That Soothe Me

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it's real, because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. 
Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" Other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." 
And... we kill those people: "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride, but we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that -- you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … 
But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride, and we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
Bill Hicks

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Journalism Confessional: The Great Misunderstanding

I interviewed a fairly famous poet last month on assignment for a magazine. I knew it would be a strange afternoon, as I've interviewed tons of musicians and artists, but never an established writer... and certainly not a poet. Not to say I don't like poets; I get along with poets well enough -- our worlds aren't all that different, really -- but I had a level of anxiety on the drive to her house that I'm not used to feeling, and all I could chalk it up to was that her artform is a medium I've always felt outside of. I can understand poetry, but I can't often understand the act of writing it. Generally, I can't write it; and if I do, it either ends up here or buried somewhere where no one will ever find it.

I knew it would be a strange afternoon, but I didn't bank on it being one of the strangest interactions I've ever had with a source.

Before our interview, I borrowed all her books from Ross and perused them, reading five or six poems from every collection, including her latest one. From her latest, I gathered that she'd been raised under the heavy hand of a Protestant preacher dad, and that it took her a very long time to overcome how worthless it made her feel as a woman. I felt like I related to this experience, so I added a relevant question to my list: "How long did it take you to be able to write this book without resentment?"

So I get there, we go to her backyard writing studio, she offers me a dollop of hand lotion, I accept. I get the distinct feeling that I'm being observed, interpreted, read, but not in an intimidating way -- much more an innocent, open thing; it almost reminded me of being in a room with a child, how she reacted to me reacting to her. It was strange, but I started to adapt to the situation.

Then, I asked her that question, but I prefaced it with, "I had a similar experience..." which proved to be...kind of a mis-step on my part. See, I hadn't read the whole book, and the poems I was referring to were close to the beginning and toward the end. She thought I was talking about the middle.

She snapped out of her poet-in-interview setting, her eyes opened wide, her voice lowered to a whisper. She leaned in and said, "Oh my God, I'm so happy you're alive. Some people kill themselves."

I panicked. At that point, I knew we weren't talking about the same similar experience, but I wasn't sure which one she was thinking of, and I realized that I could very easily blow the interview to smithereens if I didn't give the right performance at that very moment. It wasn't that I wanted to carry on a facade, especially one of this *clearly* heavy caliber, but this woman, this famous poet, had just opened up to me on such a personal level that if I had acted as confused as I was, she might've felt terribly rejected or something. I didn't want to do that to her; I didn't have it in me. So what I did next, I did out of respect.

I broke her stare and eyed the ground, muttered a weak "yeah" and accepted her uplifting words, even though they weren't meant for me. Her face became so motherly, the entire tone of our conversation changed after that. Words started falling out of her mouth, forming stories and anecdotes and all manners of pearly wisdoms and struggle-earned lessons. She talked to me as if she were talking to a younger version of herself, thankfully not entirely about our "shared" experience, but about all the parts of the world she's seen, about how much better life gets when you listen to the iceberg beneath. About how writing poetry has healed her, forced her to look at where she came from with respect to how it may have gotten her to the present. There weren't many questions after that; she answered them all before I got the chance to ask...and she told me something off-the-record that I really shouldn't ever tell another soul about. I don't plan to.

Josh came in after awhile to take some photos, and our interview more or less ended. As we said our goodbyes, she grabbed me by both shoulders and said, "Hang in there, it gets so much better! You will make it!" I thanked her and hugged her tight. Josh looked on in utter confusion.

The second I got home, I pored through her latest book to figure out what our "common ground" was. It was every bit as terrible as I expected, and she didn't make a secret of it: her father molested her, likely for years. She wrote about it in the form of fairy-tale, smack in the middle of the book -- the one I should have read all the way through before I met her.

I still feel like a total dick about it.

Grandma's Spotted Lungs

No one is surprised -- to a degree, we've all been expecting that phone call for years now, ever since she had that chest scan after her nasty wreck almost 10 years ago. There were spots on her lungs. The doctor told her about them, about what they likely meant, and she chose to wrangle a different truth from his words.

She knew it, we knew it. She shut her eyes tight and never spoke of it again. Things like that don't go away on their own.

Expecting the prolonged death sentence of a loved one is one thing, but being prepared for its announcement is quite another. In that respect, it caught us all off-guard today: Ant fell apart while waiting tables at work; I went 95% autopilot and forced myself to inch closer to next week's deadlines, just in case something even more terrible happens unexpectedly next week; mom filled her experienced role as the bearer of bad news phone calls, because at this point in her church office career, she's done it enough to barely have to think about it. Haven't heard from Jen yet, but since the woman practically raised her, I don't expect her reaction to be pretty. Aunt Tammy wasn't even able to go to my uncle's funeral when he died years ago, because she was so hysterical. Though I'm not looking forward to facing my Aunt's expression of anxious grief at the doctor's office on Monday, where we'll learn how much time we have left with Grandma, I need to be able to look my Aunt in the eyes and handle the raw pain she releases, because it is reality.

That's what everyone feels like when they're reminded of how fragile the most important things in their lives are; when they have to face, yet again, the fact that their strongest bonds have never physically been more than bridges built with toothpicks. That's how everyone feels when death gets too close to our homes -- even if some don't express it so honestly, we all feel the chill that stays in the corners when the wise bastard leaves in the middle of the night with one of our own.

I've never been able to lose it at work, or fall into kicking-and-screaming hysteria on the way to a funeral. I've never been able to let grief sweep me away like it's supposed to, wailing and pulling hair, unable to understand the point of tomorrow after the mortality of today. It always feels so terrible, such an unhealthy a thing to keep inside of me, like a smothered sneeze or a swallowed ice cube, but multiplied by a thousand and spontaneously recurring for years afterward. The honest, raw release of grief is instead reserved to those who truly seem to need it -- at least, that's what I've always thought, that's how I've always rationalized it; I must not need it if I cannot do it; it's better to stand if I'm capable, to protect the ones who must fall to pieces.

I don't think I believe my own explanation anymore, though. Not this time. This one is too close. It's going to hurt in an audible and visceral way, and I am not going to know how to handle it when I hear in my head what she told me the last five times I hugged her goodbye -- when I remember how serious, how terribly heartbroken she looked, every time she said it, not knowing if it would be the last chance she ever got to tell me she loved me.

"Next time, please, please don't wait so long to come back."

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Sometimes I wonder what it was like to be my dad when he was growing up. Sometimes I convince myself that something terrible must've happened to him, perhaps multiple terrible somethings, for him to be as afraid of everything as he is today. To be as blind to his internal contradictions as he always has been.

He shared a story with us today, something that happened when he was close to my age. He owned and operated his father's ice plant back then, and one of the guys working for him was apparently very much against eating pork. One day, they were sitting around a fire, and the guy was going off on a rant about how terrible pork was. Pork is unfit for human consumption, he proclaimed, as he roasted a hot sausage link over the fire. My dad and the other employees got a kick out of it.

I asked him if anyone'd had the nerve to break it to the guy that he was about to eat pork for dinner. No, he told me, We figured we'd just let him figure that one out himself.

Papercut

Sometimes I feel so close to home, I can barely stand it. The loveliest tangled roots made of familial habits I've been honing since birth; the sticky gumbo breeze wafting downwind from an open screened window above the kitchen sink; the drunken awe of watching cigarette smoke fall to the ground, drowning in humidity.

Other times, I feel like I've been gone for six months already. I feel broken roots and habits with no history; I do not crave gumbo; I have forgotten what it's like to enjoy cigarette smoke. There are times when I'm happy about this; excited and eager to set sail, full-speed ahead, into the mountain skyline that looms in my future. There are times when I'm not happy about it at all, though; I feel the loss of home's proximity like a hole in my heart, an injury I can't recall getting -- that terrible nausea of emptiness wraps around me like a starched white shirt and a belt that's too tight. At those times I am connected to nothing and no one, drifting like an off-course satellite gone dark; there is so much to communicate but my processor is dead, the linkup is off-line, and neither are coming back.

I think I'm going to write a lot of words about loneliness in the next few months, but not in a way that only longs for certain important human beings. It's a lonely that ties geography to family, familiarity, comfort, in a way that the people alone can't quench. The word could be "homesick," but it seems so much deeper than that connotation -- "homesick" sounds like a papercut; this feels more like an amputation. Maybe I just never understood that word because I've never left home before, or not in such a permanent way as I will in three months.

I don't think I'm scared. I think I'm just walking into the punch.

Where You Come From

North Baton Rouge is a thing in my memory. It always exists as I saw it from the school bus windows: blurry, vivid, cozy, somewhat disjointed. A child's brand of lonely, but full of so many strange details -- a constant yell of low-flying aircraft taking off overhead, lightning bug visuals for nightly cicada choruses, nicotine-stained floral curtains petrifying in the kitchen. The Easter egg with the dollar bill in it.
Little weird bits and buts that I only defined much later, collectively, as home.

Drove the length of Plank Road today to visit family in Zachary. I always take that longer route, just to pass near my old neighborhood, my old elementary school, the Piggly-Wiggly with the rancid-smelling meat shelf. I had a strange thought: the bar my dad always ended up in when he needed to hide from us for awhile -- now nothing more than an unlabeled door in the side of a massive, unrelated building next to the Piggly-Wiggly; the Tavern I heard him talk about so often -- was a place I'd likely never see the inside of.

From my old bus route, I've always remembered a boring, squat-looking place -- Skip's Lounge -- on Plank Road, zooming past my line of sight every day. For some reason, today brought me closer to that memory than I've been since third grade -- every afternoon, I'd look at the place and wonder, What on earth could be in that building to make Simone's mom want to spend an entire Friday night there? [Simone once asked to stay the night at my house because her divorced mother was going out to Skip's. Funny, the things that stick to your brain when you're 10, before you understand why anyone would want to drink gross shit and lose basic motor functions every weekend.]

When we lived in Sharon Hills, my dad used to talk about the airport, how it was trying to buy out all the homeowners in the subdivision to expand some runway or another. I guess they never pulled it off, because the subdivision still exists, albeit in a heavily-depreciated form. Our house, 6177 Guynell Drive, still has the rosebushes in the front flowerbed that my mom loved so much. For approximately two weeks per year, she loved cleaning up that flowerbed. My dad kept a big garden in the half-acre backyard -- something his parents taught him to do, if only by example, not instruction. In spring and summer, the kitchen was full of bulging eggplant, fat Better Boy tomatoes, crunchy okra, spicy radishes, and those disgusting, make-kids-think-it's-potatoes-until-they-start-chewing turnips. [Even though I like them now, fuck those turnips.]

I have bright recollections of snapping snap beans on the porch for hours on end, under the unquestioned belief that I was making my dad happy by doing it, even though back then, there wasn't much any of us could do to make dad happy. We couldn't play tackle football, we didn't do well with fishing hooks or worm guts. Dad knew nothing of how to comfort a little girl, crumpled in a heap on the living room floor, weeping because she was going to miss the two-tone Oldsmobile he'd just sold for fifty bucks.
Maybe that's why I tried so hard; maybe that's how Jen got to be so physically aggressive. Maybe that's why Jen acted out so early in her pre-teen years; maybe that's how I entered my lifelong role as a peacemaker. Maybe that's when Jen and I started becoming the people we are today, when there was nothing we could do to make dad enjoy his early years as a father, but we kept trying anyway.

Where Have I Been

all the dry eyes, in sight
every color flashes
     then leaks,
       siphons,
         melts and
             mixes
beginning is open ended
    when waking up
     is always
    erasing is beginning
when ends are pointless
closing is not peace

     it is sandpaper
         on wet rubber