and i push her to start with the boxes because i know they’re going to pile up and out and on top of each other until we are on top of each other without the interesting bits that used to happen when we were all alone before baby.
but she dilly and dallied until i started pulling her hair out or putting out the fire that is her thinking about it and just got it all moving along and even the baby helped by putting things in and, with a moment’s hesitation, putting them back out until i reached down and wrapped the edges round and round with tape even if i might have snagged baby’s hand between the seams from time to time.
and each time i thought i was done there was another corner with an article of clothing or an electronic doodad or niggling piece of nostalgia that begged for attention, inspection and packaging, and from neatly ordered and marked boxes of contents and destination it too soon became misc this over here to misc there.
i even had her feet in my hands pushing her up above closets into attics wobbling for the last piece of something or the other that we hadn’t seen in years, completely forgotten about but couldn’t let go for the life of us. when the boxes started covering the floor and blocking our view of the street where we would soon no longer face, the down and up to the tops of the closests finally bummed my left knee and i hobbled on to work.
every joint hurts, sore in the places where little muscles join big ones and a whole life gets packed right in front of your eyes in practically no time at all.
Monthly Archives: February 2005
i want to remember
i want to remember how you remember me.
this thing that
it was all starting to happen, had been happening for some time (from ‘five days…’)
and what more could happen would have been something else if not for her toothless grin. gum drop we called her because she would smile at the slightest thing that was just too fast to recognize. whenever we thought her all figured out, she’d spit out some rapid garbled pieces of wisdom and we, in return, would garble nonsense.
weren’t we the ones who were supposed to be teaching her something? done up in pigtails that shot up from her skull, she looked like an alien bunny in a one-sy inches long of her toes. the best would be the apple bites, that were always too monstrous but somehow, with cheeks packed, her lips could pucker tight to keep from chewing out loud.
this is life with her, between diaper changes and sleep, this infant turning to child.
i was once told insane
i’ve said, written this, time and again, how a friend of mine, while in the midst of working through what he believed were some severe issues, had read a batch of my writing, some of the strong experimental stuff i had been writing just before i met up with Blitz, he said to me, with a bit of a gleam in his eye, “how does it feel to be insane?”
and although much of the passion is gone, i can still see it now and then, that madness to writing, or rather that madness i like in myself when i am writing mad things.
and i think that’s what i’d like all the time, that kind of automatic freefall, moving it along more and more off center, immediate imagination, disregard for waking logic, synaptic semantic roulette. but, i also feel that there has to be a catalog of this life i am living, detailing my life somewhere to be remember somewhen and hopefully some other someone than myself.
is the writing itself enough of a marker. can it be thin enough to see what life was happening?
if i hadn't
if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
if i hadn’t
if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
dreaming seeing wishing
i hate dreaming knowing it’s a dream and yet i still work through it, explore it try to change it no matter the oftentimes confused and confusing series of events and feelings. recently they’ve been powerfully nostalgic dreams, wish filled re-memories, where the past is mixed with the present, forgotten subplots of my life worked into today’s intricacies. and it’s painful in the sense that i know i am dreaming, that what i am seeing can never play out in the waking world, that this imagined past is not dead because it was never alive…
sometimes, even in waking, i have the edging fear that i do not like where my life is going.
and yet, and yet, i cannot see it any differently.
house hoping hunting
things with the house are moving forward, somewhat.
i never thought that buying a house would be this prolonged and complicated. actually, it isn’t complicated as much as it is rife with too many details and particularities that are almost bureaucratic.
in the time that we had begun looking for a house, my parent’s have bought 2 in the tampa suburbs and my in-laws made themselves a home in colombia (i forget if its an apartment, a small apartment building, or house proper).
we started in malverne, took a couple of glances into franklin square, but couldn’t touch lynbrook. headed to oceanside but what we could afford there we were not willing to live with.
briefly, we had a flutter with a cape alot like my parent’s in its exterior but couldn’t bridge the gap between their asking price and what we were willing to pay. came awfully close to that house in west hempstead, but that’s the one with the dug up trees and schools that were good enough for my daughter but not for the seller’s son.
we danced along the edge of oceanside in baldwin where the same house we saw in west hempstead was perched instead infront of a lake. and after we all signed the contract, we were dancing in the interim between signing and committing and closing. however, the seller’s husband didn’t fill out the proper paperwork for the work done to the house, nor did he file the satisfaction of their mortgage, and in the end we were out in the cold between thanksgiving and christmas looking for house number three.
ironically enough, the third house is located on third street and its the biggest of them all while also being the least expensive. lots of room needing lots of time and lots of work.
god knows we’re willing.
PLANETARY
-Decomissioned WORDWORK and deleted (‘DROPPED’) BLOG database in MySQL.
-Upgraded phpMyAdmin from 2.5.6 to 2.6.1. Added login feature.
-Moved GROUPWISE installation from PROXY to DATAMAIL. Upated MTA, POA, GWIA & WEBACCESS agents as well their CONFIG files. In addition, had to RE-LINK SAVO_DOM to SAVO_PO via ConsoleOneGROUPWISE Utilies
phpMyAdmin upgrade
upgraded phpMyAdmin on PLANETARY from 2.5.6 to 2.6.1
doesn’t it look purty?