Indie's Inanities

My first creative writing assignment:

Gus

It's the first thing I notice: how childlike and fledgling he is. In brown wool slacks too short for him he folds into himself, drowns in the blue-lined button down shirt that looks new; but its seams are worn. I’m sure he's had it since Nixon; he just knows how to use things. A tree-root hand gnarls around a dark varnished cane, the rubber cap on the end angled, grated off by the empty tennis courts he walks through every night on his way home.

Trash: papers, empty ball cans and Gatorade bottles that everyone else has left during the day; in silence he shuffles his way over the courts in the ochre dusk, collecting. He cannot hold it all. Pieces fall, he fumbles after them. Sometimes he'll make five trips to the orange garbage bins with disheveled, generic Hefty-equivalent bags chained to the pavilion columns in attempt to deter the neighborhood’s rampant criminal preteen element.

At the nearest column, a young teenage boy – who looks awkward even through the large, baggy clothing he wears to hide in – has freed one such bin from its captivity, and proceeds to twirl it around in some sort of victory dance. His enthusiasm too much, the poor bin hurls its contents all over the dirty cement and cheap picnic tables. The boy cackles, punting an empty root beer bottle at a passing cyclist who swerves to miss it. Upon hitting the curb, the cyclist gives boy, and bottle, a stout Scotch blessing.

Meanwhile the Panama hat, of the small old man who has crossed the street, falls as he stoops to collect the now-crushed bottle. A heron, he is precariously balancing. The hat he replaces also balances; what once was a rakish tilt has settled into habit. The hat conforms to his head in both pressure and defeat.

The boy scowls, tinged with guilt as he watches the old man struggle to stand again – root beer bottle clutched tightly in his birdlike grip. Rebelling, the boy kicks a plastic ball can toward the man. The bottle glances off an old knee. Its owner also glances, for a piercing second, at the young man who’s become suddenly aware of his feet, shifting uncomfortably. Again, the old man stoops, retrieving an empty container from the warm asphalt. The boy swears under his breath, pulls his bike from the park lawn and retreats in the twilight.

It is dark, the night still warm. Crickets creak far from the glow of the streetlamps. An elderly man places the last scrap of paper in a now-upright bin. I watch as he hobbles carefully away from the park, an empty ball can in his free hand.

Like a bonsai, he is tiny, but he is huge in his minutiae; he occupies his space. For the first time, I see the very world as it sits on the backs of his shoulder blades. It is this that folds him.
 
Awesome babe. far more story-like then the earlier stuff, but still keeps the feel of the earlier writing. i cant wait to read more of your stuff from this class.
 
I concur with my antipodean comrade, wholeheartedly.

Reminds me of the writings of St. Bob. Probably the reference to the Panama hat.
 
So, since I haven't posted anything bloggy and journalish and autobiographical, I figured I'd pull out my ol' journal and type up some of my handwritten stuff. These're old. This one I'm posting first was one that I wrote in response to that post in Amber's blog where she was asking me all those rhetorical questions...and I took them not-so-rhetorically...

My intangibility. The way I hung - just so - behind such real doors. Like some born-again god, I was his omnipresence. Everywhere without consequence - an inability to measure the real stature of his devotion. I was idea. Accommodating. I hung behind doors, so well...suited...for his purpose. I could be inanimate. I could be. You were. Who doesn't pick their dreams at night?

He spoke more. He poured himself into the cup beyond ears. I was his backdoor escape. I was host to verbal soirees sans repercussions. My rhythm, basslines, the perfect seat for the shredding amped high-voltage rock plane he feared unleashing on you. You were a groupie for his emotions. I was the band. The crack habit. The toilet bowl, stained fingers, needles in the dark, forged prescriptions, his trips, his highs, his genius. I amplified his energy. You channeled it. I hit him in the face. He liked it. He hit you in the face.

I was the one to come. I was through the looking-glass. A tawdry, elusive, seductive reflection of what he showed himself. I was an obsession merely because I was a possibility untamed. I was his hunger. He ate you.

You were a ship that passed in the night. I sunk you behind the horizon at sunset in the rushing waves of all that he'd have me believe. Blissful in the ignorant wash of opaque tides. If the long boy with the endless piebald side had been a woman, had not wanted to devour - I would have been his. I only thought he was spending all his time in Booya Moon, Lisey.

We laughed at the gimmicks any group of friends would have heckled. Never about intentions, about things inherently you. Only the farce of action, of life's bloopers. It was to commune a sense of endearment, not a ridiculing or stoning. I was, occasionally, one of the guys. Always have been.

Have you never made plans late at night to chase after the impulsive? Of course there were plans. Cloud-castles. It was always a good dream.

I couldn't see anything. I was blind, groping for the way he reached at me in the dark. I propped my blindness on the truth of the way he was so willing to hold me. Will you really decry, and fault me, for my faith? It was a devotion. Who doesn't love the things they repose on in the dark?

I did not imagine you. Period. I scrawled dark mental lines over you any time he presented you to me. You were selfish, desperate, friendless, pathetic, gnawing at the legs of the only thing I could stand on. I hated you for it. I pitied you and the holes you dug for yourself. The holes you crouched and whined in. I blew energy into expending you. I simply did not allow you to exist in the places I did. For 6 months. It's a hard habit to break... I will admit, it itches and irks me to have you here. This is my world. In this one, I was here first - and in my absences I still garner the sense of you supplanting me. But these are my own selfish demons. They will be burned, purged. Until them, we are opposing forces, and I have not the current means of laying claim to my territory. My days, my life, my emotions, my words, my friendships are imbedded in these halls you romp through now. Surely you can sympathize with the way this grates me. Can understand the reasons I avoid you. You are taking a whole of the only half I have.

For now, that is enough to say.

I was not naivety. It was wool-covered. It was a heedless sabotage. It was betrayal. I adamantly refuse to blame myself. All I did was love. He misused it.

Have you never asked him? Has he never told you of the way he crawled, begging? Of his grandiose promises of your immediate, impending dismissal? Of the hours he sobbed on the phone while I set my jaw, stoic, resolute, hammering the blame into him; setting the responsibility, the wrong of it squarely on his shoulders? Of how he disgusted me and how I told him he was an even bigger fool to trash two relationships?

Did he tell you I told him that if he was with you, he was never with me? That my time with him was nothing. And that I didn't him to make a mockery of my 6 months by wasting them and not allowing them to make a difference, to turn a new leaf? To tell you everything and to be a better man?

...No, he didn't. A coward, he shrank in his skin. Told you I was the compulsive liar. Urged you to dismiss me the way he did. I loathed him. I was furious. And finally, I realized I never really loved him. I loved that he loved me. I loved the way he needed me.

I did not cry. I always cry, but I did not cry. Not when I found out, and not when he was sobbing in my ear, trying to rationalize his reasons for what he did and why we could still work.

My love cut its losses. My heart withdrew. My obsession, my addiction, my habit of him did not. After the murderous end of our emotional affair, we were pared down to a drug habit. An addiction. We were users and there was no rehab. Weak, wretched, drained... cold turkey, the only option, wasn't feasible on our state of dependency. I tried to substitute other drugs. Never got the same high; I did the drug he wanted to. It didn't last. You were his coffee and cigarettes. We dealt eightballs in the back alleys of our days. Cut lines together when no one could see us. It was miserable, selfish, but it was compulsory. We cut our lines in silence. We cut our lines alone. They just happened to be the same lines.

I forgave him for being himself, not for what he did. But forgiving him for being himself was something I had been doing since it started. Forgiveness was nothing new. It was what let us work.

He never censored himself after that. He always told me what happened with him. I slid myself, intrigued, into his shoes. I said whatever I needed to, to get him to say what he wanted. I didn't trust him. I never trusted him after his initial treason. I still don't trust him. But I know him. And I stayed very good at letting him trust me. You see, I've always listened. And I've told him the answers to things he'd ask me to listen to. They weren't - aren't - always my answers. But they were answers. You learn a lot about someone when you let them talk, only pausing to hear you agree with them. I wasn't lying to him because I wanted him back, or because I was trying to perjure him. I only lied to him because I was curious about what he said when I did. He fascinated me. And I realized he didn't love me. He loved his idea of me, just as I loved the fact that he loved me. We had always been so accommodating that way.

I still didn't think of you. Not in the sense of "the other woman." You were just the half of him that didn't particularly interest me. Your story - the two of you - fascinated me, but I only studied his half. I talked to him because for some reason I felt compelled to mentally log and calculate and observe him. His personality. His state of self, if you will. Conversation ended in January when I hit a plateau in my findings. The proverbial bedrock. It had been a fascinating study, but every researcher comes to a point where they can dig no further. I was done with him. Adequately and completely detached. On bad terms, but detached. A month later, I called for a follow-up. No new developments confirmed my diagnosis. I ran a test or two. Readings were the same. Progress was as anticipated. I watched him leave once more - at least from this book, this thesis. I end it with a sense of completion. A sigh of relief that finally it is done.

He is as he is as he is.

Finally, I have solid proof of that. He is done. He is nothing to me. He is a finished piece, another novel. A thing to be shelved. Dusted off occasionally, but put in a place to be forgotten.

Just because I learned from my experience with him, it doesn't mean he taught me anything.

I have a new profession, a new life, anyhow.


Whew. I didn't realize that fucker was so long.
 
One I had to write today...

Families are Forever

I was trying to explain it
But my words weren’t clear enough, even
In my head.
I could handle the abstractions, I just
Can’t weave them into words
Tight enough for a web, a net
To hold in your understanding.

This is not a poem.
This is not me in metaphor,
This is me empty,
Standing on the outside
Of your circles, saying
I am a reflection of all of you.

I cannot help it, it is who I am.
I was not like this three months ago.

I am tired of not understanding.
I am sick of not being
Understood.

I am sick of the angst and frustration and lack of clarity
Whenever I sit to write about you.

I don’t feel safe enough
To write about you. I cannot say things
Where you will see them, because
You will not understand me.

And you will accuse me
of all the things you assume.

I feel like I need to write.
I need to write this and not stop writing
Until I can make it clear to you what I see, feel and mean.

But even if I poured all of my words and my heart and my meaning
Into this poem, or even into something that is not a poem,
You will still not listen. You will not hear.
You will never admit that perhaps,
In some of the little things
I am right. And I can see things
In ways you do not see them.
That I am not another perspective of yours, just because
You had me.

I turn up my music
To drown out the clamour
Of intolerance and disrespect.

We function like…a bumper car rink.
Everyone gets their own bubble, and everyone
Goes their own way
And no one realizes that you don’t
Have to crash into things in the first place.

You always talk about
Too many chiefs
And not enough Indians.
Of course zero Indians is not enough.
You raised us all chiefs anyway.
You taught us all that the world
Will stop and cater to our problems.

You taught us that if it wasn’t
A problem to you, then it wasn’t really
A problem at all.
And we buried them.
We hid them from you, because
You wanted us to be perfect.
We wanted us to be perfect
And our not-real problems
Meant we weren’t perfect, meant that
They were just other things we did wrong.
Other things that you’d notice and announce in moments
When our guard was down, when we wanted approval and love.

To fix us, to make us better
You told us over and over
The things that needed to be fixed,
Until we grew up
Convinced that we were broken.
That we would never be good enough.

You told us, until we learned
To tell ourselves.
Until we were so convinced
That we could do nothing right enough
That we did nothing, to keep
From failing,
From being called a failure.

In angry moments,
We all beat each other
With the things that we love,
With the things that we are.
We belittle and berate them,
Because we feel belittled
And berated.

Until we learned
To keep what we are
And what we love
From becoming the knives in our backs
In the dull and angry moments.

To keep what we are
And what we love
From who we are around
And who we are supposed to love.

Because no one can hurt you
Like your family can.
No words mean more, carry more weight,
Than the words of those
Who see you at your worst,
Who make you believe they love you in a tender moment
And in the same hour they’ll rip you
To pieces and think
It helps.

I keep from you the things I love.
I keep from you the things
That make me feel less than perfect.

I have learned
To keep everything from you.
To guard it fiercely and to act
And say the way, the words
You want to hear, the words you’ve trained us to say
So that we can get away from the lie of this dysfunction
And on with the lives that we have had
To make for ourselves. The lives we have
Outside of the love that loves so much it hurts and
Smothers and steers and breaks us
To keep us from breaking ourselves.

So much I want to say and share and be and do
That I can’t, because
It will not mean to you
What it means to me.

So I keep it. Inside, in the dark.
Share it with friends, the family
I adopt in the dark
Who will take me as I am, and not as
They would have me be.
Not as everything I am not.

Not as the second chance of themselves,
Not as the ideal concocted during the nine months they didn’t know me,
Not as the person they believe I am just because
I learned how to keep my soft sides
Safe by not showing a soft side.

Did you know that I cry when I’m angry, not because I’m sad?
Do you know my favorite color?

Do you know the things, outside of this house,
Outside of the people inside this house,
That hurt me? Do you know me enough
To know the times that I am broken and your words
Only break me more?

Do you know
About the time last year,
When I was by myself down in the basement,
And I took the bottle of Fluoxetine,
And wrote a poignant goodbye,
And swallowed half of the bottle’s contents,
Turned “Marooned” by Pink Floyd on repeat,
And fell asleep on the couch?

Do you know that I woke up six hours later, my heart
Racing in haphazard and crippled beats, sweaty and cold?
That I laid on that couch for two hours because I couldn’t move?
That I cried under the blanket the entirety of those two hours,
And then got up, put the bottle back in my drawer,
And went upstairs to help fix dinner?

Do you know I still have the letter I wrote
In one of my journals, locked in my filing cabinet?

Do you know that I have told eight other people
Before I have finally told you?

And you will not find this confession
For days, probably. Weeks.

And when you find it, you will ask me,
Why I wrote it. Why I wrote all of this.
You will ask me if it’s true, you will tell me
That posting this
Will compromise my future, because
Some employer down the line
Will find this blog, and read this poem. And won’t hire me.
Because my future is more important
Than my past, and my now.

Do you know that I have struggled
With not lapsing into re-living that experience
Every week since it happened?

Do you know me?

Do you know the things I love and the things I want?
Do you know and love them merely because they are mine
And I am yours
And you can love and know them
Without judgment, without bias, without spewing at me
The things they are not?

I don’t believe you do.
I don’t think you can.
I don’t let you, because I
Cannot be hurt anymore and not
Have something desperate and dark inside
Rip me to pieces beyond repair.

Oh, how cracked and covered I am in the tiny lines
Of your misunderstanding, your accusation,
your criticism, your harsh looks,
your projected hopes and unspoken expectations.

I must be slow, or I will shatter,
I must be safe and distant,
Or I will break.

I must not be yours, because being yours
Has bent me to the point of breaking

And I am tired,
Of the tiny cracks that weave
Through me and my days.

I am tired of always being on the edges
Of my own life. Waiting, waiting for you
To smash me, before
I smash myself.

Because that is how it’s always been.

Do you know that I write me
Because I need
Someone, someone to know me
The way none of you have ever
Tried to know me.
Even if that someone is myself.

I write me
To make myself matter
The way I have never felt
Like I mattered.
Not even to myself.

I tell myself
In hopes that maybe
Someone, perhaps hundreds of years
From now,
Will stumble upon these scribblings
And read them,
And wonder, and
Want to know me.

The way I have never felt wanted.
 
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Random writing assignments from school this month...

It was, after all, a stupid accident. We’d been playing racquetball in P.E., my sophomore year of high school at Mountain View, and I’d gotten myself hit in the eye with the ball. Who hasn’t had that happen to them? I think racquetball is the only sport where one can be looking straight at the ball and it simultaneously hits them in the back of the head. 


I was wearing my contacts that day – gas permeable, a.k.a. hard, contacts, since they were cheaper than the soft ones – and my contact had slipped and cut my eye with the force of the racquetball, it hemorrhaged under the conjunctiva. Mom checked me out of school and we went to see the ophthalmologist, who said I’d be fine, the hemorrhaging didn’t look bad at all, and it would clear up on its own in a few days.


That was how it started. 


Fast-forward two years. Senior year of high school. Band Tour.


We were going to San Francisco. Originally, I hadn’t planned on attending. School trips were always expensive because we never earned enough at fund raisers. I couldn’t afford to go because I didn’t have a job. (Or, rather, school was my job, my parents insisted.) I felt bad hitting my parents up for five hundred-something dollars, and told Mr. Bowman, the band director, that I wasn’t going. 


It turns out, however, that Mr. Bowman did the begging for me. He’d served his mission in Taiwan, the same as my parents and knew both of them. They needed more students to go, or there wouldn’t be enough to cover the trip. My brother Jonathan, two years younger than me and a sophomore, was also in band. Mom and Dad agreed to pay for both of us to go. I was thrilled.


We bussed all over San Francisco, from Fisherman’s Wharf, to Alcatraz (okay, we ferried to Alcatraz), to the Golden Gate Bridge, from the Winchester Mansion to Ghirardelli Square. It was exciting and busy and I learned that I actually could spend more than the hour of class with those people and still stay sane. (Band class was not a favorite.) 


Our third day by the bay, we were slated to spend at the Great America theme park. And spend it we did. My friends and I rode every rollercoaster they had, most of them more than once. The last one we went on, Stealth, was terrifying and exhilarating. 


Stealth was actually the world’s first “flying” roller coaster. Riders board the coaster standing up as they’re harnessed in – straps across shoulders, chest, legs, almost like a skydiving harness – the coaster then starts to move up the giant hill. Suddenly, you’re on your back, looking up at the sky, thinking “this is dumb, I can’t see anything.” It climbs higher. You think surely you’re going to drop any second, but it doesn’t, it goes even higher. It stops, and instead of dropping, it turns. Turns and drops. And you and the rest of the passengers are hanging in your straps, headed toward the ground like so many Supermen. If you can reclaim your mind from the paralyzing terror of having nothing solid between you and the ground, you throw your arms out in front of you and stick with the Superman idea, going around loops, corkscrews, and drops. It stops and you’re standing again, lucky that there’s like a built-in seat and you’re still harnessed, because your knees are weak and you’re trying to process what just happened. You blink. 


I blinked. 


Something was wrong with my contact. My eyes were too dry – or were they too watery? I blinked again, thinking my contact was suctioned onto my eye, which happened on occasion. We got off the coaster and I hurried to the nearest restroom, desperate to take my contact out and rinse it off and put it back in right. Stupid amusement parks and their gross bathrooms with impossibly long lines. It was fifteen minutes before I got to a sink, barely registering my gratitude for drains that wouldn’t lose my contact in case it slipped in the stream of water. I popped my contact out – it wasn’t suctioned on after all – and blinked while I rinsed it off. Augh! I had taken out the wrong one, the weird look was still there. I put it back in and took the other one out. Nope. Maybe it was the first eye. Maybe I’d just been wearing my contacts too long and my eyes were protesting. Maybe I hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night and my eyes were just tired – not an absurd hypothesis, when one’s spending the night with 5 other girls in the same hotel room. 


It’s hard to describe the difference in my sight. I’m an artist. I’ve always been someone who observes things. Pebbles in asphalt. The veins on the undersides of leaves. The difference between crimson and vermillion and just plain red. It was like my sight was suddenly a camera lens. Hyper-focused, or not focused enough. The edges of things were different. The lines, contours of things, weren’t lined and contoured right. I was annoyed. 


My friend Seth and I realized that we were going to be late for the awards ceremony they were having in one of the pavilions. We rushed to meet the other band members and have dinner. It was a boring affair, silly plaques for every band who participated in the festival so we’d have something to mark the occasion. To commemorate hours of practice on songs we wouldn’t remember a year from now that we didn’t really play all that well either. 


I wanted to get back to the hotel. I wanted to take my contacts out and put on my glasses. I wanted to go to sleep and see if things would line up right in the morning. I maintained a futile blinking vigil until we got off the bus at the Residence Inn; by then, I was irritated and genuinely tired. I’d been quiet and distant the whole evening and my friends noticed something was wrong, but were too caught up in the excitement of the day and of the tour in general for it to register, and they left me alone. 


Up in our room, after Jenny and Cammi had finished using the bathroom, I took my contacts out and washed my face. I blinked at the mirror. It still wasn’t right. I covered my left eye. I stared down my reflection; she looked back at me concerned, holding her hand up to her face. She slid her hand to the other eye, the shadow of her arm crossing over the Alcatraz Penitentiary Swim Team t-shirt she was wearing for pajamas. I looked at the lettering on her shirt, the edges of the letters there and yet, not there. The contour of her arm, there and not there. Her hand fell and she glanced at me, a mixture of fear and uncertainty in her hazel eyes that, also, were there and not there. Lined and contoured in an out-of-focus sort of focus. I pitied her. I was her.


I put my glasses on, knowing against a now-crippled wish that they’d do no good. Sleep was the only recourse I had left to find an answer in, here on the edges of things. I fell to the mattress on the floor and woke up early the next morning, forgetting for a moment that anything was wrong, until I’d gone into the bathroom and noticed my contact case on the counter. I put it away in my bag. 


We had another performance that day. Somewhere a bit up the coast from the main hubbub of the city, in the hills. It was green; I can’t remember the name of the place. It was like a concert hall in the middle of some botanical gardens. It had rained and everything was wet. Glistening. The added glare off the raindrops, instead of filling me with that familiar ache of something beautiful, annoyed me because they made were blurring the lines of things even more. 


As we clamored out of the buses to go assemble our instruments, stretch our legs, and wander around the gardens until it was our turn to play, I heard familiar voices and turned to look. My parents were there, with my brother Joseph (the baby at the time) in the stroller. 


Mom and Dad had decided to surprise us and fly out with the baby to come hear us play and to have their own mini-vacation, leaving our two sisters with the neighbors. In the excitement of having them suddenly there, I was distracted from the annoyance of my sight. My friends and I hauled the baby around, joked with Dad. 


The problem with my eye settled to the background until we were sitting under the bright lights of the stage. My bass clarinet was glinting, the flutes in front of us twinkling silver and fast, the saxophones to the left glared gold just as the trumpets on the right did. I was anxious and discontent. I kept shifting in my seat, turning to avoid the glare. I pulled out our sheets of music and groaned inwardly. The black and white of the lines and the dots on the page – so many lines – made whatever was wrong with my eye start screaming. I couldn’t look at the lines. 


Mr. Bowman raised the baton and I tried to play, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t look at the music. I fingered blindly, not playing a note. Which didn’t really matter, anyway. I was only a bass clarinet, a last-minute position I had been pushed to. The unsung limbo of the band world. Every symphonic band is supposed to have one, and yet no one ever notices them. Even when they play, because they mostly just follow the tuba or baritone sax parts. Steve, my cohort in said limbo, looked askance at me, raising an eyebrow in question. I shook my head slightly and turned the page for him. I closed my eyes.


The next day, Mom and Dad took me and Jenny to go tour the Winchester mansion and I told them about my eye. Mom was worried and Dad said they’d schedule me an eye appointment when they got home so that I could go see Dr. Donaldson (the ophthalmologist from my racquetball injury) as soon as the band got back to good ol’ Utah Valley. 


As we finished the last two days of concerts, I noticed my eyes getting worse. Instead of the lines of things being out of focus and not out of focus, I now noticed in the center of my field of vision in my left eye a round area of distortion. The best way I have been able to describe it is with comparisons to that old Windows screen saver, where the 3D ball or lens bounces around your screen, twisting and distorting the image on the screen as it goes. However, in my eye, the ball was stationary. And right smack in the middle. 


I tried to have fun with my friends, to ignore what was happening to my eye and just have a good time. There was nothing I could do to fix it without the doctor, so I might as well enjoy myself. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. Inside, I was distraught. I was ignoring things as a way to cope with them. If I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t really happening. God knew me. God knew that my art, my perception of things, was a pivotal center of my existence. He knew that I’d always said I’d rather be deaf than have anything happen to my eyes. 



Upon arrival in Utah, and after a visit to Dr. Donaldson, we learned that things were not well with my left eye. Apparently the racquetball injury had done far more damage than originally suspected – not only had my conjunctiva been damaged, but the impact of the ball had somehow caused a scar on my retina. And, as luck would insist on having it, the blood vessels in the scar had hemorrhaged on that exhilarating roller coaster ride and detached my retina from the back of my eye. Dr. Donaldson decided to pass me on to a retinologist. 


Dr. John Carver is one of the best retinologists in Utah. Lucky for me, his office was only a ten-minute drive from our house. 


I would spend a lot of the next four months in Dr. Carver’s office as we learned that I had a fun condition called cardio neo-vascularization – meaning my body randomly generates new blood vessels, especially around scarred areas, which is why the blood vessels in my eye had ruptured at the scar. 


He watched carefully as I sat with his assistant and had my first fluoroscene angiogram, which consists of being injected with the medical equivalent of highlighter ink to make your blood vessels easier to see and then having them hold your eye open while they shoot bright pictures of the inside of it. No one told me that I'd also be peeing highlighter ink for the next two days. I made my family come check it out before I flushed. Only the first time. I had seven more. Even that novelty wore off.


John Carver was the first and only person to inject a needle not only in my eye socket (twice), but into my eyeball as well. A procedure I was completely awake and cognizant for. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be as kids. I can think of worse things to stick at the end of “cross my heart, hope to die” chants, now that I’ve had the needle in my eye. A sensation akin to squishing a particularly large-abdomened spider in a Kleenex – that slight resistance and then easy pop…

Dr. Carver was the one who burned the hole in the back of my eye to cauterize the blood vessels and stop them from hemorrhaging and detaching more of the retina, when after a month we couldn’t get them to stop. I had cortisone injections behind my eye, which hurt like Hades for a week as I got to march around school with an eye patch and feel like my eye was being pushed out of my head from the inside from all the extra pressure. 


Three months into a then-regular cycle of visit – diagnose – treat – wait – visit – diagnose new problems – treat – wait, we were at our wits’ end as to what was causing the new hemorrhaging every few weeks and I made some off-hand comment about how nice it was being excused from P.E. and it’d be great to be excused from the rest of my classes, especially band. It was Dr. Carver who looked at me and asked what instrument I played. Dr. Carver who discovered that it was blowing my clarinet that was causing the pressure than kept re-rupturing the blood vessels; that had exacerbated the original hemorrhaging from that first night on the roller coaster. Dr. Carver who told me that if I’d stopped playing that stupid limbo-of-the-band-world instrument after I’d gotten off the roller coaster, I wouldn’t have the huge blind spot in the middle of my eye that I have now. 


That was when I got angry. That was when I started to blame God. I had been living right. I had been living better than I had any of my other troubled teenage years, saying my prayers, reading my scriptures, participating in seminary, helping with the family, serving as a stake youth counselor. I had done everything I was asked, was finally living in faith, strong in the gospel, and God had made me – me the artist, the girl who walked staring at the sky, who picked up rocks on the road to look at them closer – blind.


My faith wavered. Sometimes it still wavers.


I still have the blind spot in my left eye. I can read out of my left eye now, with my peripheral vision, if the font is large enough. I still have the same prescription for my left eye in my glasses that I had when I was 17 because every time we’ve tried to update it, the test isn’t ever right. I still have a strange sense of lost focus. Of lines and the shapes of things being right and not-right. Of my right eye compensating for the hole in my left.

I still wonder why it had to happen; still wonder what I was supposed to learn from it all. 


I read about Monet, who had cataracts, of Degas who was partially blind in one eye, and I hope. I read up on the latest technology for people with macular degeneration, which is the closest medical problem in relation to my own condition. 


I keep going. I still have the rest of my sight. 


I still appreciate the tiny things, perhaps even more now. The undersides of leaves. The Douglas firs on the side of Y Mountain that you can see from the freeway. The way the edges of pebbles in asphalt glint in the light, especially after it rains.


And poems...

it, me nailed in her like steel, her
i belong to her, i
splinter in her skin and
when she moves, she

feels me. it's
unnatural, her
face is pained

but

all i am trying to do
is settle comfortably,

to fit in.


i have managed this peripheral still.
i live, fruitful
on the edges of myself.

a mushroom circle,
a reef of coral.

see me so colorful,
productive at circumference.

i can
maintain myself uncentered,
can't i?

maybe there is
nothing in my grey areas
worth keeping

after all.


like andromeda. no one telephones.
a mother's ideals
set me here.

naked on the edge of the sea, between
a rock and
a hard wave.

no calls, no visitors.

your bottled messages
shatter at my feet
in the breakers.

your words
waterlogged, become
another part

of what beats me,
what washes me,

what keeps me
awake,
alone

and chained.


going. she is never here. o innocence, your bathinet
fairy, i am,
here to pull
your teeth, and
replace them with

tiny favours.

ten cent pieces for
chunks of yourself.

i will take them
when you're asleep,
unguarded;

leave before you wake

before you realize
the trade isn't fair.

sleep, baby,
sleep.


he had to have his way. as down
i spun into
being for him the
things he needed me
to be for him.

i have always done this,
lived for

a wrap around them, too
slippery
for anything

but me to hold on.


openly, as though we two held equal shares
for a while. now
shut, i cannot
be myself to you.

i am in the process
of recovering my

peaces.



precedes

i have been you;
have come for you
like it has moved mountains.

and they march
toward me, glacier, fir-
bearing shoulders
of rock, of solitude
foundation and
imposability.

oh mountain,

mountain, could mohammed
wish you had waited
and

not have it blasphemy?

not have you hovering
at his door.



and the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes
i have spent the morning with you
at arms' length again.

the sun through the blinds
striped my skin,
and i saw me
in two lights, for a moment;

the way i feel
when i am in lines
to you, and in body,
in person,
in this chair.

i tiptoed around you today.
you sensed me sneaking and if i
had been more veritable, we would
have talked it out

today.

i love you more
than i give myself
credit for.

i lie you more

to give you
things to fall back on, when
i let you

go.

it's a love, a consideration
holding on to keep you
from having other regrets.

or is it me,
being selfish?

wanting to be the only thing.
the only one wrong.

the only one.


soul in its set; you see, it's done with speed
i have been the tree,
letting them leave,
falling off in leaves

tiny dead pieces that
once clung to me, never realizing
we were apart

until it became me, stripped,
naked in the wind, nothing
wrapped around me.

this time, it's not done
being fall, and you still
in my branches.

i am retreating
into my roots.

the whole tree
will have to come down.


and disasters. i do not mean you. no, you, love.
i mean me.
speed and distaster.
the empassioned
violent beginnings of things.

will you realize
that i love you
even when i say
i don't love you.

pardon while i don
my cliches.

my heart breaks
at my breaking yours.

i knit us
too close together,
you see. it was quick, with
needles and i

never think the small
mistakes
will matter in
the midst of things.

but at the end, i am
malcontent, disappointed
in the things

i've done.



my body stretching like a tear
it crawls to you, in the dark,
in cities you never knew were fighting.

i avoid the places
in which i loved you.

i am mustering
up the silent
words i need to walk
through rain.

i am seeing you
like shot-riddled corpses, week-
old at the side
of my oft-traveled roads.

like death, you are;
the first
time it shook me.

you will die at my
hand, but we
are both casualties.

it is already (always)
an ugly word.


always nights i feel the ocean
i see
my literalism, there is
literally,
a world between us.

i have drowned
in the distance

where you and i have never known me.


on crutches, waiting to be roused
my truth (i will be true)
is gurneyed at
the side of sterile hallways.

it was in the way
of nurses rushing to
your pain, your proof
of insurance.

i will facilitate
your happiness
in patience, in
lieu of patients.


it sprawled across that sprawling acreage
spread-eagle you lay
in the fields where
i lie.


i watched you clutch your blank
don't make me
remember myself
of the shot I begged
from you which

was not yours to give.

we are toy guns; we
are dramatic, are perfect
for what we are playing.


of breakers meet and disconnect, foam through bracelets
your generosity overwhelms, I
crash against it.
falling apart
through the little
things you give me.



i hear the bone dice
it rolls a six. a seven.
no more fives, monkey.

six again, the seven
is pulling my hand.

my hand is
pulling apart
at the fingers.

we will make of them
more dice, they
will click on concrete,
beneath enamel grimacing:

yellow, full
of holes.
 
Haven't put anything in here in a while...here's some from the last couple months.


laps

adam's up at 2:30
to talk to me after rhedyn's
alcohol-free birthday party;

the lion's pride
kept him from
chewing fat off
downed wildebeest.

he loped home and we
chat about whether or not
we would (or had guts to) play
a cheesy song
as a bridal waltz,
if we say we picked it
to make our mothers cry (not
because it means something
to us.)

he hasn't
proposed yet; we talk
about our kids
as though they wait for
us to pick them up
from a friend's house,
from soccer practice,
after-school biology homework make-up.

i talk too; i
nearly dumped him
in october.

last night i meandered
over to the sports park
behind the high school.

the weather filmnoise
grey, pre-rain.

in the halo 3 hoodie
he sent me, i sat
at a more-than-warped
picnic table, beside
hunter-vest orange
garbage bins, hefty bagged
and chained.

i watched the same
old man, white and folded,
in a red tracksuit
lap the asphalt course

over, and
over.



taking (wood)stock

the undersides of my leaves
hyper-veined but
less red.
less autumnal.

a beautiful ache
of a compliment,
worded in your
no-other way.

i smear its
traces to the
corners of my mouth,
flash rocks.

Frost's robin, i
project. a thought that
his bird is so
ideal a comparison, but

no; is there nothing
more alive and more stoic
all at the same time
in his pieces?

forget the robin, i'll be
that woodpile, left in
the middle of nowhere
in the middle of incomplete.

held fast by neglect,

by the questions
i feed the hungry
mouths of your
eyes.



zen and the art of breaking

i teeter here
on the verybrink of
this page;
my throat
choked with an impossible
mouthful of
no.

i can't even
spell anything right.

you are
a sweet trajectory of
agony and battle.
and i
wish i could lick
your rough edges,
wish i

had a tongue,

a face
to feel your hair
on my face,
brushing
across a cheek
in the dark.

you remind me of
everything like
nothing in my favorite
poets.
you are

a favorite.

i am
too meagre, incapable
to express
the effect of your awestriking,
so bright i

could hardly see.

the weight of your body
seems effortless to a
steady set of hands.
i can trace
it all

with my pen.

i picture
my snowflakes
in your hair, settling
gorgeous, ornamental,

an alluring contrast but

too transient,
filigreed

not
what you need.



headpoem dumping

catch clips the
nonsense flutters
between ears, behind
eyes and
below hair, not

a lack of seriousness,
it is non sense because i can't
identify it with

five things.

the way Jeff Buckley
will sing
and not say a word, the way
his guitar sounds like
three guitars

or not even a
guitar at all.

i can be eight octaves, i
can cover things come
before.

sushi day, yes. new
place no more
brown avocado, no

waitresses who know
my name, who glare
when i don't

tip the usual, tip
big money.

i am, after all
just a student.

today the sun is out
and the leaves on the trees
are still dead.

are still useless.
still hang.

they spurn and bathe
in a meal
they wouldn't have refused
if they were still

green, were still
too new to know

better.

makes me think of
that punk who told

finchy she was
childish,
new kids

who make the moon a mockery
of cliched and
fetid metaphor, of

unfeeling feelings.

of OMG i r not a gud typer!!!1!!11!one!

i get more dubious
every autumn; my upper lip
curls quicker,

i find more less things
than i did,
i belittle belittling things,
not even with a word, but
a glance, a skimmed

click, delete.

reading and age
make me pretentious.
make me pretend

i know what
all this adult fuckup
means.



(improv)

i glare at the
glint of wintersunshine
between brown, wet leaves

not to glare intentionally,
but because
it hurts my eyes, and
i want to
still look anyway.

i wonder

if i am looking
at the sunshine or the leaves
on those bonebare carbon trees.

and, dependent on which,
do i appreciate the one only
for how it shows the other?

i love it, need it
twice.

find me your definition
hidden
in the thing you're

defining.



This One Has Been Screened

Neuron branches
in yellow ochre, burnt sienna,
burn the stasis of their growing
through the windowtint glazed
behind the half-wall
of my grey cubicle.

This is (again) a subtle-sunned
Novemb - er, no, December day;
I am sunstared, ponderous
still of the effect
those rays have on the box elder tree,
and vice versa.

Frozen lightplay. Even leafless,
in the maple I glimpse
the wind elbow through
tightweave limbs, the way
I'd squeeze Play-doh

balls - neon pink -
through open windowscreens when
(five, and)
Mom wasn't keeping her cautiouseye
at the ends of my hands.

The screen a filter, an
instant, impacted but only slightly
bent or displaced.

The Play-doh departed in
stringpieces, magenta noodles.

Crumbles of itself stuck behind.



chelsea he says i

chelsea he says i
say yes? and he
says will you

marry me? and

i - i take a second
to make sure
my heart is going
to keep beating and

to make sure i
haven't crazy-spiked or

tripped on some
thing in my little

brother's brownies that
isn't flour or more
than sugar. and then

i, i whisper y-es and
giggle so violently that
my legs won't hold
still and kick the covers

off and he, i hear

him near crying and
want to see the rest
of my world pooling

in the pearls that
slip from his
eyelids, want to

lick them off his
concave, rockstar cheek
and love him until
he won't need to

cry again.
 
Other random drawings of mine...

This one is actually a really tiny pencil drawing, about 2" x 4".
flowerbottlecropat6.jpg


And this one is actually really huge, like 14" by 20", in colored pencil.
redmotorcyclecropmv3.jpg


This one's 12" x 16", on blue paper with white pastel and charcoal.
sharkcropfe6.jpg
 
you're so talented it makes me hurt sometimes. I really like the one with the cupcake. Im glad you drew that in there, the skellington head was looking famished.
 
Hey kids, sorry it's been so long, thinks are pretty hectic in my life these days.

Anyway, they got even more hectic this week when I was offered a nanny position out in Stamford, Connecticut on Tuesday and then told they expected me on a plane on Saturday morning.

So...yeah. Moving to Connecticut for a year. Good times! More updates once I'm out there and my PC is FedEx'd to me.

Hope all's been well with you!

Always,
IG
 
I have my worries. I would never move to a state I could not spell. Coneticut is like Massetusus in that respect.

Good luck, Poe. Hope the new job turns out well for you.
 
This spot is a placeholder for a funny, funny story involving car trouble and blonde children.

But I am not typing any of it until I get a proper IG-length email off to Syddo. :hug:
 
Hey kids, sorry it's been so long, thinks are pretty hectic in my life these days.

Anyway, they got even more hectic this week when I was offered a nanny position out in Stamford, Connecticut on Tuesday and then told they expected me on a plane on Saturday morning.

So...yeah. Moving to Connecticut for a year. Good times! More updates once I'm out there and my PC is FedEx'd to me.

Hope all's been well with you!

Always,
IG
Yay Connecticut!

And flem, lay of Massachusetts!! :D
 
This spot is a placeholder for a funny, funny story involving car trouble and blonde children.

But I am not typing any of it until I get a proper IG-length email off to Syddo. :hug:
:hug:

T'will be the highlight of my week...nay, month. No, year!

sydia_@hotmail.com, as always.

It will be a welcome relief to usual heaps of Nigerian scams and Spaniards trying to convince me I've won the lottery.

Missing your guts!
 
Whoa, it's still here.

Though very dusty, but that's my own fault to be sure.


Anyway, hi. (Hello, hi, holla, avast, etc.) So really I blame about six major things for me not being around the past...while. We'll say while. That's a good word for it.

Thing Number A) My not-children.
Yes, they are children, but they are not my children. Meaning I didn't physically bring them into this world, though there are days when I do threaten to take them out of it. There are days when I am convinced that being a nanny is the hardest job in the world, second only to being a mother. I used to laugh at those smarmy little hallmark cards and whatnot with their little "You haven't had a full-time job until you've been a mother" slogans and thought them drivel, but boy howdy, if they ain't the gosh-honest truth. Also, if you've never seen Dylan Moran's bit on how children are basically tiny drunks, or how they aren't like the kids he remembers, then...you should.

(Here, it should be duly noted that the next four things are mostly a continuation off this main subject.)

Thing Number B (or A2)) Playdates
First off, what the hell ever happened to just running down the street and grabbing your neighbors' children and building bike ramps in the middle of the street with no helmets to jump off of on bikes that usually fell apart if you looked at them funny?! Apparently that's not the thing to do anymore. Nowadays you schedule "playdates" two weeks in advance with the child's friend's mother (or legal guardian, or parental figure, or nanny or housekeeper) making sure to provide them with a detailed list of the activities the children may or may not be participating in, and you wrap them extensively in bubble wrap and bulletproof, flame-retardant materials and ONLY THEN do they get to watch Hannah Montana (don't get me started on that) and color. But those crayons had BETTER BE non-toxic and not fit in their mouth or you are sure gonna hear it from the other child's legal guardian later!

Thing Number C) Summer Vacation
All I can say is thank god school's back in session so I have time once again to do things like...shower, and NOT go to the grocery store.

Thing Number D) Soccer
Don't get your backs up, I tried calling it football like the rest of the world does and was summarily chewed out by the resident thirteen year-old Arsenal fan. When I am not buying granola bars or cleaning up granola bar wrappers, I am carpooling three separate children to three separate soccer practices three separate times (per child) during the week. Also, the youngest does gymnastics, which segues very appropriately into:

Thing Number E) The Minivan
I am convinced by now that I do not, in fact, live in the nanny apartment over the garage, but that my habitation is actually a Toyota Sienna filled with the aforementioned granola bars and/or wrappers along with a hodgepodge collection of mismatched socks, soccer balls, overdue library books and coupons clipped but never actually used. Also, water bottles.


Thing Number F) World of Warcraft
Blizzard Entertainment wants your soul, and they will get it. It's like heroin, only bad for you. I have climbed back out in relatively one piece. I wouldn't necessarily say unscathed...

20080721.jpg




So...yes. The rumors are true, and I am back for the time being. It's so nice to find a comfy place to hang out again.


Always,
IG
 
I have to say, though, of all the minivans I've driven in my lifetime, the Sienna is a very nice automobile. It handles rather well.


In other news, it's been quite the shit week for IG, various reasons to be left in the dark. However, I actually wrote some poetry for the first time in a long while, and suppose I feel like sharing. Lucky you!


Don't Disturb the Gilmour

I could stand
to render this
apathy in twain.

Chilled Chel
on the half-
shell.

It's autumn, I'm
sucking bottom.

Even the dingy oak
leaves look better
than me

and I love them be-
cause it makes
me miserable.

Again, in the mornings
I'm back to

alone--

gray squirrels and back-
wood birds, now white
noise behind windows--

I cry when I'm
coming.

Broken out, broken
up and the only things
I can muster
belief in are

the facts that
living choiceless is
the most efficient mode of
failure;

that even the truest
friends are never true.

I believe in the sounds
that escape during
sleep, that

disappointment is
the only reality.

That every man wishes he
were an island, and
that his dreams were

as solid as fishes.

I believe I
should have killed
this teenage boy,
instead of letting
him

move in.

Dreamfish packed
tight, I walk on
water every year.

All I find:
the same old fear.

Wish I were here.
 
Oh my god, updates, updates...

Let's see... latest blog entry that wasn't a poem or a youtube music clip... ah, here we go.

I may be drunk, krogan, but you're ugly. And tomorrow I'll be sober.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011

in other news, i do NOT like wednesdays. i ordered some new bras online that were supposed to get here yesterday but apparently they are stuck in louisiana or illinois or something and might not get here until tomorrow? stupid.
a t-shirt i ordered last friday (or thursday?) DID get here yesterday, though. i heart it. with many much hearting.

wakeme_sblk_w1_443.jpg


isn't it cute? so cute. you wish you could be that cute. and cool. and condescending. i know i did. that's why i bought the damn thing.

also, in lieu of saving the collective asses of the entire galaxy, twice, while i was embedded in the throes of a violent and insidious headcold, i am in surprisingly high spirits, given all that has not transpired in my life to lead to such an erroneous conclusion. everyone in the world should play mass effect. the world would be a better place. and not just because more guys would want to look like commander shepard. drool.

reality continues to ruin my life, so virtual reality has picked up the slack and my failed sense of actual accomplishment has led me down the path of faulty logic toward a completely foundationless sense of virtual accomplishment, which, while neither irrefutable or rational, leaves me with an actual warm glowy feeling that is better than turning to alcohol, or ben & jerry's (although i do have a pint or two of haägen dazs sorbet in my freezer, but that's not really ice cream, so it's neither here nor there what i do with said pints) or worse, world of warcraft. which thankfully i have not become re-addicted to, but i do admit to dabbling in on an occasional weeknight in a purely social context. i'm not addicted to video games. and, as the great calvin once said: "it's not denial, i'm just very selective about the reality i accept." which is exactly where i was going with this rambly paragraph in the first place.

no, actually, i have been really good at keeping my new year's resolution of seriously doing things with REAL, ALIVE, TANGIBLE people on the weekends, barring of course this past weekend because i was bedridden and desperately diseased with what can only logically be diagnosed as an otorhinolaryngolocial form of ebola. which i only got because the previous weekend i was hanging out with real, alive, tangible people who gave the disease to me in the first place.

this is why people become hermits. because it's safer for the entire galaxy as we know it to be fraught with peril by a giant million year-old race of sentient genocidal machines lurking in the dark space beyond the edge of the milky way hell-bent on harvesting the technological fruits of all organic life every 50,000 years, than it is to play with your best friend's baby girl for 6 hours because you don't want to be home while your teenage sister is hosting a pre-dance party slash dinner for her entire group of friends. and their dates.
 
I made my Commander Shepard have the first name "German." I giggled like a full retard every time I read it.

Also, preorder Skyrim.
 
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